Owczynnikow Łukasz
Double bass player, born in Warsaw into a family of musicians. He received his secondary education at the J. Elsner Music School in Warsaw in the class of Adam Kotula, and went on to graduate from the Music Academy in Łódź in the class of Piotr Czerwiński and Tadeusz Górny, and from the Jazz Studium college in Warsaw in the class of Adam Cegielski.
He has participated in many masterclasses and double bass festivals in Wrocław, Paris, Berlin and Łódź, led by such masters as Rufus Reid, Wilbert de Joode, Frank Proto, Thierry Barbe, Rustem Gabdulin and Rinat Ibragimow.
As a pupil at secondary school he received awards and distinctions at national competitions in Katowice, Łódź and Warsaw. He has appeared solo with the orchestra at the Witold Lutosławski Polish Radio Concert Studio; in 2011 he performed at the Gaudeamus Muziekweek festival in Utrecht, and in 2012 at the Łódź Philharmonic. During recent years he qualified for the finals of the European Bass Convention in Paris, in the orchestral category (2008), as well as winning a distinction in the jazz category at the World Double Bass Festival in Wrocław (2010).
Since childhood he has been actively creating and performing contemporary and jazz music. He headed his own ensemble of contemporary and improvised music “jegökoledzy”, and has staged solo performances. He collaborates with dancers and theatres, including the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practice, the Furu group, and Łódź w Ruchu. He has created music for films and theatre performances, and arranged and recorded music on discs with numerous ensembles playing classical and light music.
He has performed at numerous festivals in Poland, such as the Warsaw Autumn, Ad libitum, Warsaw Music Encounters, and solo in a production directed by Krzysztof Knittel during the Łódź Ballet Encounters. Together with the group futurEthno he appeared at the EthnoJazz festival in Chișinău, Moldora, as well as at several Ukrainian festivals such as Vinnytsia Jazz Festival, Nimi Nochi in Odessa, Jazz Bez in Lviv, Kharkiv and Sevastopol. He has played in many first performances and recordings of contemporary music, both chamber and solo, including works by Tadeusz Wielecki, Krzysztof Penderecki, Kazimierz Przybylski, Marcin Stańczyk, Bartosz Kowalski-Banasewicz, Tomasz Opałka, Andrzej Kwieciński, Ignacy Zalewski, Mateusz Dębski and Paweł Zalewski.
Appearances and recordings with numerous orchestras have included the Young Sound Forum of Central Europe, Sinfonia Iuventus, the orchestra of the Grand Theatre – National Opera in Warsaw, Opera at the Castle in Szczecin, Zenon Brzeski String Orchestra, under conductors such as Christoph Altstaedt, Jacek Kaspszyk, Tadeusz Wojciechowski, Jerzy Maksymiuk and Krzysztof Penderecki. He also performs with the Polish-Ukrainian jazz quintet futurEthno, the Czessband group, and ensembles of Balkan music.
Together with Karolina Cicha he has recorded works for the Gajcy CD of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, and prepared a project titled To Cannibals to words by Tadeusz Różewicz. With Magda Latuch, Justyna Jary and the musicians of the Czessband ensemble he led a project of communal singing and music-making with the elderly, titled The whole of Praga sings with us, as well as being involved in songs of Warsaw workshops for senior citizens as part of the Active Praga project. In May 2012 during the New Tradition festival he made his debut with the most recent project involving a new perspective on the traditional music of Mazovia, the Mazovian Quintet, at the Witold Lutosławski Polish Radio Concert Studio.
