Born March 22, 1957 in Warsaw as the son of Janusz Kaczmarski, a painter and art reviewer who for many years was the president of the Main Board of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers, and Anna Trojanowska-Kaczmarska, a painter, educator and art historian. With an unfailing sense of the irony of history, the bard himself says the following about his conception:
"As far as I know, it was about love. It was like this. Grandpa wanted or could get mom to study in Paris, but mom followed dad first to Leningrad, then to Kiev. And because it was the end of Stalinism, 1955, 1956, they saw with their own eyes how this dream system looks like, how it functions. And - as they say - the scales fell from their eyes. That's where I was begotten, to be precise, during a storm on the Black Sea, during my parents' trip on the ship 'Rossiya' - formerly 'Adolf Hitler'."
The future singer attended the renowned Narcyza Żmichowska 15th High School in Warsaw. Then in 1980 he graduated from Polish Philology at Warsaw University, writing his master's thesis on the literature of the Enlightenment with Professor Zdzisław Libera. It was entitled "The figure of Stanisław August Poniatowski in the occasional poetry of his epoch". It can be said that this intellectual formation clearly influenced Kaczmarski's work. His songs often use the figure of allegory, a favorite of the Enlightenment (a sign or story that literally speaks of something, but whose real, "hidden" meaning is different). The masterpiece in this regard is The Ballad of Katyn - a series of contradictory comparisons telling what the grave in the Smolensk forest is not. The narration of the present by means of historical, mostly antique allusions is also of Enlightenment origin (though not only, as one can reach back to even older eras). Finally, the singer himself said that the collapse of the First Republic, which occurred in that epoch, constituted for him the basic historiosophical reference. It is interesting to note that, according to family tradition, the poet's distant relative was Jakub Jasiński, an Enlightenment writer, soldier and revolutionary.
Simultaneously with his studies, Kaczmarski began his musical career. His debut took place in 1976 (during the Warsaw Song Fair), although the lyrics of some songs were written much earlier. The author of Walls was associated with Jan Pietrzak's Pod Egidą cabaret - the Ballada o przedszkolu / The Ballad about a Kindergarten, for example, is maintained in the cabaret style, though closer to that of Wojciech Młynarski. The 1970s also saw the beginning of a long-lasting and fruitful collaboration between Kaczmarski, Przemysław Gintrowski and Zbigniew Łapiński. Their first joint program, Mury / Walls, was written in 1979, followed by Muzeum / Museum and Raj / Paradise.
In 1979 Kaczmarski won an award at the Student Song Festival in Krakow for his song Obława / Manhunt, and in 1981 he won the journalists' award at the Opole Festival for Epitafium dla Włodzimierz Wysockiego / Epitaph for Włodzimierz Wysocki, still one of his most acclaimed songs. The Russian was a figure held in high esteem by Kaczmarski. The author of Obława / Manhunt, written at the age of 17 and based on Wysocki's Polowanie na wolki / Wolf Hunt, even used the master's idea in writing the song Czołg / Tank and translated several of his songs. The concert of Wysocki, who came to Poland in 1974, has always been an important and frequently recalled memory for Kaczmarski.
When martial law was imposed in Poland on December 13, 1981, Kaczmarski was in France on a concert tour. He did not decide to return to Poland. He made his living mainly from performing, donating part of his earnings to support the underground Solidarity movement. In 1984 he began working in Munich for Radio Free Europe. He became a member of the editorial staff of the Polish section of this radio station, he hosted the programme "Kaczmarski Quarterly" and wrote political commentaries for the main information service "Facts. Events. Opinions". He worked there until 1994, when the Polish section of the radio was liquidated (the main mission of the radio is broadcasting to non-democratic countries, and Poland was no longer one of them).
Since 1990 Kaczmarski often toured and performed in Poland. His first tour in nine years with Zbigniew Łapiński resulted in the album Live, which in 2001 achieved Gold Record status, selling over 50,000 copies at the time. The Kaczmarski-Gintrowski-Lapiński trio also collaborated on the albums Wojna postu z karnawałem / Post and Carnival War (1993) and Sarmatia (1994).
In 1995 Kaczmarski, together with his second wife Ewa (who had helped him in Munich to overcome his alcohol addiction) and his nine-year-old daughter Patrycja settled in Australia, near Perth. As a reference to this decision can be considered the song 1789 and the album Two Rocks, whose title refers to a geological formation located near his place of residence. This time, however, emigration, despite a considerable geographical distance, did not close the way to performances in Poland.
