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Elma Kais

Trained in classical music, Elma Kais finally turned to jazz and graduated from the Krakow School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in the vocal class under Marek Bałata. During her school years she received awards in several jazz vocal contests.

Her professional life is constantly organised around musical improvisation: from her artistic and stage activities (as a soloist, a band leader, as well as a composer of music for her own projects and for theatre), through her academic research (her doctoral thesis focused on psychological aspects of musical improvisation), to her therapeutic work (as a music therapist in improvisational approach). For her interdisciplinary actions Elma was appreciated and awarded the prize by the Foundation for Polish Science.

All those multidimensional activities have been inspiring and forming her musical sensitivity and visions, personal language of composition and improvisation, as well as distinctive vocal expression.

Finally, all of these materialized in a phonographic debut. „Hic Et Nunc” in quartet with Verneri Pohjola (tp), Dominik Wania (p) and Maciej Garbowski (b) (iMp 2014) has become a new chapter of the story. The album was enthusiastically acclaimed by jazz reviewers, including top notes by Jazzarium and JazzPress, and found its place on the podium of the Polish Jazz Top Ten ranking. The second album of Elma Kais with V. Pohjola, D.Wana & M.Garbowski, "Ad Rem" released by Hevhetia (2016) received excellent international reviews. The following one, with Knox Chandler (g), Daigo Nakai (b) and Klaus Kugel (dr) is just coming (to be released at the end of 2021).

Elma Kais: Licentia Poetica

by Howard Mandel
February 26, 2023

I tried to write words freed from rhythm... Yet the song came, of itself, in the right measures, And whatever I tried to write was poetry. Ovid, Tristis IV, 24-25 More than 2000 years ago Ovid captured the essence of spontaneous improvisation in a stanza--as the collective of Elma Kais, Knox Chandler, Daigo Nakai and Klaus Kugel does on Licentia Poetica. The Roman poet, author of “Metamorphoses," describes a creative outpouring which finds--or reveals--its perfect form ...

"ELMA composes and sings without lyrics in a way incomparable to anything I have heard before. [...] Sensational debut recording!!!" /Maciej Lewenstein "Polish Jazz Recordings and Beyond"/

"ELMA - sensational discovery of the Polish jazz vocal scene" /Adam Baruch, Singer Jazz Festival/

"ELMA - one of the most interesting new voices on the jazz scene" - /Jazzarium/

"Hic Et Nunc" by ELMA - …the most intriguing vocal album of not only the last year" -/Maciej Karlowski, Jazzarium/

"I have no doubt that „Hic Et Nunc” by mysterious ELMA is one of the most important debuts in Polish vocal jazz in recent years." - /Tomasz Luczak, Polish-Jazz/

"ELMA composes and sings without lyrics in a way incomparable to anything I have heard before. [...] Sensational debut recording!!!" /Maciej Lewenstein "Polish Jazz Recordings and Beyond"/

"ELMA - sensational discovery of the Polish jazz vocal scene" /Adam Baruch, Singer Jazz Festival/

"ELMA - one of the most interesting new voices on the jazz scene" - /Jazzarium/

"Hic Et Nunc" by ELMA - …the most intriguing vocal album of not only the last year" -/Maciej Karlowski, Jazzarium/

"I have no doubt that „Hic Et Nunc” by mysterious ELMA is one of the most important debuts in Polish vocal jazz in recent years." - /Tomasz Luczak, Polish-Jazz/

"One of the greatest discoveries in Polish jazz AD 2014" -/Mateusz Magierowski, JazzPRESS/

"... ELMA's voice becomes an instrument. It carries purity. It is unshaken and movable. It is piercing at moments, and at times it is almost childlike naive, in the best sense of this word. And at the same time it is not entangled into the corset of the text or the ravel of meanings, thus it brings an unusual power of stimulating imagination! ... ... When listening to ‘HIC ET NUNC’ we are truly participating in very exceptional experience of ‘here and now’, witnessing something that may never happen again... Four musicians who managed to play only the really important sounds. The quartet with no leader and no drums, however, full of motion and rhythm, where music is born as naturally as breath and it rolls with its own speed, giving no heed to the rushing world…" - /Maciej Karlowski/

About ELMA "Ad Rem": "The importance of this music is twofold; firstly it is breathtakingly beautiful, emotionally intense and aesthetically stunning, and secondly it is intellectually courageous and fascinating. Elma is not regressing to the 1970s to create more of the same vocal Improvised Music created then, but takes the tradition right up to date, moving forward and updating the concept, adapting it to contemporary Jazz language, sound and vision. Her vocalese and other tricks of the trade, most of which she invented herself or expanded from earlier examples, is a completely new language in itself, which enables her to go where nobody went before; an extremely rare quality these days." /Adam Baruch, The Soundtrack of My Life / Polish Jazz/

About ELMA "Ad Rem": "This is indisputably one of the most important albums released on the Polish Jazz scene in the last decade and as far as vocal Jazz is concerned, also on a world scale. There is no other vocal Improvised Music of this intensity and innovative authority anywhere else at the moment, which makes this album simply a one of its kind. To say the truth, this album should be studied by every vocalist in the world, Jazz and otherwise, just to make them aware of what the human voice (and mind) is capable of." /Adam Baruch, The Soundtrack of My Life / Polish Jazz/

"ELMA is great - for me she is becoming the most significant free vocalist in this area in the world." /Maciej Lewenstein "Polish Jazz Recordings and Beyond", II edition, p. 511/

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