Late September will see the beginning of Rafał Sarnecki Quintet’s Korea tour. The guitarist accompanied by Polish and Korean musicians will perform at the Forest Jazz Festival in Seoul and on club stages in six other cities. The tour, which is part of the 2019 Jazz Po Polsku Live in Asia project, will conclude with a concert accompanying the second edition of the Polish design exhibition in Korea.
Rafał Sarnecki continues his Asia tour which kicked off in August in China. In Korea, the musician will perform with Kuba Cichocki on the piano, Wojciech Pulcyn on double bass and Piotr Pawlak on drums. At some of the concerts the band will be joined by Korean musicians: singer MinJin Seo (Jinju, Busan, Ulsan) and saxophonist Sunjae Lee who has already worked with Sarnecki in Warsaw. Their joint concert was held in March 2019 as part of the KOsmoPOLityczny project celebrating the 30th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between Poland and the Republic of Korea.
The musicians will start their Korea tour at the Seoul Forest Jazz Festival performing on 29th September on the open-air stage. The band will then set out to play concerts in Jinju, Daegu, Daejeon, Busan and Ulsan. The last concert, which will be held on 6th October at Incheon’s Lotte Concert Hall, will be part of the programme of events accompanying the exhibition The ABCs of Polish Design presented at the Lotte Department Store in Seoul and Incheon.
Rafał Sarnecki has recorded four albums as a leader. Two of them: Song From a New Place (2008, ARMS Records) and Cat’s Dream (2014, Brooklyn Underground Records) were nominated for the Fryderyk Award, the Polish equivalent of a Grammy, while The Madman Rambles Again (2011, Fresh Sound New Talent) was selected by All About Jazz as one of the 12 most interesting albums of 2011. He has worked with such musicians as Joel Frahm, Ingrid Jensen, Willie Jones III or Gary Thomas. Since 2005, he has been living and working in New York, where he had previously studied under one of the most famous guitar teachers John Bollenbeck. Sarnecki’s fourth and latest album titled Climbing Trees was released in the US in July 2018. As a group leader, he regularly performs at festivals and jazz clubs around the world.
Rafał Sarnecki’s Korea tour of is part of the year-round presentation of 2019 Jazz Po Polsku Live in Asia. To date, five concert tours have been organised as part of the project. Spring 2019 saw Michał Martyniuk Quartet give concerts in Southeast Asia, followed by Michał Milczarek Trio and Confusion Project who performed in China. In September, the quintets of Stanisław Słowiński and Rafał Sarnecki hit the stages of China and Mongolia. To date the bands have played seventy of one hundred concerts planned for this year.
2019 Jazz Po Polsku Live in Asia concert tour is organised in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Polish Institute in Beijing and the Plateaux Foundation. The performances are held under the honorary patronage of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Seoul, the Consulates General of the Republic of Poland in Chengdu and Guangzhou and the Polish Office in Taipei.
29.09 13:40 SEOUL, Forest Jazz Festival
01.10 19:30 JINJU, Klang Haus
02.10 20:00 DAEGU, Bird Jazz
03.10 20:30 DAEJEON, Yellow Taxi
04.10 20:00 BUSAN, General Pause
05.10 21:00 ULSAN, Royal Anchor
06.10 14:00 INCHEON, Lotte Culture Hall
