Artist Bio:
Singer/songwriter Marta Topferova first fell in love with the music of Latin America as a young girl growing up in the Czech capitol of Prague in the 1970s. A chance discovery of an album by Chilean folkloric ensemble Inti-Illimani set the six-year-old Topferova on a musical and personal odyssey that would one day take her to Spain, Cuba and New York City, where she lives and works today.
Topferova began her musical career at the age of eight, singing traditional and classical pieces with the Mládí choir of Prague, which toured internationally and participated in choral festivals in Germany and Finland in the 1980s. The choir's repertoire included works in many languages, including Czech, German, Latin, Russian, Finnish, French, and Spanish, which gave Topferova an early grounding in singing music outside of her native language. Her linguistic skills were further developed when she moved to the United States in 1987 with her family. That year she continued her development as a vocalist and performer by joining the Seattle Girl's Choir, and further developed as a soloist, specializing in the music of Spain and Latin America.
After majoring in music and dance in college, she travelled to Spain to study privately in the flamenco stronghold of Moron de la Frontera. There she honed her skills as an instrumentalist, taking up the guitar, hand percussion and her signature instrument, the four-stinged Latin guitar known as the cuatro. She returned briefly to Prauge, and travelled on to Cuba to absorb yet more musical lessons, before eventually settling in the Latin music Mecca of New York City in 1996.
In New York, Topferova began composing and performing in earnest, and honing her songcraft by collaborating with an impressive cast of musicians, including Lucia Pulido, Marta Gomez and Edmar Castaneda. Working as a soloist or with a series of small combos, Topferova's impressionistic, deeply personal songs drew from many different sources: the poetry of Pablo Neruda, the llaneros and tonadas of Venezuelan singer Simon Diaz, the Andean protest songs of Atahualpa Yupanqui, the classic boleros of Cuba and beyond. Her quiet, reflective songs combined with her husky, sultry voice and willowy stage presence to make her a fixture on New York's Latin music scene, and her recording career began to take off.
Topferova released Homage To Homeland, a self-produced collection of Czech, Moravian & Slovak Folk Songs in 2002, but soon turned to her true passion with the release of Sueño Verde, a collection of original Latin material sung in Spanish, the following year. In 2005, she returned with her stunning breakthrough record, La Marea, which boasted an impressive backing band that further explored Topferova's fascination with the music of Columbia. 2006's Flor Nocturna features a slightly re-arranged backing combo, with the Andean flute replacing the rollicking harp of La Marea, but Topferova's solid songwriting and sure, jazz-inflected phrasing remain the same. —Tom Pryor
