AMINA FIGAROVA
Genres: Post Bop, Post-Fusion Contemporary, Classic Fusion, African Fusion • Azerbaijan

Amina Figarova was born in 1966 in a most unlikely place for a jazz musician, Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan on the Russian side of the Iron Curtain. Her parents encouraged her at the tender age of two years old to pursue playing the piano. As a classically trained musician, Figarova was influenced by such usual masters as Johann Sebastian Bach, Sergey Rachmaninov, and Claude Debussy, and played scores of Alexander Scriabin. But her mother and father loved jazz, and she was fortunate to be able to hear albums by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, and Ella Fitzgerald, items that were in short supply in Azerbaijan. She attended the Baku Conservatory, but moved to jazz studies in the Netherlands at the Rotterdam Conservatory, and eventually to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. These academic institutions fortified her skills as a player, but also inspired her read more...