Amina Figarova at

Amina Figarova is without doubt one of the most productive jazz composers and talented jazz piano players from Europe. Amina started playing piano and composing at a very early age. She studied as a classical concert pianist at the Baku Conservatory, jazz performance at the Rotterdam Conservatory and the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Amina made her recording debut with Attraction in 1994, and was accepted into the prestigious Thelonious Monk Jazz Colony in Aspen, Colorado in 1998.

With her husband multi-flutist Bart Platteau central to the three horn frontline Ms. Figarova arranges for her sextet, she plays compelling, artful and heartfelt changes on the urbane, bluesy lyricism originally developed by the likes of Miles Davis, Horace Silver, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, et al. Though the recipient of rigorous Russian musical education in the classics, Amina has come to identify her sound with these master mainstream-progressives of recent jazz decades after having explored aspects of the avant garde (in September Suite, her shocked and sad response to terrorists attacks on American soil) and multi-keyboard fusion-oriented funk (on Another Me)....

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Amina Figarova is without doubt one of the most productive jazz composers and talented jazz piano players from Europe. Amina started playing piano and composing at a very early age. She studied as a classical concert pianist at the Baku Conservatory, jazz performance at the Rotterdam Conservatory and the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Amina made her recording debut with Attraction in 1994, and was accepted into the prestigious Thelonious Monk Jazz Colony in Aspen, Colorado in 1998.

With her husband multi-flutist Bart Platteau central to the three horn frontline Ms. Figarova arranges for her sextet, she plays compelling, artful and heartfelt changes on the urbane, bluesy lyricism originally developed by the likes of Miles Davis, Horace Silver, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, et al. Though the recipient of rigorous Russian musical education in the classics, Amina has come to identify her sound with these master mainstream-progressives of recent jazz decades after having explored aspects of the avant garde (in September Suite, her shocked and sad response to terrorists attacks on American soil) and multi-keyboard fusion-oriented funk (on Another Me).

On the CD Above the Clouds (Munich Records) one of the most cosmopolitan and accomplished artists in jazz today proves that the music is a natural not a national language. Amina Figarova, the globe-trotting Azerbaijan-born, Rotterdam-based composer-pianist-bandleader with more than a dozen recordings to her credit has created a new album of original songs that refresh the classic post-bop idiom established by labels such as Blue Note, Prestige and Impulse! during the 1950s and 1960s. Far from derivative or concept-conscious, though, Above the Clouds unfolds as a personal, vividly colored, confidently-propelled contemporary soundtrack, satisfying in and of itself.

Amina is stylistically wide-ranging, unwilling to be pinned down, but most of her compositions on Above the Clouds continue in the direction she set forth on Come Escape With Me, a 2005 release which reached top 10 status on the Jazzweek radio airplay charts (two tracks preview her next project, a suite for nonet). Throughout the entire album Amina's measured, graceful, touching pianism and cooly-controlled ensemble writing demonstrate commitment and ease with a jazz idiom.

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