Janusz Stefański. Virtuoso percussionist and co-founder of European jazz
Mediathek Sorted
Concert “Jazz gegen Apartheid” (Jazz against apartheid)

Band leader, event organiser and juror
Stefański was also an outstanding promoter of jazz. In May 2005, he organised the “German-Polish Jazz Jamboree” at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt. He was responsible for the artistic arrangement of this musical encounter, bringing together 30 German and Polish musicians. As well as concerts, there was a podium discussion, moderated by the jazz journalist Werner Wunderlich, with the jazz musicians, who had met for the first time in 1956 at a jazz festival in Sopot.
For Stefański, it was of great importance to commemorate the life of his friend Zbigniew Seifert (1946–1979). In 2010, he co-founded the Zbigniew Seifert Foundation (Zbigniew-Seifert-Stiftung) and in 2014 became a member of the jury for the International Zbigniew Seifert violin competition, which is held every two years.
The final years of Janusz Maria Stefański’s life were dominated by his fight against lung cancer. Despite this, he was determined to continue performing right until the end. He died on 4 November 2016 in a Frankfurt hospital, one week after the end of a tour of five concerts, which he gave with Emil Mangelsdorff. Obituaries of him appeared in the major Frankfurt newspapers, European music magazines and in the national Polish media.
Stefański passed on his skill and knowledge as a teacher, staying in contact with the ever-younger generations of musicians. He was the life of any party, had a wonderful sense of humour, and always had hundreds of anecdotes up his sleeve from his sometimes very turbulent concert tours in Europe and the US. Sadly, these were not recorded. He wore well-tailored, sporty jackets, with a cute little hat, often with red trainers and ostentatious silver rings. When he spoke, he liked to use American turns of phrase. He had the kind of personality that was impossible to overlook. He was a drummer with a strong, energetic beat and his own unmistakeable approach to his instrument. Among his circle of friends and family, he was also a passionate pianist. Stefański gave unforgettable concerts as a solo percussionist, in his gallery in Königstein and later at his wife Ewa’s art exhibitions.
In 1981, Stefański had originally planned only to sit out the turbulent political events in Frankfurt; yet in the end, he put down roots there. Luckily, and only partly by chance, fate saw to it that he spent his exile in Frankfurt, the most American of all German cities and an important centre for jazz in Germany, in which he played an influential role for 35 years. The urn containing Stefański’s ashes was buried in the family grave in the cemetery of the Łagiewniki-Borek Fałęcki district of Kraków.
Joanna de Vincenz, November 2018