Gary Gwadera

Gary Gwadera is the name of a solo project of a Polish drummer, improviser and composer Piotr Gwadera. As an anthropologist – dreamer from Łódź, he keeps finding his own language on the Polish contemporary music scene. Gwadera is a versatile artist: he freely moves between traditional, experimental and improvisational music, as well as club sounds, consistently exploring the relationships between rhythm, movement and cultural memory.

In his groundbreaking album “Far, far in Chicago. Footberk Suite” (2024), Gwadera juxtaposes the triple metre of Polish oberek with the syncopated sound of Chicago footwork, thus creating the authorial concept of “footberk”. This project led to a collaboration with a footwork style pioneer RP Boo, with whom Gary Gwadera performed at Unsound Osaka, Kraków, and New York (2025). He received prizes at the Polish Folk Music Competition ‘New Tradition’ 2024, and was named the artist of the SHAPE+ platform.

Presented as part of the Polish footwork spotlight with support from the Polish Institute in Stockholm.