As part of the Jewish festival week "30 years of the Jewish community of Rostock and 20 years of the community center at Augustenstraße 20"
In April 2024, the Jewish community of Rostock will be 30 years old, and in September 20 years ago, the community moved into the community center at Augustenstraße 20. These wonderful anniversaries were actually supposed to be celebrated with a week of festivities in December. However, this did not happen due to construction work. The Jewish community of Rostock is therefore all the more pleased that it can now invite people to a number of concerts.
The musicians in the band confess: "... We want our music to simply be called KROKE MUSIC ..." KROKE (which is Yiddish for Krakow) was founded in 1992 by three friends: Tomasz Kukurba, Jerzy Bawoł and Tomasz Lato. As graduates of the Academy of Music in Krakow, but also as artists in search, they did not refrain from experimenting with jazz and contemporary music. The band, which was originally associated with klezmer music, currently oscillates between different genres. The artists are inspired by ethnic music from all over the world, but always enrich their works with their own improvisations. In this way, KROKE creates its own unique style that transcends borders, forms and time.
The musicians could be found on the streets and in the clubs of Krakow's Kazimierz district, once the Jewish part of the city. The musical compositions they played, which were completely unknown to some, awakened memories of a long-forgotten world in others. It was there that people first heard the songs that appeared on the band's first cassette, released at their own expense in 1993. One day, Kate Capshaw, the wife of Steven Spielberg, who was filming his movie "Schindler's List" in Krakow at the time, came to the "Ariel" restaurant, where the band often performed. One evening, she took her husband to a concert. The director quickly recognized KROKE's talent and invited the band to Jerusalem to perform at the "Survivors Reunion" ceremony organized for the survivors of Oskar Schindler's List. "... Since that remarkable moment, everything became more profound... That's when the band really began to exist. We received a kind of musical blessing from these people, some of whom were klezmer...", the musicians mention. But that was just the beginning of a great adventure.
Further projects followed, for example with Peter Gabriel, Nigel Kennedy, Edyta Geppert and Krzysztof Herdzin, with the Sinfonia Baltica orchestra under the direction of Bohdan Jarmołowicz or with the Sinfonietta Cracovia.
