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The material on Vanga is my contribution to what I hope for the future of personalized expression in singing to be. The rhythm section I chose to build this musical idiolect with consists of the artists I've been working with for a decade now. The participation of Miklos Lukacs, whom I let into my trio's "marital bed" for the second time in the past three years, was again designed to be a Hungarian cherry on my Polish pie. Enjoy! (Grzegorz Karnas)

Track Listing

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• Received four stars from French monthly JazzMagazine

Press Quotes

Karnas sings and speaks in an array of languages, which merge his mother tongue and English into a deconstructed jazz scat-collage Matisse would love. His extraordinary range dips into sensually warm chest tones and pure falsetto heights. Meld the rawness and emotional abandon of indie rocker Dave Matthews with the clean-lined, tradition-rooted swing of Kurt Elling and you might imagine his sound, but Karnas is actually like no other vocalist -- a true original -- as he rolls freely in the folds of his trio's musical bedsheets.

     —Katie Bull, The NYC Jazz Record,December 2014

Polish experimental singer Grzegorz Karnas offers a completely realized trio album, Vanga, a solidly grooving, fluidly swinging odyssey outside the box of tradition, yet clearly rooted somewhere in 'there'

     —Katie Bull, The NYC Jazz Record,January 2015

On Vanga, Polish vocalist Gregorz Karnas is joined by his countrymen, bassist Michal Jaros and drummer Sebastian Frankiewicz, along with Hungarian cimbalom (a hammered dulcimer indigenous to both countries) phenomenon Miklós Lukács, for a live date at Budapest's Opus Jazz Club. 'Heal Me Out' sets the tone for the concert. Singing in English with a thick Polish accent, Karnas employs a double echo effect that bounces each sung phrase right and left, like a delayed chorus, punched up by the rock-punk energy of the rhythm section. Karnas' scat chops come to the fore on the seven- beat 'Sinusoid', where his amazing solo recalls a bit of Bobby McFerrin, a bit of Milton Nascimento. 'Fin d'Été', a habanera, mixes a South American vibe with Eastern European Roma style when Lukács solos in an idiomatic minor scale with raised fourth and seventh degrees. Elsewhere, the combination of AfroCuban, swing-blues, Hungarian folksong and free-scat makes this music difficult to pigeonhole.

     —Tom Greenland, The NYC Jazz Record, February 2015