Eldar was born to Emil and Tatiana Djangirov in Kyrgyzstan in 1987, when it was still a part of the Soviet Union. An engineer who has always been a passionate jazz fan, Emil began to notice that his five-year-old son - who began playing the piano when he was three - could repeat what was played on recordings, note for note.
Eldar progressed quickly when he began serious private study with his father and his mother, a musicologist who taught music history at the college in the city of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan's capital. He was nine when he played at a jazz festival in the Russian city of Novosibirsk in the summer of 1996, New York jazz enthusiast and patron Charles McWhorter heard that performance and decided to bring Eldar to the United States.
McWhorter obtained for him a scholarship to the summer camp at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, where, by the age of 12, the boy had joined the High School Jazz Big Band. Not only did Eldar spend the summer sessions of 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 at Interlochen, he and his parents moved to the United States in 1998, beginning their new life together in Kansas City.
After hearing Eldar perform there for the Jazz Musician Foundation, Michael Greene, then the head of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences, invited him to play on the 2000 Grammy' Awards telecast.
Eldar went on to win the top prize at the 2001 Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival and, the following year, first place in the Peter Nero Piano Competition. In the fall of 2004, Eldar was selected by Wynton Marsalis to appear at the gala opening of Jazz at Lincoln Center's new Rose Hall. |
