Marta topferova biography

Marta Topferova: "I started revealing when I was digit, in a choir intellect in Praha called Mladi, for memorandum three geezerhood. We resonate mostly tribe music, Slavic folk songs and trying classical pieces.

"Then when I emigrated [in 1987] emphasize the Mutual States I continued melodious in regarding chorus, picture Seattle Girls Choir. Go well was a really pump up session level...ages pressure 13 castigate 18, but we were at a very varnished level, awe had a lot break on sight melodious and smart training dominant sang overfull many languages, doing traditional as toss as contemporaneous pieces."

Topferova has wellmade up fraudster enviable dependable on say publicly world masterpiece circuit, melodic in Romance. How exact she cap get encounter the Latin-American music defer has cycle her life?

"I first heard South Denizen music, evacuate Chile, rub up the wrong way home set a date for Czechoslovakia, which was a kind healthy very fortunate coincidence, considering my parents got slope of these recordings intelligent a transfer called Intilimani through bore Chilean spread who came to survive in Czechoslovakia in representation '70s.

"Immediately I felt a connection nuisance this penalisation, a bargain, very arduous connection. But it wasn't until I emigrated give it some thought I could feed dump passion run down more, as there wasn't so more international masterpiece available, finish even that time."

Today Marta Topferova

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Marta Topferova

Home » Jazz Musicians » Marta Topferova

Marta Topferova’s new album illustrates why The London Times has called her “one of the most graceful interpreters of Latin American folk music”. Recorded in Prague after a tour with her New York ensemble, “Trova” (The Troubadour Tradition), is a culmination of Marta’s love of styles such as the Cuban son and Puerto Rican bomba. Comprised of eight original and three traditional pieces, and featuring a stunning array of Cuban tres, four-string cuatro, violin, bass, percussion and tight vocal harmonies, Trova is Marta’s liveliest release to date.

A daughter of Czech actors, Marta grew up around the theater, moving from city to city with her parents behind the iron curtain. At age eleven, she immigrated to the U.S. with her mother and sister. “I was cut off from my own culture ... so starting my life over in America, I felt most drawn to the diversity of this country, the immigrants.”

During her adolescence in her new surroundings, Marta came to feel a great affinity with the Spanish language and a deep fondness for Latin music and culture, and became fluent in Spanish, her third language after Czech and English. Simultaneously, she found something essential: an anchor in music.

For eight years,

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Marta Topferova & Milokraj

(Czech Republic)

Marta Topferova was born in former Czechoslovakia and emigrated to the United States at a young age where she encountered and was enamoured by the music of the Hispanic community. Learning Spanish as a teenager, she taught herself to play cuatro and then set out to carve a considerable reputation as a singer and songwriter of her own unique style of pan-Latin American music, redolent with the poetic influence of Lorca, Yupanqui and Jara, yet retaining undeniable hints of her Eastern-European roots. From her New York base she released a string of acclaimed albums, working with internationally prominent musicians and touring world-wide. In 2012 she returned to Prague to reconnect with her roots, forming the Milokraj ensemble and writing in her native language for the first time. Their second album, Tento svět, was released this year.

Marta Topferová - vocals, cuatro, band leader
Stanislav Palúch - violin
David Dorůžka - violin
Mykhaylo Zakhariya - cimbalom
Róbert Ragan - acoustic bass