On March 3, Piotr Schmidt became the new president of the Silesian Jazz Club Music Association.

The oldest continuously operating jazz association in Poland organizes concerts and festivals in Silesia and beyond.

more at sjc.pl

Silesian Jazz Club Music Association since 1956 Silesian Music Association Jazz Club was founded in 1956 and is the oldest jazz association in Poland. Over the course of over 60 years of its existence, it has created a huge number of events, concerts, festivals and other projects.

The history of SJC dates back to 1955, when a group of students from the Silesian University of Technology and graduates from the Music High School decided to play jazz. At that time, practicing jazz was not viewed positively by the authorities. Independent student movements and clubs did not yet exist.

It so happened that at that time the director of the Culture Center of the Huta "Zabrze" was Mr. Jan Piotrowski: one of the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising, a soldier of the "Baszta" regiment under the pseudonym "Tur". Eventually, young students approached him. And so it began. The founding meeting of the Silesian Music Society Jazz Club took place on October 19, 1956, and among the founders (apart from the aforementioned Jan Piotrowski) were:

Henryk Choliński - called Jazzscelency in the community - he was the originator and co-producer of many music publications and the author of radio broadcasts. In the early 1970s, he developed eighty-one broadcasts from the series "All Charlie Parker Recordings", broadcast by Polish Radio. For this series he received an award (the best publication about jazz in the category of radio and television programs) in 1978.

Tadeusz Kosiński – he took piano lessons from a music professor: Jerzy Żurawlew (creator of the Chopin Competition). In 1957 he took part in the 2nd International Jazz Festival in Sopot. He took part in films such as: "Nobody Calls", "Tarpan" by Kazimierz Kutz, "How to Be Loved" by Wojciech Jerzy Has. From the 1970s he lived in Jelenia Góra, where he created the largest jazz music project in the city, the Krokus Jazz Festival.

Jan Kwaśnicki – In the years 1959-62 his band Polish Modern Jazz Quartet was considered one of the top jazz bands in Poland, and Kwaśnicki himself joined the exclusive Friends of Music USA founded by Willis Conover. This quartet was one of the first Polish jazz bands in the times of the Polish People's Republic to go on tour behind the Iron Curtain (1960).

The organization was the concert agency for the High Society Band (the best Polish traditional jazz band of the 1960s and 1970s), the Kwadrat group, the Bednarek-Zgraja duo, and for some time even the Dżem band. Many radio and television broadcasts in the 1970s were broadcast in cooperation with the NRS or created independently by the Association.

more at sjc.pl