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Jazz FM Celebrates Its Birthday With the Premiere of the Album "Leni Valkova is the Queen of Jazz"

The radio celebrates 19 years on the air with the album of the first professional jazz singer in Bulgaria

Jazz FM celebrates 19 years on air with the premiere of the first album produced by the radio of the first professional jazz singer in Bulgaria - Leni Valkova. For the first time on the air listeners can hear the 14 songs from "Leni Valkova is the Queen of Jazz". "We considered it our duty to record this album. When you have such a person in front of you, who at the age of 93 is the personification of music, you can't miss the moment", said the programming director of Jazz FM and executive producer of the album Svetoslav Nikolov in "This morning" on bTV. With this album, the radio applied for entry in the Guinness Book of Records for a new category "Album with new material of the world's oldest artist", as well as to improve the record in the category "Debut album of the oldest artist".

The album includes 10 newly recorded and 4 songs from more than 70 years ago, thus tracing all the important moments of Lenny's creative path, depicting key stages in the development of jazz in our country. There are four songs specially written for her by the Patriarch of Bulgarian Music - Yosif Tsankov, world hits with her humorous Bulgarian lyrics about love, jazz standards, opera aria and even jazz classics with improvisations by Lenny in a modern club arrangement and remix by DJ Mr. Moon - Mladen Dimitrov, host of the Jazztronica show on Jazz FM. The author of the arrangements for quartet and quintet is the grandson of Yosif Tsankov - Vili Stoyanov. They include some of the brightest names on our contemporary jazz scene - Vili Stoyanov (trombone), Kalin Zhechev (piano), Dimitar Blagoev (guitar), Daniele Febbo (bass) and Nikolay Danev (drums). The guest soloist is the trumpet player Misho Yosifov.

The album is a natural continuation of the project of the radio, "Jazz Stories", which aims to preserve the history of Bulgarian jazz and to promote it in all its richness through the authentic testimonies of the musicians who developed the genre in our country. The process of recording the album took less than a year and ended on August 28, and it reaches the audience through the radio's website, popular streaming platforms and social networks, as well as on physical media. With the production of this album Jazz FM radio reaffirms its mission for 19 years to promote the genre, to increase knowledge about it, to facilitate access to culture, to support Bulgarian artists in reaching their projects to the public.

Details about the production can be found at jazzfm.bg.