📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 24 October
Simeon Shterev, nicknamed Banana, played jazz flute in a country whose communist rulers had banned jazz after the war, and Bulgarian Wikipedia counts him among the best jazz flautists in the world. He would have turned 83 today.
What happened on this day
Simeon Shterev was born in Sofia on 24 October 1943. He graduated from the State Conservatory in Sofia in the flute class of Yordan Kindalov and began his career in 1967 with the quartet Focus. Bulgarian jazz histories list him in Jazz Focus 65, with Milcho Leviev on piano, Lyubomir Mitsov on double bass and Petar Slavov on percussion, a quartet Bulgarian Wikipedia calls the first Bulgarian jazz group with international recognition. The quartet took the critics' prize at the Montreux festival in Switzerland in 1967, and in 1968 it recorded an album in West Germany, beyond the Iron Curtain. English Wikipedia adds that, despite that success, the quartet's music was not in favour at home, where on occasion it was banned as "politically inappropriate".
That is the context to hold on to. Bulgarian Wikipedia says the communists who took power banned jazz after the war and repressed the people who played it, so a Bulgarian flautist winning a prize abroad was swimming against a strong current. Shterev also played in Orchestra Sofia, the combo formed in 1964 under the Sofia municipality, whose line-up lists him on flute as Banana, and he recorded for Bulgarian National Radio and Television, the country's equivalents of the BBC. Bulgarian Wikipedia says he played with Chick Corea, Maynard Ferguson and others and was placed near the top of annual international jazz polls; the history of Bulgarian jazz also singles out his combos, alongside Konstantin Nosov's, as playing in the best traditions of world jazz. From 1974 he taught flute in the pop and variety department of the State Conservatory. He also turns up on screen, as the flautist in the 1970 film Vesela antologiya and as Zhoro in the 1981 film Nashiyat Shoshkanini. He died on 26 March 2020, aged 76.
Why this matters for British expats
Shterev is a way into a corner of Bulgarian culture that visitors rarely meet: a jazz scene that won its first international recognition abroad while being unwelcome at home. The Corea and Ferguson names are ones a British jazz fan will know, and the Montreux prize and the West German album put Bulgarian players on the same map. If you meet an older Bulgarian who loves jazz, his name is worth knowing. No Shumen connection turns up in the record, and Sofia is a long way from us, so treat this one as cultural literacy rather than local pride; our Shumen guide is the better place for that.
Sources and further reading
This piece draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Simeon Shterev, read alongside the Bulgarian and English pages on the history of jazz in Bulgaria and the Bulgarian page on Orchestra Sofia. He has no English Wikipedia page and his Bulgarian page is brief, so much of the detail comes from those neighbouring pages.