In 2001 Jacek Kaczmarski celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his creative work, which he commemorated with the album Dwadzieścia (5) lat później / Twenty (5) Years Later, with the title referring to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Solidarity. A year later, in March 2002, he was diagnosed with advanced stage esophageal cancer. Kaczmarski decided to undergo expensive and complicated therapy in Austria, hoping to avoid surgery that would permanently damage his vocal cords. Numerous concerts and fund-raisers were organized at the time. Unfortunately it was to no avail - despite the promising initial results, after two years of fighting the disease Kaczmarski died in a hospital in Gdansk on April 10, 2004.
Kaczmarski was self-taught in guitar playing, which led him to develop an unusual technique. It resulted from holding the guitar inverted - despite the fact that the author himself was not left-handed. Such guitarists usually reverse the position of the strings on the neck, so that the same strings are at the bottom of the neck as in the case of a right-handed guitarist holding the instrument normally. Kaczmarski did not do this, which necessitated the necessity of performing grips differently than is generally accepted. The musician himself claimed that with time he noticed that it helped him to give a specific sound to the bass chords.
Another musical curiosity is admitting to being influenced by... piano techniques in the case of the song Obława:
"I wanted to convey the impression of a chase here, of chaos, and hence this rhythm. As for the level of difficulty of this technique, I was undoubtedly helped in mastering it by playing the piano, where the basis is a loose wrist. This rhythm cannot be played for too long with a stiff hand."
Not counting these technical peculiarities, in the field of music Kaczmarski remained a traditionalist. He used to say:
"I try to stay true to one principle: when composing music, I rely on classical models. I don't use jazz, blues, rock or pop standards. Unless it's to serve a purpose. But that rarely happens."
He did not, however, shy away from musical quotations and stylizations - for example, Z pasa słuckiego pożytek uses the melody of a polonaise.
Two things immediately catch the eye in Kaczmarski's song lyrics: his sophisticated irony, and his ability to retell cultural texts in such a way that they continue to arouse the listener's interest, or even express new, unfamiliar content. The song Lalka / The Doll is, for example, a summary of the novel by Boleslaw Prus, in which the simple refrain ("Rzecki dreams of Bonaparte / Wokulski loves Izabela") provides a slightly different commentary on the same verses each time. Kaczmarski's true mastery, however, lies in his writing about paintings. An entire program entitled Museum, prepared together with Przemysław Gintrowski and Zbigniew Łapiński, was devoted to descriptions of works of art (the so-called ekphrases).
References to painting appear very often in Kaczmarski's work. Suffice it to recall The Poisoned Well, referring to a series of paintings by Jacek Malczewski; the ironic The Impostors, based on Caravaggio's The Card Players, in which the swindler and the cheated swap places unexpectedly; The Ambassadors, faithfully reflecting the idea of Hans Holbein, whose painting deals with transience; or the entire program of the Museum. Less widely known - apart from Rublev - are songs based on Andrei Tarkovsky's films: Stalker and Sacrifice.
Another distinctive feature of his work is an uncanny ability to stylize. This is evident in works such as Epitafium Brunona Jasieńskiego / Epitaph of Bruno Jasieński, whose text imitates not only the poet's characteristic rhythm (fourteen-line 7+7 interspersed with a thirteen-line masculine accented clause), but also surprising, avant-garde metaphors and neologisms of the pre-war futurist: "And I inhale London's flu-generating fumes / And taste Paris's mouldy roquefort". A frequent writing strategy of the author of Scream was the so-called role lyricism, i.e. speaking on behalf of someone else, for example in the songs Luter, Jan Kochanowski or the daring Katarzyna's Dream - but also in texts modeled on stories heard from ordinary people. This method was perfectly summarized by Joanna Boss:
"The author often [...] within his songs gives voice to animals, characters from paintings, literary heroes, simple people who, while describing themselves or the situation in which they find themselves, draw at the same time, in a way that is not necessarily conscious, the image and color of the reality of which they are a part."
Kaczmarski's stylistic skills made it easy for him to refer to cultural history, to speak about the past in a voice as close to it as possible, and yet as contemporary. However, perfect imitation did not mean complete acceptance - on the contrary, such texts expressed as much affirmation as doubts. A perfect example of this is Conversation with a 16th Century Coffin Portrait, which at first seems like a manifesto of a conservative, but with time presents an increasingly nuanced vision of our historical baggage. In yet other cases, a conversation about the past becomes a reminder of a nightmare and our complicity in it. Professor Jerzy Jedlicki called this strategy writing "to terrify the heart," which applies particularly well to the song cycle alluding to Henryk Sienkiewicz's Trilogy and expressing doubts about the attitudes of its characters.
