Michal Urbaniak

Once Poland’s most promising import in the jazz-rock 1970s, Michal Urbaniak’s main worth in retrospect was like a fellow tourist of Jean-Luc Ponty, a liquid advocate from the electric powered violin, the lower-pitched Violectra, as well as the Lyricon (the first popular, if right now largely under-utilized blowing wind synthesizer). Like many Eastern Western jazzmen, he’d incorporate components of Polish folk music into his jazz pursuits, and his additional heroes add the unavoidable Kilometers Davis to Polish classicist Witold Lutoslawski. His electrical violin was frequently filtered having a gauze of digital modifying products, and sometimes, he could produce an attractively unforgettable structure like “Silk Woman.” Urbaniak started playing the violin at age group six, accompanied by studies within the soprano and tenor saxophones. His passions in jazz created chronologically from Dixieland to golf swing to bop as he was raised, and he analyzed in the Academy of Music in Warsaw while employed in numerous Polish jazz rings and playing traditional violin. In 1965, he created his own music group in Scandinavia with vocalist Urszula Dudziak (later on his wife), time for Poland in 1969 to discovered Constellation, including pianist Adam Makowicz. Having received a scholarship towards the Berklee University of Music upon becoming voted Greatest Soloist in the 1971 Montreux Jazz Event, Urbaniak produced the U.S. his house in 1973. He quickly formed a favorite jazz-rock group known as Fusion, documenting for Columbia and Arista inside a Mahavishnu Orchestra/Ponty style, with Dudziak adding darting, slippery scat vocals. This group lasted until 1977, and Urbaniak’s profile could not end up being as high once again, although he performed with Larry Coryell in 1982-1983, led the brand new electric powered group Urbanator in the 1990s, and provides performed and documented in various other styles which range from bop to free of charge jazz in to the 21st century.