Gábor Bolla
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Gábor Bolla was born on 18 October 1988 in Hungary to a Sinti and Roma family. He learned to play the clarinet freely and virtuously at an early age and won the Hungarian music school competition at the age of 12. Through his music-loving parents, he soon came to jazz and switched to the saxophone. A child prodigy career followed: After only six months of practising on the tenor saxophone, Bolla was discovered and promoted by Robert Maloschik of Hungarian Public Radio.Soon he was touring with the jazz greats of his home country and was selected for the Getxo Jazz Festival in Bilbao, Spain. At 15, he became the only teenager and Hungarian to date to be nominated for the semi-finals of the prestigious saxophone competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival. After that, many doors opened. He was invited as a guest soloist for the world famous Vienna Art Orchestra and played with US stars such as Johnny Griffin, David Murray, Kirk Lightsey as well as Gregory Hutchinson. In the following years he won further prizes, such as the Hans Koller Prize as "Talent of the Year". After Bolla's celebrated concert in Germany in April 2011, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praised the young saxophonist as an "improviser of overwhelming independence".