Ars Nova Workshop presents Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński, performing his transformative interpretations of the music of John Coltrane and the words of Langston Hughes at Solar Myth on Wednesday, February 18, 2026.

A guitarist, composer, improviser, culture animator and musicologist, Raphael Rogiński was educated in jazz and classical music while also studying musical theory and ethnomusicology. Since the beginning of his creative work he has focused primarily on improvisation rooted in blues and jazz, as well as on ethnic and folk music – the combination of those two paths defining his style.

On his 2015 album Plays John Coltrane & Langston Hughes – reissued and expanded with new material in 2024 – Rogiński’s singular reimaginings of the work of these two iconic artists draw on the guitarist’s unique and immediately recognizable style, rooted in jazz, blues and global folk idioms. Approaching Coltrane’s singular, spirited music with a perspective formed outside the jazz tradition, Rogiński slowed the songs down, extracting polyphonic tensions and striving for an intimacy and mysticism that transcends genre. In addition, Rogiński’s long-standing interest in mystical experiences across cultures brought him to the poems of Langston Hughes, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, and one of the innovators of jazz poetry.

Pitchfork called the album, “a perfect encapsulation of [Rogiński’s] mystical, spiritual energies. Each track springs from the same well of nameless sadness, channeling an ancient, ancestral current of longing.”