SPARKS OF YOUTH

„Somewhere in hours and hours of voice memos and video files, in stacks of scratched DVDs and VHSes piled in my brother’s closet, is the story of my life. Without any discussion or planning, my brother and I set about recording all twenty-four years of my life. He is eighteen years older than me, so he caught moments too early for me even to remember. He showed me a story of my youth that I wouldn’t otherwise have known: I am sliding down snow on my belly; I am playing accordion beside my father; I am minutes old, in my mother’s arms; I am seven, playing the piano; I am seventeen, playing the piano; my father is saying to me, “When I die, I will not die, I will always be with you, son, in your mind, just remember that,” and I am listening. The sound of my life is so much bigger than an orchestra. If I could use any sort of sound to make music, why would I limit myself to the sound of a diminished chord or a saxophone or a piano? Why not seek out the most powerful sound? What about the sound of my being born? Why write a song about my father welcoming me into the world when I can play a recording of my father welcoming me into the world? When I can score his voice like a scene in a documentary? When I can score the soundscape of my whole life using every sound available to me, why do anything else? I saw in the sum of those recordings a documentary about my life, and I scored it. I wrote songs to the scores, and then each song became like a scene from a movie, scenes I organized into a film that you hear. That film, or this album, is called The Wild Boar. This song, the first scene, is called Birth.“

Sapphire Adizes 

Sapphire Adizes, saxophonist, producer, and singer-songwriter, creates symphonic electronic tracks drawing on classical and jazz music and enriching it with experimental textures, ethereal vocals, and powerful saxophone and piano performances. He started composing at an early age – he wrote his first sonata at five and his first symphony at seventeen, while at eighteen his first jazz quartet piece was performed at the Lincoln Center. Adizes has expanded his career to join the Chainsmokers production duo, as well as collaborated with the singer Berhana on the EP album with over sixty million streams on Spotify. He has proven himself to be a diverse and subversive artist worthy of attention. His works pertain to the genre of “present music,” which aims to describe the dynamic production that lives at the intersection of institutionalized and non-institutionalized music. Adizes is also the founder of The Avocado Orchard studio where the margins of pop and classical music are explored. He released his debut album the Wild Boar in 2019.

Dr. Ichak Kalderon Adizes, with more than thirty courses over a four-decade career, has developed and refined a specific methodology that bears his name and enables corporations, governments, and other organizations to achieve exceptional results. The Leadership Excellence Journal named him one of the Top 30 Thought Leaders in the United States, while the Executive Excellence Journal put him on their list of the Top 30 Consultants in America. Dr. Adizes has received 18 honorary doctorates from Universities in ten countries. He is a Fellow of the International Academy of Management at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), visiting professor at Stanford and Tel Aviv, Dean of the Adizes Graduate School and is currently an academic advisor at the Academy of National Economy (Russia). He is founder and president of the Adizes Institute in Santa Barbara (California), an international consulting company that applies the Adizes Methodology and is ranked as one of the top ten consulting organizations in the United States. As the author of more than twenty books that have been translated into twenty-six languages, Dr. Adizes is known worldwide, and his book Corporate Lifecycles: How Organizations Grow and Die and What to Do about It was named one of the Ten Best Business Books by Library Journal. In his leisure time, he plays the accordion and enjoys meditating.

Nađa Janković, a guitar student at the Vida Matjan Secondary Music School in Kotor under Professor Srđan Bulatović, started playing at the age of nine. Since 2017, she has studied under Professor Stefan Schmidt in Friedberg (Germany). In 2013, Nađa Janković gave two benefit concerts in the Church of the Holy Spirit and St. Tryphon Chatedral in Kotor, and a recital in the Parliament of Montenegro. She has also performed in Belgrade, Florence, Rome, Tirana, Vienna, Stuttgart, the USA, and across the Balkan region. She has attended masterclasses of many renowned professors, including: Vera Ogrizović, Srđan Tošić, Darko Karajić, Jelica Mijanović, Thomas Offerman, Maroje Brčić, Carlo Marchione, Nikita Koshkin, Hubert Käppel, Radoš Malidžan, Costas Cotsiolis, Paolo Pegoraro, and Adriano del Sal, among others. Nađa Janković has won over thirty first prizes at international competitions, most notably at Dnevi Kitare (Slovenia), Julián Arcas (Spain), Giovani Musicisti (Italia,), the Youth Music Festival of Montenegro (Herceg Novi), Edouard Pamfil (Romania), the Zagreb Guitar Festival (Croatia), Guitar Art Festival (Serbia), Sarajevo International Guitar Festival, (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Alirio Díaz (Italy), Rust Guitar Festival (Austria), the Tenth Rago International Competition (Germany), and the National Classical Guitar Competition (Herceg Novi). In 2016, she became a member of the D'Addario Foundation.

Jacek Rogala, conductor, graduated in Composition and Conducting from the Music Academy in Wrocław (Poland).  In 2011, he received a PhD in performance at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw, as well as earned his Post-Doctoral Degree. In the 1990s, he served as Assistant Conductor at the Wrocław Opera and honed his conducting skills with the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. In 2001, Rogala was appointed Artistic Director of the Kielce Philharmonic Orchestra. He has to his credit numerous premieres and radio recordings of pieces by contemporary composers, and has performed at numerous prestigious venues across Poland, as well as in Albania, Argentina, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Northern Macedonia, Canada, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and Vietnam. Since 2013, he has conducted operas that were part of the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music production. Rogala also worked at the Music Department of Polish Radio in Wrocław, as Adviser for Music to the Minister of Culture and the Arts, and as Head of the Contemporary Music Department of Polish Radio 2 in Warsaw. After years of lecturing at the Institute of Music Education of the University of Kielce in Poland, Jacek Rogala was in 2016 appointed Associate Professor at the Music Academy in Łódź.