Wacław Zimpel

In the artist's words:

Wacław Zimpel has made a name for himself as one of Poland's most adventurous multi-instrumentalists, composers and producers. He loves jazz, but also draws inspiration from electronics, minimalism and global roots - a prolific collaborator who blurs extreme boundaries in his tireless search for new musical languages, to the point of blurring them completely. The New York Times has called him a "musical chameleon".

The Warsaw-based artist, who was born and raised in Poznań, has his earliest musical memories of playing the piano with his father, starting violin lessons at the age of six and classical clarinet training in high school, which he completed at the Academy of Music in Poznań with a diploma in classical clarinet. Playing on his beloved rare alto clarinet, discarding the frustrations of formal music lessons in favor of redemption in jazz, and a burning desire to improvise led to a world-class mastery of other woodwind instruments, including the khaen (proto-harmonica from Laos). An expert in the use of urban-ritual electronics and loops rooted in a human perspective and folk-trance tradition, Zimpel emphasizes depth and understanding of his chosen context.