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Targi Kielce Memorial to Miles Jazz Festival - the Prelue Schmidt and Tomaszewski will perform live on the anniversary of the trumpeter's birth
The May concert will be a prelude to the main part of the festival, scheduled for 25–27 September 2026, which will bring together jazz artists and listeners inspired by Davis's work in Kielce.
There will be a multitude of similar anniversary events this year. Davis, like few others, inspires returns and reinterpretations – often, however, these are attempts to reconstruct well-known patterns: "Kind of Blue", "So What", the golden canon. However, the Kielce concert promises to be different. Piotr Schmidt – for years one of the most fascinating Polish jazz trumpeters – reaches for repertoire from a less obvious period of Davis's work, focusing on the turn of the 1970s and 1980s,
a special moment in his career: electric, ambiguous, and often overlooked in classical narratives about jazz. Yet it was then that Davis shattered the boundaries between jazz, rock, and funk, creating a language that still resonates in improvised music today.
This very idiom will become the starting point for the reinterpretations prepared by Schmidt's quintet. Alongside the leader, the band will feature guitarist Jakub Mizeracki, bassist Marcin Pospieszalski, drummer Paweł Dobrowolski, and – as a special guest – pianist and keyboardist Paweł Tomaszewski, one of the most versatile musicians of the younger generation.
This combination is not accidental, as this lineup provides space for dialogue between acoustics and electronics, between structure and the freedom of improvisation – precisely where Miles Davis was looking for new sounds in his later work.
The "100 Miles" concert is not a reconstruction; it is rather an attempt to speak to Davis's music from a contemporary perspective – without nostalgia, without "rehashing" themes. If there is any sense to be found in playing his repertoire today, it is in this approach.
Will this be a one-off event? Hard to say as the musicians do not rule out further development of this material, perhaps also in studio form. For now, however, "100 Miles" remains a project inscribed in a specific moment – the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth.
In the world of jazz, where improvisation is the essence, such a one-off is important.
The concert begins on 26 May at 7:00 PM on the Small Stage of the Kielce Cultural Centre. Tickets at kck.com
Edited by: /MS/
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