Amina Figarova

Education

Amina began studying music as a child, beginning learning the piano, and expanding into musical composition and arrangement as she matured. Figarova attended the Baku Conservatory, where she studied to be a classical concert pianist while a young girl in Azerbaijan. This was followed by a course of study in jazz performance at the Rotterdam Conservatory before entering and completing her studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. She has toured extensively, developing a tight-knit ensemble that, despite inevitable personnel changes, has attained a distinctive and inimitable voice by concentrating on all-original repertoire for almost 18 years. During that period, having collaborated with musicians residing in both the U.S. and Europe and having built up a circuit of welcoming venues, the Amina Figarova Sextet has triumphed at the main stage of the Newport Jazz Festival, been invited repeatedly to New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, won critical and audience acclaim in Chicago, Detroit, Paris, Amsterdam — and of course New York. Amina's pieces strike a perfect tone, employing genuinely beautiful harmonizations, to capture fleeting thoughts that accompany those precious moments when the puzzling jostle of daily existence comes into unexpected but deeply satisfying sync.

Figarova's 12th album, titled Twelve was her debut release on the renowned independent German label In + Out. The album celebrates jazz as an international music and New York City as a locale where "jazz gypsies" may feel most at home. Twelve is suffused with the heightened expectations, sense of adventure and fresh perceptions, as well as the confidence, creative energies and nuanced fulfilment that artists gain from being in the right place at the right time.

Amina Figarova is married to flautist Bart Platteau, who is part of her Amina Figarova Sextet. The couple live in New York City.