Anna Maria Jopek - Polanna Project

Tickets €30 (booking fees may apply)

Sensational vocalist Anna Maria Jopek is as Polish as one can be - not only with her gentle beauty, but first of all with her music, coming straight from the heart.  “I come from the vast meadows of central Poland, I've been brought up with its musical traditions, but it does not make my ID complete. Especially now, with the world getting so much smaller every single day. I truly believe that the new music might emerge from co-existence of so many so different voices, influences, traditions, religions”.

Anna Maria is a classically trained pianist and graduated from Chopin's Academy of Music in Warsaw, Poland. After briefly studying in Manhattan School of Music's Jazz Department Anna decided not to play Mozart concertos anymore and traded her beloved Ravel for Keith Jarrett, and Philharmonic Hall for small clubs and theatres.

With 14 albums of her own Anna Maria  has performed and recorded with all the important artists in Poland including numerous concerts and recordings with Tomasz Stanko and with American stars such as Pat Metheny, Joe Lovano, Bobby McFerrin and Branford Marsalis. 
Although she plays open air gigs for thousands of fans, Anna Maria prefers an intimate setting to a huge concert hall and performs about 100 concerts each year, from Toronto to Vienna, London to Berlin.

Let's leave the last word to jazz giant Pat Metheny: 'Anna is original, unique, different. She's brave, she's modest, she's open. She's a great musician. What she's been doing all her life is just trying to choose the best notes’.

Her Polanna concert in Cork will deliver the essential Polish soul in music.

lineup: Anna Maria Jopek (Vocals), Marek Napiorkowski (Guitar), Piotr Nazaruk (Flute/Vocals), Krysztof Herdzin (Piano), Robert Kubiszyn (Bass/Electric Bass), Pawel Dobrowolski (Drums)

TigraN

Being a virtuoso art, jazz produces prodigies just as miraculous as those in classical music. The sensational young Armenian pianist TigraN Hamasyan is one of them. He has been raising eyebrows and dropping jaws worldwide since winning the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition in Los Angeles in 2006.

His unusual marriage of jazz and Armenian folk has picked up high-profile fans including Chick Corea, Brad Mehldau and Herbie Hancock; his most recent album, A Fable, topped the jazz charts in France.

Now 24, TigraN grew up in an Armenian household that was full of music. By the time he was three he was working his way through figuring out songs on piano by pop artists. Now based in Los Angeles, his jazz tastes early on were informed by Miles Davis’s fusion period and then, around the age of ten he came to discover the classic modern jazz songbook.

Dressed in black and looking like a young Bob Dylan, TigraN places his stool away from the piano and bends double while playing, his forehead almost touching the keys. He sometimes mumbles into the microphone while soloing; occasionally beat-boxing over the funkier tracks, sometimes singing wordless, hymn-like compositions.

Don’t miss the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival debut of one of the hottest young guns in jazz today. Presented in association with Mintaka Music.

lineup: Tigran Hamasyan (Piano), Edel Sullivan (Violin)