Simeon Shterev

In 1965 Simeon Shterev founded the quartet Jazz Focus 65 with Milcho Leviev, Peter Slavov and Luben Mitsov — the group that carried Bulgarian jazz to Montreux, where it took the critics' prize in 1967, and into a West German studio in 1968 for the first modern Bulgarian jazz album recorded abroad. Born in Sofia in 1943, he came to the flute after early piano lessons and studied in the class of Yordan Kindalov at the State Academy of Music; the classical schooling never left the jazz playing, nor the jazz the classical. He was for many years a soloist of the Bulgarian National Radio's orchestra, played alongside Chick Corea, Maynard Ferguson and Kenny Wheeler, and toured Europe, the Americas, Japan and India. From 1974 he taught flute in the pop and jazz department of the National Academy of Music, and his students went on into both the jazz ensembles and the symphony orchestras of the country; he also composed for chamber forces, for the theatre and for film. The Ministry of Culture gave him its Golden Age award in 2013. He took part in the anniversary concert for the actor Rashko Mladenov at Bulgaria Hall on 1 October 2017, an evening that put classical soloists, jazz musicians, actors and singers on a single programme. He died in 2020. Albert Mangelsdorff belongs with the musicians he played beside, and for many years he worked with the Big Band of Bulgarian National Radio, leaving hundreds of recordings for radio and television along with albums of his own.