Michał Urbaniak, a Polish violinist and jazz fusion pioneer who in the 1970s became one of the first jazz musicians from his Eastern bloc country to gain an international following, eventually playing with luminaries like Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, died on Saturday. He was 82.
His wife, Dorota Dosia Urbaniak, confirmed his death in a social media post. She did not say where he died or cite a cause.
Born in Nazi-occupied Warsaw during World War II, Mr. Urbaniak came of age in the 1950s in an atmosphere of repression. Poland’s Soviet-backed Communist government had banned jazz, which was considered a corrupting form of Western influence.
“We were isolated, and going abroad even to Eastern bloc countries was complicated,” Mr. Urbaniak recalled in a 2021 interview with the Polish website Culture.PL. “The strongest freedom we had was the music.”
After emigrating to the United States in 1973 and settling in New York, he signed with Columbia Records, known for its roster of jazz heavyweights, and his career blossomed. He was noted for his explorations of jazz fusion, a blend of jazz harmonies and improvisation with rock, funk and R&B.
Mr. Urbaniak went on to record more than 60 albums, collaborating with other fusion notables, including the guitarists Larry Coryell and George Benson, the drummer Billy Cobham and the bassist Jaco Pastorius, of the platinum-selling fusion group Weather Report.
He was also a sought-after session musician who appeared on recordings by Mr. Hancock and Mr. Davis — notably, “Tutu,” Mr. Davis’s 1986 blend of jazz, funk and electronic pop.
Mr. Urbaniak had said that he first came to the attention of Mr. Davis through an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” Afterward, Mr. Davis apparently told a colleague (albeit in earthier language), “Get me this Polish fiddler, he’s got the sound!”
Mr. Urbaniak’s first major solo album was “Fusion” (1974), an “enigmatic recording at once lyrical and noisy,” C. Michael Bailey wrote in 1999 in a review on the site All About Jazz. Mr. Urbaniak achieved a rainbow palate of sounds with his violin by applying various electronic effects like wah-wah and phase shifter, which creates a watery, swirling sound, while also exploring Eastern European tonalities.
“This disc deserves to be considered in the same breath as releases by Weather Report, Return to Forever and electric Miles,” Mr. Bailey wrote. “It has a pioneer spirit while remaining true to its regional roots.”
“Fusion III,” released the next year, took Mr. Urbaniak’s work to new heights. It included a star-studded roster of guest musicians, including Mr. Coryell, the guitarist John Abercrombie, the session drummer Steve Gadd, the bassist Anthony Jackson and the Polish vocalist Ursula Dudziak, who has had a prolific recording career herself.
Given his inventive work on electric violin, Mr. Urbaniak was often compared to his more famous counterpart, Jean-Luc Ponty, the French jazz violinist, who made notable contributions in fusion, releasing many hit albums and collaborating with the likes of Elton John and Frank Zappa.
In contrast to Mr. Ponty’s “glittering brilliance,” The Chicago Reader noted in 2002, Mr. Urbaniak had “a rougher-hewn tone” and more aggressive attack, sometimes achieving a “banshee wail” on his instrument, but also maintaining the melodic flow of bebop.
As much as he was identified with the genre, Mr. Urbaniak expressed skepticism about the direction fusion sometimes took.
It was “created by the cream of jazz musicians by adding electronics to sophisticated modern jazz,” he said in a 1982 interview with The New York Times. “But what came out of it was a vehicle to make commercial music and Muzak.”
Michał Urbaniak was born on Jan. 22, 1943, in Warsaw, a city devastated by the German invasion of 1939.
Growing up in Lodz, in central Poland, he was a violin prodigy who played with symphony orchestras. He first learned of jazz “through ‘American propaganda,’ the so-called ‘imperialists,’” Mr. Urbaniak said in a 2019 interview with Culture.Pl. — specifically broadcasts by the concert producer and disc jockey Willis Conover on his long-running program on Voice of America radio.
His first efforts in jazz came on saxophone, playing in a Dixieland jazz outfit, although he later returned to his original instrument.
Moving to Warsaw, he joined the band of Zbigniew Namysłowski, who played alto saxophone, flute and other instruments and would become one of Poland’s breakout jazz artists. In the early 1960s, Mr. Urbaniak joined the noted pianist and bandleader Andrzej Trzaskowski on a tour in the United States.
“It was incredible — my first trip abroad,” Mr. Urbaniak said.
Once there, he began meeting idols like John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. “Many times I was looking around and making sure is it real?” he told Culture.Pl in 2021. “Like the commercial in U.S. says: Is it real or Memorex?”
After the tour, he returned to what he considered a grim life behind the Iron Curtain but vowed to forge a career in the American jazz capital. “New York’s the only home for a jazzman,” he said in the 2019 interview.
Looking to push the boundaries of jazz in the 1980s, Mr. Urbaniak began to incorporate the beats and raps of hip-hop. He later started an ensemble called Urbanator, which released three albums in the mid-1990s, a time when acid jazz — a dance-club-ready mix of jazz, hip-hop, R&B and funk — was in vogue.
Information on his survivors, in addition to Ms. Urbaniak, was not immediately available. Mr. Urbaniak’s previous marriage, to Ms. Dudziak, the jazz vocalist, ended in divorce.
Despite never having a major commercial breakthrough, Mr. Urbaniak attracted an enthusiastic following, and in the early 1970s had the distinction being the first popular Polish artist to be recorded in the U.S. in more than 30 years, according to a 1974 article in The Times.
All along, the legacies of jazz were never as interesting to him as the promise of tomorrow. “I’m an Aquarius,” he told Culture.PL, “and Aquarians are supposed to be looking to the future always.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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