Wanda Warska

Wanda Małolepsza (28 April 1930 – 6 July 2019), known professionally as Wanda Warska, was a Polish jazz singer and composer who worked with her husband Andrzej Kurylewicz and was nicknamed the "First Lady of Polish Jazz".

Biography Early life and career Wanda Warska was born Wanda Małolepsza on 28 April 1930 in Poznań, Poznań Voivodeship, Poland. After singing at the at the age of five, Warska studied piano as a young child and was educated at a music and ballet school and in the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw.

She and her husband Andrzej Kurylewicz started working together in the 1950s, performing for the latter's bands for her first recording, the 1956 Sopot Jazz Festival, and the Jazz Jamboree, and serving as his repertoire's primary performer. She was the vocalist of Kurylewicz's Organ Sextet, and her 1971 album Muzyka teatralna i telewizyjna was a collaboration with him and Czesław Niemen. She also received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 2011, Warska was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis for "her contribution to Polish culture". Polskie Radio described her 2016 album Domowe piosenki, composed of her recordings from over the past six centuries, as a "phonographic rarity", noting that her work rarely appeared on albums.

In April 2016, Warska was incapacitated by a paralyzing stroke. which her daughter accepted on her behalf while she was recovering. Her state funeral took place on 11 July 2019 in Laski, where , the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, read a letter from Deputy Prime Minister Piotr Gliński. In the letter, Gliński described Warska as a "great lady of Polish jazz" and "one of the great figures of Polish culture based on the implementation of the idea of beauty in all its forms."

Warska is nicknamed the "First Lady of Polish Jazz". Muzeum Jazzu described her as "a legend, an icon of poetic song and jazz, [and] an uncompromising animator of countless artistic projects", and also credited her with "introducing the Brazilian bossa nova to Poland".

Discography Muzyka teatralna i telewizyjna (1971) Piosenki z piwnicy Wandy Warskiej (2005) Domowe piosenki (2016)