Leopold Tyrmand

Leopold Tyrmand

Leopold Tyrmand (born May 16, 1920 in Warsaw , † March 19, 1985 in Fort Myers ) was a Polish writer, publicist and jazz initiator.

Life

Leopold Tyrmand came into contact with jazz in 1938 when he was a student in Paris , where he attended the Hot Club de Jazz and heard the Duke Ellington Orchestra . Tyrmand then played an important role in building the post-war jazz scene in Poland. In 1946 he founded the Warsaw Club of the YMCA . On his initiative, the first public jazz concert under the motto Jam Session took place on May 30, 1947 in the YMCA Club in Warsaw . a. the saxophonist Charles Bovery , the singer Jeanne Johnstone Schiele , the clarinetist Juliusz Skowroński , the pianist Wiesław Machan and the drummer Janusz “Marek” Byliński took part. The YMCA clubs (there were others in Krakow and Łódź ) did not have a long life; they were dissolved in 1947 when the cultural authorities downgraded jazz as "bourgeois, decadent, suspicious and harmful". In 1954, Tyrmand was the patron of the first Polish jazz festival ("1st Cracow Jazz All Souls").

His books critical of the regime were banned in Poland, but were published as translations in the Federal Republic of Germany and Great Britain. He emigrated to the USA in 1966 , where he published in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine .

Works (selection)

• The Evil. Roman (“Zły”, 1955). Ullstein-Verlag, Berlin 1958 (translated by Kurt Harrer).
• A hotel in Darlowo. Roman ("Siedem dalekich rejsów"). Ullstein-Verlag, Berlin 1962 (translated by Jan Tauschinski).

literature

• Pawel Brodowski: Jazz in Poland . In: Annette Hauber (Ed.): That's Jazz. The sound of the 20th century . Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt 1988 (catalog of the exhibition of the same name, May 29 to August 28, 1988).

Web links

Commons : Leopold Tyrmand  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Leopold Tyrmand at culture.pl (Polish)
• Literature by and about Leopold Tyrmand in the catalog of the German National Library