Video on Žofie Kašparová

Dear friends! The long anticipated album release has come! IMPRESSIONS, the first album of
Žofie Kašparová & The Peacock Tree is now available on bandcamp:

About

Žofie Kašparová is a flute player, bass clarinet player, composer and music teacher from Prague, Czech Republic. She has been living in Gothenburg (Sweden) for nearly five years and nowadays has one foot in each city.

Being educated in many different genres (western classical music, jazz, Swedish traditional music, oriental music, Balkan music and other) makes her a versatile musician adaptable in different contexts.

Žofie’s own composed music is a contemplative world of dreams influenced by western minimalism, oriental rhythms and Scandinavian folk music. But often it is an exciting improvisational flight to the unknown.

Žofie has been performing on many stages and festivals in Sweden, Czech Republic and all around Europe with different projects – Peacock Tree, GAO, Bosphorus Ensemble, 13th Dimension, Etno Histeria Umeuropa Caravan, Transatlantic Chilean Folk Ensemble, Soliloqui, Unreel, Tamaral,… as well as teaching childern and adults and leading world music workshops.

In 2020 she released her first album of her own compositions called Impressions with the band Peacock Tree.

In 2017 her band 13th Dimension won in open call of Czech Music Crossroads, the biggest world music showcase and conference in Czech Republic.

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Žofie was born in Prague (Czech Republic) and she started with playing classical music as a child. However classical music has never been “the genre of her heart” (even if it remains a remarkable influence in her playing and composition style). The longing for making music “out of the box”, without borders and musts brought her to study at the World Music programme at the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg (Sweden), where she graduated in 2017. There she developed as an independent artist and collected many experiences and knowledge that became her huge inspiration for composition – Nordic folk music and Middle Eastern music.

Before her move to Sweden she also studied classical and jazz flute at Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory in Prague and musicology at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague.

Peacock Tree

3 winds and a double bass,
meditative jazz fusion.

“Their whole being was intensely present in the music, the sound, the space. Insisting and demanding full attention. Vulnerable and intimate. Honest and strong! The music complex in its simplicity, different layer that became a whole. Remember I thought: Wow! I’m listening to very different live music and rarely get really touched. But this being, you helped conjure up the physical and spiritual space – it did something to me.” – Frank Rudolph, a listener

Music inspired by deep forests in the autumn, the city in the middle of the night, pictures mirrored on the lake surface, silence of a winter morning, landscape behind the train window and behind the window of your own eyes…

Žofie Kašparová (CZ) -flute, bass clarinet
Robin Backgård (SE) – trumpet
Robin Johansson (SE) – soprano and tenor sax, clarinet
Erik Bengtsson (SE) – double bass

Peacock Tree is a project of the Czech flute player, bass clarinet player and composer Žofie Kašparová who has lived in Gothenburg, Sweden for five years. When she started this band, she decided, that for the band she will choose the people regardless of instruments. People, who she loves to play and work with. That created this unusual setting and also a fun challenge for the composition and arrangement.

In her music Žofie makes a fusion of the many genres and styles that she has been through – from western classical music, through jazz, minimalism, Arabic rhythms to Scandinavian traditional music.

Žofiiny miniatury (solo)

Žofie’s solo project, where she works with flute, bass clarinet, voice and a loop pedal. In this world of dreams and fantasies she’s floating with meditative improvisations and let herself be inspired of Swedish folk music and western classical music.

This project is a result of Žofie’s move to Sweden in 2014. The creative process is a great way to spend the long, dark and rainy winter evenings in Gothenburg and a big help to overcome them.
It is also an exploration of the possibilities of solo flute, curiosity for new sounds, soundscapes and harmonies.

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