Jimek: Polish hip-hop is one of the best in Europe, and I won’t even apologize for saying that
Jimek Brings a Hip-Hop and Classical Trilogy Back to Warsaw
Poinews.com – Jimek - Radzimir Dębski, better known as Jimek, is preparing to reunite twelve rappers for a major Warsaw performance on 12 September 2026. The show in Bemowo arrives three months after the release of Études for Piano, Sampler, Orchestra and Friends, an album built around the same number of invited artists and a blend of rap, piano, sampling and orchestral writing.
The recurrence of twelve has become a striking feature of Dębski’s recent creative calendar. His latest record was released on 12 June 2026, while its live counterpart follows on 12 September. But the number also points back to 2012, when a breakthrough moment introduced him to a much wider international audience.
A Global Career With a Warsaw Centre
That year, Jimek won a remix competition for Beyoncé’s “End of Time,” finishing ahead of more than 3,000 entrants from 25 countries. He was in Berlin when Beyoncé called him personally with the news.
“I wanna congratulate you because you are the winner.”
The victory helped open the way to a growing run of work beyond Poland. His later appearances have included collaborations with Snoop Dogg at the 2025 BET Awards in Los Angeles and at Snoop’s Holiday Halftime Party in Minneapolis in December of the same year. He has also performed in countries including Japan, Germany and Kenya.
International recognition has not shifted his focus away from home. Instead, Poland remains the place where he is building the next stage of his work, despite the broad reach that symphonic and classical music can offer across borders.
“First of all, being at home, meaning going back to where you’re from, is something that’s become a need for me, and at the same time a way of searching for my own balance. If my own identity gets warped, that’s something dangerous for me. But at the same time it’s also an enormous pleasure and relief. Being yourself in Warsaw in the summer... There aren’t many places in the world I like more. And I don’t just mean Warsaw, but Poland in general.”
For Jimek, that attachment is not presented as a grand artistic theory alone. He describes it in practical, grounded terms: Warsaw and Poland offer a sense of balance, familiarity and personal identity that has become increasingly important.
Completing a Three-Part Musical Story
Études for Piano, Sampler, Orchestra and Friends, originally titled Etiudy na pianino, orkiestrę, sampler i kolegów, closes a larger hip-hop-and-classical sequence. The idea began with his exploration of American hip-hop and developed naturally into a desire to tell a Polish hip-hop story as well.
From the outset, he wanted the musicians involved to stand together on one stage. Achieving that was difficult: coordinating a large group of rappers, alongside the demands of a concert-scale orchestral project, created an obvious logistical challenge.
The first Bemowo concert in 2022 effectively tested whether such a gathering could work. A second edition followed in 2023 at Silesian Stadium with the National Symphony Orchestra of Polish Radio, raising the scale and the stakes. The upcoming chapter takes a different approach, bringing together artists he encountered during those earlier ventures and creating new songs with them from the ground up.
“This concert will be different in that, having had all these opportunities, we also recorded a new album — new tracks came out of it, which might give this whole story its best possible punchline.”
The new programme includes established material alongside fresh compositions. On the album, classical music functions as a connecting thread, while the piano occupies a central role. Yet the arrangements are not designed as a single fixed formula imposed on every guest. Each rapper is approached on individual terms.
Bedoes 2115’s Étude No. 3, for example, introduces guitar into the musical setting. That detail reflects Jimek’s broader interest in finding the right sound world for each collaborator rather than simply placing rap verses over orchestral backing.
Collaboration as a Creative Method
After years spent making music independently with a computer, Jimek sees collaboration as a way to disrupt familiar habits. The process becomes less about executing a predetermined plan and more about discovering how another artist’s presence can alter musical choices from the earliest stage.
“When you’ve spent 20 years sitting alone in a basement with a computer, at some point you also want to meet another human being and see what different creative decisions get made in someone else’s company.”
“So I went looking for exactly that — a situation with another person that changes our decision-making process right from the start, just to see where it would take these tracks.”
His dual allegiance to classical music and hip-hop has long shaped this work. The earlier album 2015, made with Miłosz “MIUOSH” Borycki from a concert at the National Symphony Orchestra of Polish Radio headquarters in Katowice, drew the attention of Deutsche Grammophon. Clips from that performance were shared by figures including Ashton Kutcher, Mobb Deep and Nicki Minaj.
For Jimek, Polish rap is not a secondary element in an orchestral experiment. It is a musical culture he rates highly and wants to place at the centre of a large-scale live project.
“This is completely biased, and I won’t even apologize for it. Polish hip-hop is one of the best in Europe.”
The Bemowo concert therefore represents more than an album launch. It is the latest expression of a career that has moved through global stages while returning repeatedly to Warsaw, where Jimek is bringing together orchestral ambition, local rap talent and a musical language shaped by both.
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