Buba Badjie Kuyateh & Michał Górczyński — 26th Jazz From New Festival 2026

Buba Badjie Kuyateh and Michał Górczyński form a duo in which two distant musical worlds meet — the tradition of West African griots and European contemporary and improvised music. Their instrumentation is sparing: bark and bass clarinet. It is from the dialogue of these two characteristic sounds that music is created based on attentive listening, spontaneous reaction and free improvisation.

Buba Badjie Kuyateh comes from Brikama, Gambia, and comes from a family of griots — musicians who are also guardians of tradition and oral history in West African culture. He learned to play the bark from an early age. His father Kausu Kuyateh and uncle Dembo Konte were among the esteemed performers of this instrument. The artist remains strongly associated with the traditional music of the Gambia, while also willingly combining it with jazz, funk and contemporary musical forms. Since 2012 he lives in Warsaw, where he founded the band Bantamba. He collaborated with Stanisław Soyka, Maria Pomianowska, Marcin Masecki and Milo Kurtis, among others.

Michał Górczyński is a clarinetist, composer and theatre creator, a graduate of the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw. A special place in his activities is occupied by contemporary music and improvisation. For years he has been developing his own performance techniques on the bass clarinet and expanding his sound possibilities, using, among others, inspiration from beatbox. He co-creates the ensembles Kwartludium, Bastard and Polonek, and as a soloist he has collaborated with, among others, AUKSO, the Silesian Quartet and the Orchestra of New Music.

The collaboration between Kuyateh and Górczyński resulted in the album “Cut The Air”, released in 2017 by the Multikulti Project. The album contains six common compositions in which the warm, rhythmic and melodic sound of the bark meets the deep register and the wide sound palette of the bass clarinet. It is a music situated between tradition, jazz, world music and free improvisation.

During the 26th JAZZ Od Nowa Festival the duo will perform on October 14, 2026. The concert starting the first festival evening is scheduled for 20:00 at ACKiS “Od Nowa” in Toruń.

Composition: Buba Badjie Kuyateh (Gambia) — choir Michał Górczyński — bass clarinet