Let’s return to the Crossroads! Tomasz Janas: EtnoKrakow / Crossroads 2025

The 27th edition of EtnoKraków/Rozstaje//Crossroads is just around the corner. A festival unlike any other in Kraków. This year’s guiding theme – “Returns” – perfectly captures its spirit and its focus on drawing inspiration from tradition.

Once again, the intuition of the festival’s originators and organisers proves a stroke of genius, as – over a quarter of a century ago – they named it “Rozstaje” – “The Crossroads”, using a word with multiple meanings that aptly reflects the attempt at embracing contemporary interpretations of traditional music, a phenomenon we tend to summarise as “all things folk”. For Crossroads are not only the places where people part to go their ways and to sever the ties. Whether on the map or only imagined, it is also the place where the same wanderers cross their paths again, and sometimes even come back to discover what they’d forgotten to reread or relisten, to take in what they’d once overlooked for the lack of time, and maybe to grasp something essential.

Where paths meet 

As the Festival has long shown, the Crossroads are a place of encounters. In the most fundamental and literary sense, these are encounters with traditional, folk culture in all its various forms – from poetry to crafts – yet, above all, with its musical element. Rediscovering and reviving tradition takes many forms: from music close to the tradition of individual villages to modern reinterpretations and transformations. History’s irony – or perhaps logic – makes even the harnessing of electronic instruments for playing folk seem fitting and natural, and can convey the aforementioned theme of return. But this theme isn’t confined to a narrow, geographical understanding of culture – yes, the local, Polish folk traditions are a vital and foundational element, but equally moving and fascinating expressions of folk heritage can be found all across Europe and around the world – as the festival proves, year after year, to the delight of its faithful patrons.

What was

Call it folk, ethno, world music – whatever the name, it is music of remembrance and transformation, of past and future, of recalling and building. Its foundation is tradition, but its heart, its true expression, lies in telling “what was” your own way. That’s where “return” – or rather “returns”: plural, in all their meanings – becomes a key names for defining this manner of music-making. That’s what makes this year’s theme so fitting and so reflective of what you can expect from the EtnoKraków/Rozstaje//Crossroads Festival.

Returns

Therefore, the word used as the lodestar for this year’s event refers to what is absolutely the most essential: today’s artists and audiences returning to the roots of folk music. But this is also the return of many musicians to their music idioms from the earlier years. It is also a return to the creative ideas once proposed by other artists. It’s a return to simplicity, to authenticity of the message, to openness, and to sharing the joy of being together. The term also captures the more down-to-earth kind of return (even if with a profound artistic message and merit): the homecoming of performers who once played at the festival and have left unforgettable memories. And finally, although the connotations of “returns” are far from exhausted, there are also returns to the ideas once “planted” at this festival: the care for forgotten ethnic minorities whose voices are getting lost among today’s media noise – and whose songs and melodies perhaps find no other place where they resound more clearly or more fittingly than in the context of music rooted in tradition, in folk memory, in the natural act of remembering.

Symbols

This is the lens through which to understand this year’s performance by the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kin’Gongolo Kiniata band. It belongs to the realm of tradition of other Congolese artists – guests at our festival, in Poland – who’ve raised their voices against the never-ending war in Congo and in support of human dignity and liberty. Another kind of symbol is the return of Fanfare Ciocărlia – a legend of Balkan music and one of the world’s most loved brass bands from the region, who played their first – absolutely triumphant – concert at our festival on Kraków’s Main Market Square, back in 2001. This time, they return as true classics of the genre. Also returning is the extraordinary Torgeir Vassvik, bringing the traditional yoik songs of the Sámi to our audiences – gathered both on the banks of the Vistula and on the Wesoła Meadow.

Contexts

Returning to the festival is one of the greatest marvels of the Polish music scene – Wędrowiec from Warsaw. Why has it remained unnoticed by a wider public, remains a question to be answered by the Polish media? The band builds a bridge between folk, minimal music and elements of the accessible avant-garde. Also returning is a long-time friend of Rozstaje – the consummate violinist Maria Stępień – once more at the helm of the Festival Orchestra, and this time also with her proprietary project that takes in modern electronic sound: the Non-Adaptive Dance Music. The Kraków-based duo Chwost will return, as will the bands of Kraków House of Dance initiative. Also appearing is the duo Sw@da & Niczos – made famous by recent Eurovision headlines. Its “second half”, that is Nika Jurczuk, has already performed at Rozstaje as part of Hajda Banda. Stanisław Słowiński’s Symphony of the Four Corners of the World also makes a return: it premiered four years ago as a particular epilogue to the festival, and now comes back as an artistic achievement enjoying wide acclaim throughout the country. And then there’s Wassim Ibrahim: returning many times over to present his mastery, this year will lead two entirely different but equally promising and thrilling musical projects. And, finally, though calling her appearance a “return” may be misleading as she’s not so much returning as simply resuming her rightful place – the one and only Joanna Słowińska: a singer without whom it would be hard to imagine this festival and dawn singing on the summer solstice.

Future classics

Let us not forget artists such as the ensemble Radical Polish Ansambl, who – riding the wave of recent success (Folk Album of the Year 2024) of their latest record – will perform at the festival for the first time, though many of its members have graced the stages at the Crossroads before. And then there’s the duo Piotr Damasiewicz and Dominik Wania – outstanding improvisers who have for years been particular to a smart dialogue with tradition – also making their début at the Crossroads this year. Reminded that Damasiewicz has recorded exceptional improvisations on folk themes from the Beskidy Mountains, and that he won the Grand Prix of the Nowa Tradycja festival, you may safely guess that in the not-so-distant future we will count the two musicians among those returning to the Crossroads.

The Audience

All of this is well known to the festival’s loyal audience. For they, too, return year after year into the circle of events at the Crossroads. These are come backs in the hope to find what they already love and know perfectly well, and also to discover entirely new things. This is no paradox. For nearly three decades now, the Kraków festival has acquainted its regulars with a unique atmosphere – one of openness to others, whether from near or far, and to the intimate contact with extraordinary music that seeks inspiration in diverse traditions. Now, that very music continues to take on ever new forms of expression, offering the audiences nothing else but an opportunity to experience deeply moving – at times downright overwhelming – moments and discoveries.

Venues

The concert venues and places for meeting music also belong to the theme of returns. Like last year, most festival events will take place in Wesoła – at the Strefa Nowa club and on the nearby meadow. Thus, we will return to places that have become “our home” – familiar, welcoming spaces in which it only feels natural to welcome musical guests – Wanderers, one might say. We will also make a return to the banks of the Vistula to welcome the sunrise with traditional song on that most special – longest – day of the year. We will also return to the grand and prestigious concert spaces of the NCK Nowa Huta Culture Centre and ICE Kraków – where festival events were held in the previous years. For it turns out that folk, ethno, and world music have many faces, (nearly) all of them fascinating and surprisingly naturally fitting many a setting. And wherever this music may go, it finds captivated audiences!

[ Tomasz Janas]