Wieleba Lech – Poetic Jazz

Lech Wieleba studied double bass at the Konservatorium in Danzig (now Zespół Szkół Muzycznych w Gdańsku-Wrzeszczu) under Stanisław Rosiek, with whom he also completed his course in 1977. For the next four years he played at the State Opera House and in the Philharmonic Hall in Danzig. But he had long been interested in jazz. As early as 1975 he appeared at the Jazz Jantar Festival in Danzig (founded in 1973) in a band put together by the American Don Cherry (1936-1995). In 1980 he was awarded the Krzysztof Komeda Prize. In the same year he was the winner of the Jazz nad Odrą(English: Jazz on the Oder) Festival in Breslau with the band Antiquintet and appeared at Poland’s oldest international jazz festival, the Jazz Jamboree Festival in Warsaw. In 1982/83 he went on a tour of Europe with Polski Teatr Instrumentalny that had been set up by the saxophonist Ryszard Misiek (1947-2010) in Danzig.

After moving to Hamburg in 1984 Wieleba began to establish himself in the German music scene. He accompanied the song maker Franz Josef Degenhardt (1931-2011) on three CDs (1986 “Junge Paare auf Bänken. Franz Josef Degenhardt singt Georges Brassens”, 1987 “Da müssen wir durch”, 1988 “Stationen”), and on Udo Lindenberg’s album “Hermine” in 1987/88: all the albums were released by Polydor. In 1987 Wieleba worked on the soundtrack for a two-part TV documentary drama directed by Horst Königstein. In the same year he played Celtic music with the Californian band Golden Bough for the LP “Winding Road” on the Arc Music label. In 1993 he joined up with Bernd von Ostrowski (vibraphone), Hans-Jörn Brandenburg (piano) and Hans-Peter Stiller (drums) to create The Classic Jazz Quartet and coproduce a CD with “Modern Jazz Classics” that was recorded in the Lichtwarksaalof the Carl-Toepfer-Stiftung in Hamburg. He also worked in musical productions in Hamburg, like “The Phantom of the Opera”, “Closer than Ever” and “Fiddler on the Roof”. For six years he worked with the action artist and cultural manager André Heller, including a period as the musical director of the Berlin Wintergarten-Varietés on a tour of Germany, Switzerland and Austria between 1993 and 1995. In 1998 and 2002 he joined up with Witek Kornacki (clarinet) and Angel Garcia Arnés (guitar) to form the Sureste Tango Trio and record the CDs “Soledad”, “Pasión en Tango” and “María de Buenos Aires” with music by Astor Piazzolla. Between 1998 and 2005 he toured a huge number of European countries with the Sureste Tango Trio. He also composed the music for theatre productions like “La Musica”, based on a book by Marguerite Duras, in the Theatron in Hamburg and “Chawale” in the Theater am Hechtplatz in Zürich.

Since the turn of the century Wieleba has increasingly performed in Switzerland and the area around Lake Constance. In 2002, for example, he was involved in the theatre production “Rothschild’s Violin”, based on a short story by Anton Chekhov, in the Théâtre La Fourmi in Lucerne. In 2002 he presented his programme Sureste Tango, and in 2004 a programme of tango, jazz and Klezmer music in La Chaux-de-Fonds in western Switzerland. As early as 1995 he began work with the Hamburg actress Paula Quast on a poetry and music portrait of the Jewish poet Mascha Kaléko (1907-1975) who originally came from West Galicia in Poland. The show was presented in German-language countries until 2007.

But Wieleba’s new programme of “Poetic Jazz” has been the centre of his work since 2002 was his”. The first CD album “Open The Heart” appeared in the same year. It was recorded live in the concert hall of the Augustinum in Aumühle near Hamburg, with Jan-Peter Klöpfel on the  flugelhorn, André Mornet on piano, Ali Husseini on drums and, of course, Lech Wieleba on the double bass. The CD contains the first versions of “Waiting for the Call” and “La Chanson de la Pluie”. Reviewing it in the Allgäuer Zeitung on the 14th February 2003 Christoph Pfister wrote: “A miraculous lightness fills this music formed from the deepest origins of jazz, formed from the pastel autumn melodies of Slavic musicians and the high art of classical music”. In 2005 Poetic Jazz, played concerts in places like Düsseldorf Berlin and Nuremberg, partly with a new line-up.