ZELA MARGOSSIAN

Zela Margossian is a jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader of Armenian descent based in Australia. As evidenced by her quintet's 2018 debut Transition, she writes texturally rich, strikingly melodic original music balances Armenia's rhythms and folk traditions in "ad hoc songs," with post-bop, Middle Eastern modalities, and even modern classical music. A mainstay on festival stages from Beirut to the Sydney Opera House, she signed to Ropeadope for 2021's The Road. Margossian was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1980. She began playing piano at three. Between 1988 and 1999 she studied Piano Performance at Parsegh Ganatchian Hamazkaine Musical College. Her childhood and adolescence in Beirut were marked by regional conflict and political instability, themes she would later explore musically. After graduating university with a degree in English Literature, she left Lebanon to study classical piano at the Komitas Conservatorium in Yerevan, Armenia. Her vocational path in classical music was altered when read more...