Because of the public image of Kaczmarski as a bard, the humorous aspect of his songs is often forgotten. Yet he did, for example, perform bravely the songs of Stanisław Staszewski (the same ones that later appeared on the album Tata Kazika / Kazik's Dad), parody Bob Dylan's voice in an otherwise profound ballad about the artist's alienation, or write his own lyrics with a heavy comic load. Of these, the ballad Czaty śmiełowskie should be singled out, as should several other songs also included on the album Pochwała łotrostwa.
Despite this sense of humor and irony, Kaczmarski was fundamentally opposed to an optimistic reading of his songs. Mury / Walls (1978), sung to the melody of L'estaca by the Catalan Lluís Llach (a song which, by the way, was treated as an expression of protest against General Franco's dictatorship), was recognized as the unofficial anthem of Solidarity, but the author himself consistently held to a different interpretation.
"I 'Walls' was written in 1978 as a piece about distrust of any mass movement. I heard a recording of Lluís Llach and a crowd of thousands singing, and I imagined a situation - as an egoist and a person who values individualism in life - that someone creates something very beautiful, because it's beautiful music, a beautiful song, and then they are deprived of their work because people capture it. The work simply ceases to be the property of the artist and that's what 'Mury' is about. And that ballad has outgrown itself, because the same thing happened to it."
In the face of the colloquial, optimistic understanding of the ballad, its author made two important polemical gestures. The first was a melancholic song known as Mury'87 or Podwórko. It began with the words: "How can you pull the teeth of the lattice out of the walls, / When rust streaks the brick and mortar? / How can we bury the old world with rotting rubble, / When the new world has nothing to build on?"; the refrain, in place of walls, appeared graves. At concerts, the artist often provoked the audience by playing the dynamic introduction to Walls only to perform Podwórko afterwards. The second was the change in the last verses after the fall of communism in Poland, when Kaczmarski started singing in the present tense instead of the past tense: "And the walls grow, grow, grow / the chain swings at your feet". As a testimony to a broader, more general understanding of such songs-songs as Mury (The Walls) and Obława (Manhunt), let us take this statement:
"These are not really anti-communist songs. Like most of Vysotsky's songs, they are songs admonishing the freedom and dignity of the individual. Communism as a system that uniquely persecutes the individual is not monopolistic."
One area of Kaczmarski's work that remains underappreciated is his novels. At least the first of them, Self-Portrait with a Scoundrel, caused quite a public uproar in its time. It portrays Polish opposition circles in a distorting mirror. The titular scumbag is student Daniel Błowski, Kaczmar's friend, who is in love with the same girl as he is and who collaborates with the Security Service and the communist authorities. Kaczmar himself is far from perfect, too - for example, there is the theme of alcoholism (based on the author's own experiences). The author himself sees in the unpleasant, turpid nature of the world presented in the novel an attempt to restore a balance that most stories about those times lack:
"I was just trying to even out the image that was mythologized in books written after '89: We heroes of the underground, we emigrants organized help for Poland, influenced Western public opinion, etc. That's all true, only in human terms it looked a little different. That's all true, only in human terms it looked a little different."
As a rule, Kaczmarski's novels made extensive use of autobiographical themes: Plaża dla psów (Beach for Dogs) is the aftermath of his stay in Australia, O anioły (On Angels) returns to the subject of addiction, this time set against the backdrop of the changes in Poland in 1989, and Napój Ananków (The Drink of the Ananaks) is... a combination of memories from his time working for Radio Free Europe with a fantasy novel about a legendary man living somewhere beyond the Urals. Additionally, there is a homosexual theme in this book.
The work of the author of Manhunt often found a response in other artists. I will limit myself here to just a few examples. Kaczmarski's music played an important role in the film The Last Bell, directed by Magdalena Łazarkiewicz, based on the screenplay by Włodzimierz Bolecki (1989). In 2007 the reggae band Habakuk with special guests (including Muniek Staszczyk and Patrycja Kaczmarska) recorded the album A ty siej..., on which 13 Kaczmarski songs were performed. The same band has also recorded Mury sung to the tune of Get up, stand up by Bob Marley.
The effects of Kaczmarski's fame as a singer were often ambiguous when it came to the literary reception of his works. As Krzysztof Gajda, who is also the author of a doctoral dissertation on the artist, writes
"Jacek Kaczmarski emerged in Polish postwar culture as a lyricist and song composer. This choice of genre meant that despite the immense popularity enjoyed by his work (...), it has not yet become the subject of extensive literary studies."
The situation has fortunately changed in recent years, as evidenced by the numerous master's theses listed on the author's Wikipedia page. It is to be hoped, therefore, that Kaczmarski's place in literature will finally be properly recognized.
Photo: TVP/PAP - Ireneusz Sobieszczuk
text: http://culture.pl/
