Alexandrina Simeon: Writing the Next Chapter

Alexandrina Simeon presents her latest album, QUIET GIRL, at the Harz Classix Festival this November, and she’s already writing the next chapter behind it — new material she says pulls back toward the Bulgarian-jazz blend that has run through her catalogue since the beginning.

Simeon was born in Varna, Bulgaria, and has lived in Augsburg, Germany, for many years. She describes herself as at home between the two countries, and says jazz is the music her heart desires, the foundation underneath her cultural roots. That combination — Balkan identity filtered through a jazz vocabulary built in Germany — has shaped every record she’s made, and it’s given her a musical identity that doesn’t sit neatly inside either tradition on its own.

Her debut, Roots & Influence, came out on Mons Records in 2011 with the Alexandrina Simeon Quintet, laying down the Balkan-jazz territory she’s returned to ever since. The second album, OCEAN TALES, followed in 2018, weaving Bulgarian language, older melodies, and folkloric rhythms into a jazz setting, with trumpeter Benny Brown appearing as a guest. QUIET GIRL, released on Laika Records in May 2025, moves in a different direction entirely. “With the album ‘QUIET GIRL’ we wanted to underline the calm and contemplative side of jazz literature,” Simeon told me. The record ranges across formations from duo to sextet, with Brown back on trumpet and flugelhorn, and it puts Simeon’s voice somewhere she hadn’t taken it before. “I also wanted listeners to experience my voice in a new context — different from anything I recorded before,” she said.

The repertoire backs that up. “On this album you will find songs like ‘My Favorite Things’ as well as the song ‘The Peacocks’ — a piece very rarely recorded by a singer,” she said. You can hear that track on Jazz In Europe’s Jazz Vocals Spotify playlist. The title track goes further still: “On the main tune ‘Quiet Girl,’ only sung with syllables,” a choice that turns the album’s namesake into something closer to a wordless meditation than a conventional vocal feature. The current band behind the project is Daniel Mark Eberhard on piano, Stephan Holstein on clarinet and tenor sax, Andi Bauer on bass, Tom Steppich on drums, and Brown on trumpet and flugelhorn.

That lineup takes the album to the Harz Classix Festival on 6 November 2026. “Together with the quintet — and with Benny Brown, our long-time colleague and friend — we will present our latest album ‘QUIET GIRL’ at the Harz Classix Festival,” Simeon said. Beyond that date, she’s looking at festival appearances in 2027 across Bulgaria and Eastern Europe, including Bansko and Varna, as well as dates in Germany and Austria — plans still taking shape rather than confirmed bookings. For now, her attention stays close to home: the quintet she already has, and the new material she’s writing for it, rather than any outside projects.

That new writing is where the more interesting story sits. “At the moment I’m spending time with writing down new songs and compositions for my quintet I had in mind the last two years,” she said, and the direction sounds closer to OCEAN TALES than to the standards on QUIET GIRL. “I still love blending my Bulgarian roots with jazz, and the result often becomes a kind of world-jazz sound — much like what you can hear on our second album ‘OCEAN TALES,'” she said. It suggests a return to her own compositional voice after an album spent almost entirely inside other people’s songs. There’s also a Christmas project recorded this year, a mix of well-known classics and traditional chorales, which she hopes to bring to audiences in December 2026 — a smaller undertaking, but one more sign of how much she currently has in motion.

There’s been a striking amount of strong music coming out of the Balkans lately, and the pull between jazz vocabulary and Balkan tradition keeps producing some of the more interesting records in the wider European scene. Simeon has already shown she can do the standards chapter well. What she does with the next one, built from her own compositions and her own roots, is worth watching for.

Find out more about Alexandrina here at her website.

Jazz Vocals Spotify Playlist

A curated selection of vocal jazz that pushes beyond the expected, chosen by the Jazz In Europe team. Nothing standard here — just inventive voices, bold ideas, and music that helps move the genre forward. Follow the playlist to keep up with the kind of records we believe deserve attention and to stay ahead of the curve.