“It’s amazing when you think about the lack of Polish folk music in the media”: WoWaKin on keeping their music scene alive

The evening is hot. Like so many in a record-breaking summer of high temperatures in Poland. WoWaKin and their guests are on stage playing wild polka for their final performance at the Globaltica Festival in Gdynia. Paula Kinaszewska, the band’s leader and an established actress, sets her violin aside and begins a free, improvised dance. For her, playing in Tricity [the urban area that contains Gdynia and two other cities] on the Polish seaside is like playing at home. Her hometown, Gdańsk, famous as the birthplace of the peaceful anti-communist movement, Solidarność, is just around the corner. Gdańsk was also the site of Kinaszewska’s personal revolution: “I was maybe eight years old, a pupil at the sport-ballet school. Early 80s. One day, the teacher was explaining to us how not to dance: ‘Don’t do it like they do at the village weddings, when they’re pinching others.’ I got absolutely upset, I started crying, saying [that] it’s not true at all – that my mother and grandmother are from the village and they don’t pinch anybody. I felt like a village girl myself – every summer since early childhood we spent a lot of time at my mother’s birthplace in eastern Poland, playing with other kids and talking in the local dialect. This identity of being from there stayed in my mind all this time, throughout my acting career. I missed [these] local vibes in the music I played myself for many years.”

Kinaszewska discovered Poland’s growing roots revival scene around 2010 and then, in 2016, she formed WoWaKin – a trio of her, singing and playing the fiddle, Bartłomiej Woźniak, her husband, playing various instruments including drums and banjolele and Mateusz Wachowiak on a three-row Polish accordion and the folk basetla (cello). Their brand-new record Latem (During Summer) is about extending this line-up. “That was the starting point for the album’s concept,” says Woźniak.

The first guest is Piotr Zabrodzki on various keyboards. He plays banjo and sings with Warszawskie Combo Taneczne, who perform the traditional street music of Warsaw. “We saw him at various folk-dance parties, also at the Mazurkas of the World festival [in Warsaw], playing the whirling dances of the lowlands. We knew that to play them, an ecstatic love for the genre is required,” says Woźniak. The second guest is Marta Maślanka – a rare Polish hammered dulcimer player. “In the past, that instrument was more often performed in the villages around my mother’s birthplace,” says Kinaszewska. “The dulcimer has for the Polish listener a sort of Eastern, archaic vibe,” she adds.

WoWaKin’s recent success includes being featured in the soundtrack of Netflix’s 1670, a comedy series about 17th-century Polish nobility, which gained a large audience, and not only in Poland. Their tracks, recorded with the young vocalist Nina Kodorska, were prominent in the show and allowed the band to grow their fanbase. “We had little idea about the project – the brief said ‘Polish medieval times series’… But indeed, we did our best and the directors, as well, to place [the music] cleverly in the movie. It’s all been a big surprise. [And] it may have another chapter,” Woźniak adds mysteriously.

“It’s amazing when you think about the lack of Polish folk music in the media,” says Kinaszewska. “We’re totally wiped out from TV, commercial radio. Yet, so many people, bands and communities did so much to make this scene survive. And we don’t only make that – we grow,” she says. Once the summer’s gone, Kinaszewska will, for the seventh time, run traditional music community workshops at Praga Cultural Centre – a place where every week she teaches the adults and kids knowledge about traditional fiddle techniques that she learned from the village masters.

Latem expands the sound of the Warsaw trio. With its mix of ecstatic dances and melancholic laments, it will likely be one of the most remembered Polish folk albums of 2024.

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today