Hilda Kazasyan

Jazz, film music and popular song are the three territories Hilda Kazasyan has worked. She was born in Sofia into a musical household: her father, Vili Kazasyan, was a pianist, composer and arranger who led the Bulgarian National Radio Big Band for close to four decades and stood behind the Golden Orpheus festival. Her partners have included the drummer and composer Hristo Yotsov, the pianists Angel Zaberski and Zhivko Petrov, and the bassist Dimitar Karamfilov. She works readily with large forces, appearing with symphony orchestras and big bands across Bulgaria, and has built concert programmes around film music and around her father's catalogue — the latter assembled from archive research and prepared with the Radio Big Band and the Studio B vocal group he founded. Born in 1970, she trained as a percussionist at the Lyubomir Pipkov music school and went on to the conservatory. The trumpeter Mihail Yosifov is another of her regular partners, and she has sat on television talent-show juries, among them Kato dve kapki voda from its first season in 2013. After the Sofia Music Academy she specialised in percussion in Saluzzo, Italy.