MuLaKuŻ is a music project implemented by the Jewish Culture Festival Society at the Festival’s official coffeehouse, the Cheder Cafe. The concept behind the laboratory is the radical breaking with popular and wrong belief that Jewish music is only the klezmer music. The laboratory present new Jewish music as the living organic tissue reacting to contemporary trends and music genres, vivid and fertile, rather than being a klezmer museum piece. MuLaKuŻ is an intersection point for those artists on the fringes whose activity in essence revolves around the crossing of boundaries.

On the Cheder Cafe stage, we have so far presented 20 groups within the framework of the MuLaKuż programme. Every performance has been a concert premiere presenting the new developing Jewish scene in Poland. The Cheder stage has hosted appearances both by debutants and mature musicians from the avant-garde music scene: Cukunft, Mikołaj Trzaska Solo, Ircha Quartet, Sztetl Quartet, Tsiguns Turbo Balkan Groove, Shofar, Banda Dzeta, Drom, Mazolewski Bund Band, Plazmatikon, Gaamera, Projekt Tutaj, Raphael Roginski, Maćko Korba and Cinemanual, Zooplan and Nefesh.

The fresh new perspective on Jewish music presented by the artists participating in the MuLaKuŻ project is a combination of profound knowledge of the tradition and classical canons and simultaneous creative inspiration, at times marked by heresy. But There’s no progress without heresy.