A new album of young Armenian jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan will be released next month, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Hamasyan is a 23-year-old jazz pianist who has already become popular though he had not signed to a major label before. In 2006 he won the Thelonious Monk Jazz Piano competition, meanwhile his debut took place at the International Jazz Festival in Yerevan when he was only 11 years old.

Since then Tigran Hamasyan has performed in clubs and participated in the European festivals where he met with great musicians such as Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea.

He claims that Armenian folk music is very close to him. “I learned how to improvise through jazz music . . . For me it’s the most incredible improvised music that exists. But the vocabulary of it doesn’t necessarily have to be the Western vocabulary. For me, that’s where Armenian folk music comes in, that vocabulary,” the Los Angeles Times quotes the musician.