Theodosii Spassov

The kaval is a shepherd's flute of eight holes and no keys, and Theodosii Spassov has spent a career establishing how much music will pass through it. Born on 4 March 1961, he trained at the folk music school in Kotel and at the Academy of Music and Dance in Plovdiv, and arrived at a manner of playing — village tradition inflected by jazz, fusion and the concert hall — that Newsweek in 1995 credited with having invented a genre. He has been a soloist of Bulgarian National Radio, played in Riverdance between 1998 and 2001, and directed the Philip Koutev National Folklore Ensemble. His collaborators run from Ennio Morricone and Wynton Marsalis to Dave Liebman and Billy Cobham, and he has appeared on some twenty discs, four of them his own. He writes for film — Granitza of 1993 among the scores — and the National Film Centre named him its best composer of film music in 2006; UNESCO made him an Artist for Peace in 2015. From 2003 he appeared in Sofia with the Sofia Philharmonic, on programmes he shared with Ina Kancheva, Petar Petrov, Ludmil Angelov and Lyubomir Denev. He graduated from the Kotel music school in kaval and from the Plovdiv Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts in 1986, worked out a style of his own in which traditional folklore is interwoven with jazz, classical and pop music, and has played with well-known Bulgarian and foreign performers and formations — Jazz Line, the Trio Bulgarka, Dave Liebman, Dimitrios Vasilakis, Andy Sheppard, Yıldız İbrahimova, Ennio Morricone, Jamey Haddad, Vesselin Nikolov, Albert Mangelsdorff, Marc Johnson, Ivo Papazov and Trilok Gurtu; he was born in Isperih on 4 March 1961. With Kristjan Järvi and the guitarists Vlatko Stefanovski and Miroslav Tadić he made the Balkan Fever project, taken up by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Monaco Philharmonic, the MDR orchestra in Leipzig, the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Macedonian Philharmonic. The honours include a prize from the International Academy of Arts in Paris in 1996, the Apollo Toxophoros statuette in 2001, the Golden Century award of the Ministry of Culture in 2011, the Order of Cyril and Methodius in 2013, an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts in Plovdiv in 2014, the Crystal Lyre in 2015 and the Ikar prize in 2022.