Zemfira

Zemfira Talgatovna Ramazanova (Земфира Талгатовна Рамазанова, Земфира Тәлгать кызы Рамазанова; born 26 August 1976) is a Russian rock musician.

In the 7th grade, Zemfira split her time between music and basketball, becoming the captain of the Russian Girls’ Junior Basketball Team by 1990.

She began to lose interest in classical music, preferring instead to hang out with friends in the streets of Ufa and covering songs by Russian rock groups such as Kino, Nautilus Pompilius and Aquarium (who reached the peak of their popularity in the early 1990s).

At the urging of her mother, Zemfira continued with piano studies and graduated music school with honors.

In her last year of high school, basketball competed with school work, and the singer abandoned the sport in favour of music.

She took the entrance exams for the Ufa College of Fine Arts and was admitted into the second year, studying vocal performance.

During college, she performed jazz and rock and roll standards in various local bars and restaurants accompanied by her friend, saxophone player Vlad Kolchin.

She graduated with honors, and in 1996 took a job as a sound engineer at the Ufa subsidiary of the radio station "Europe Plus".

For the next couple of years Zemfira spent her days making advertisement recordings at the station and her nights on a computer, where she recorded the songs that would later become the singles "Why" (Почему), "Snow" (Снег), and "Weatherman" (Синоптик).

She has been performing since 1998 and has been popular in Russia and other former Soviet republics.

To date Zemfira has sold over 3 million records.

An ethnic Volga Tatar, she was born in a typical middle-class family – her mother is a doctor, and her father is a history teacher.

At the age of 4, Zemfira became interested in music and entered a music school the following year (where she studied piano performance and voice) and writing her first song when she was seven years old.

Her older brother Ramil introduced her to rock music, which became her real passion – she listened to Black Sabbath, Nazareth and Queen, learning to play the guitar.

In early 1998, Zemfira invited Rinat Akhmadiyev, Sergei Sozinov, Sergei Mirolyubov, and Vadim Solovyov to join Zemfira.

Their first professional gig took place on 19 June 1999 as part of a festival celebrating the anniversary of a local radio station Silver Rain Ufa.

Shortly after Zemfira sent out promo tapes to multiple Moscow producers, one of whom (Ilya Lagutenko from Mumiy Troll) was smitten with the material, and invited the band for some sessions in Moscow.

Recording and production work on the debut album took place at Mosfilm Moscow until 10 May 1999, when the debut was finally released.

The promotion of Zemfira prior to the release included heavy rotation of singles "AIDS" (СПИД), "Arrivederci" (Aриведерчи), and "Rockets" (Ракеты) as well as the video clips for those songs.

The band immediately went on tour, starting a tradition of celebrating their beginnings with a summer concert in Ufa while recording their second album Forgive Me My Love (Прости Меня Моя Любовь).

The group enjoyed popularity from the start, in part because of heavy rotation on radio and television, and in part because a female rocker is a fairly rare and unusual concept for the Russian music scene (which to this day is dominated by scantily-clad female pop singers).

After the release of PMML (Russian abbreviation for Forgive Me My Love) in March 2000, what can only be described as “Zemfiromania” swept the country.

"Searching" (Искала) and "Ripe" (Созрела) became instant hits, and the group was invited to headline the festival Maxidrom.

Constant touring wore down on the band, and after the release of 14 Weeks of Silence the band took a break.

In September 2004, Zemfira began studies towards a degree in Philosophy at Moscow State University, but after the first semester she took a sabbatical and did not resume her studies thereafter.

On 16 October on the MTV Russia Awards show the singer performed "We Are the Champions" together with the rock group Queen.

The fourth studio album, Vendetta, which consists of 15 tracks, was released on 1 March 2005.

The recording became a result of Zemfira's collaboration with several musicians: Igor Vdovin, Korney, Vlad Kreymer, Yuri Tsaler and Oleg Pungin.

Primarily the album was going to be named "Oil", but the title was changed few days before the official release.

"Vendetta" got many positive reviews.

On 14 February 2007, a collection of music videos Zemfira.DVD was released.

It contains all the singer's clips, except AIDS and ''Traffic.

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In May and June 2007, Zemfira embarked on a short concert tour titled 'Déjà Vu', with performances held in smaller venues (clubs and small theatres).

The tour culminated with a Moscow performance at the Green Theatre which was filmed by Renata Litvinova.

The tour program focused on stylish remakes of the singer's top hits, often reworked in styles such as jazz, ska, bossa nova, and blues.

A new album, Thank You (Спасибо), was released at the beginning of October.

It is described by Zemfira herself as 'very positive', in contrast to what she terms the 'restlessness' of Vendetta.

The concert movie Green Theatre in Zemfira, which mixes Zemfira's monologues with selected songs shot during her live performance at the open air show in Moscow, was released in several Russian digital movie theatres on 21 February 2008.

Later it was also released on DVD and Blu-ray.