“Longing for Home”

“Tęskniąc za domem” (“Longing for Home”) is an innovative attempt to reconstruct the legendary band The Happy Boys, which was founded in Germany just after the end of the war.

Its founder was an outstanding violinist and saxophonist Chaim Bajgelman from Łódź, a brother of the outstanding composer Dawid Bajgelman, murdered after the liquidation of the ghetto. Chaim found a few surviving Jewish musicians with whom he played in Łódź for years, invited them to work together and that was how The Happy Boys were born: a jazz, swing, klezmer band.

The bitter contradiction of the name was a symbol of those times when, after years of fear and terror, one could finally think about a normal life, laugh and have fun. The Happy Boys often performed at allied military bases, but above all played concerts for Holocaust survivors, trying to rebuild their broken world with music. They played hits from the Polish interwar period, mostly created by Jewish composers, including works by Dawid Bajgelman, in a fashionable jazz style. They played their own songs and traditional Jewish themes. Their repertoire was also filled with the then omnipresent excellent jazz standards. Unforgettable songs by Glen Miller or Benny Goodmen mixed beautifully with Jewish traditional songs and pre-war hits.

In 1949, after four years and dozens of concerts, the extraordinary story of The Happy Boys ended. The musicians went in different directions of the world. Only memories from a time when life started to move towards normality remained. There are only a few songs left, including "We long for a home / Tęskniąc za domem", which inspired the title of our concert.

The author of the script and the director of the “Tęskniąc za domem“ concert is Miron Zajfert, the creator of last year's "Get to tango" event. The musical side of the event is supervised by an outstanding trumpeter, composer and arranger Robert Majewski, accompanied by Henryk Miśkiewicz, Michał Tokaj, Sławomir Kurkiewicz, Marcin Jahr, Grzegorz Nagórski and Bartek Dworak. Sticking to the instruments used by the original musicians in the past, these outstanding artists have reactivated the "Happy Boys" jazz band.

The excellent jazz band is accompanied by exceptional vocalists: the rising star of Polish jazz - Wojciech Myrczek, one of the leading artists in our music scene - Aga Zaryan and the legend and master of swing vocals - Andrzej Dąbrowski.

mkidn  Narodowe Centrum Kultury Narodowe Centrum Kultury

© 2020 Dialogue Center. Co-financed by the National Center for Culture as part of the Culture on the Web program.

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