Nicolas Simion

Nicolas Simion was the professional name of Nicolae Simion, a Romanian jazz saxophonist and composer who spent more than forty years turning the wedding songs and dance rhythms of Transylvania into a personal jazz language. He was born on 15 June 1959 in Dumbrăvița, a village in Brașov County that he later called the source of almost every note he wrote. A primary-school teacher urged his parents to send him to music school. He studied at the arts lyceum in Brașov and then at the Bucharest Conservatory, graduating in 1983. He later studied conducting with Constantin Bugeanu and composition with Nicolae Coman. On saxophone, bass clarinet, taragot and flute he was largely self-taught as a jazz improviser.

His first brush with jazz did not convert him. In an interview he recalled hearing Louis Armstrong at about twelve and thinking that this music was not for him. The turn came seven years later, during military service, when he met Lon Fieraru, a gifted amateur musician who could pick up a clarinet, saxophone or guitar, turn on the radio, and improvise without formal keys. Simion said that if Fieraru could do that, perhaps he could too. At nineteen he bought his first saxophone.

From 1981 to 1988 he worked in Romania. In 1985 he founded the band Opus 4, with musicians of his generation including the pianist Mircea Tiberian. Some interviews date the band to 1984. Radio România Cultural dates the founding to 1985. Either way, Opus 4 became one of the most active jazz groups in late communist Romania, and Simion began writing original music while he was still inside that scene. He also played with symphony orchestras in Brașov, Târgu Mureș, Bacău, Sibiu and Ploiești, and with the Romanian Radio orchestra in Bucharest.

A failed or blocked visa for the Jazz Jamboree in Warsaw convinced him that the career he wanted could not stay inside Romania. In October 1988 he left, quietly, and asked for political asylum in Austria. He reached Vienna in early 1989. There he entered the West European jazz circuit and played with Art Farmer, Leo Wright, Idris Muhammad, Jim Pepper, Harry Sokal and Christian Muthspiel. Later partners included Tomasz Stańko, Lee Konitz, Charlie Mariano, Archie Shepp, Duško Gojković, Ed Schuller and Lonnie Plaxico. The partnership that still defines the early German years is with the pianist Mal Waldron. From 1991 Simion recorded for the German label TUTU. After the death of saxophonist Jim Pepper, Waldron needed a saxophone voice for his quartet. Producer Peter Wießmüller brought the two together. They also played chess. On 19 December 1995 they recorded the duo album Art of the Duo: The Big Rochade at the Loft in Cologne, released by TUTU in 1998. The title is a chess term, and the music works the same way: two players shifting position and leaving each other room.

Folk music was never a costume for him. He told interviewers that Dumbrăvița was in every note, and that the melodies he had heard as a child at weddings and feasts belonged to his musical language rather than sitting on top of it. He played more of this ethno-jazz abroad than at home, and he said Romanian audiences sometimes did not savour the folklore they heard every day. Jazz, he argued, was a language with syntax and grammar. A culture could speak it in its own accent. A text carried on his site said of him that when European jazz remembers its own roots, it can find its own identity, and described a bandleader whose range ran from the aggressive to the meditative, from the lyrical to the hot.

Since 1998 he lived in Cologne. He taught saxophone once a week at a music school near the city and said teaching was something a musician eventually had to do, a way of leaving experience for other people. In 2004 he founded 7Dreams Records. The label was not only a home for his own albums. It was an archive. He reissued and documented Romanian jazz figures who might otherwise have stayed in drawers: Jancy Körössy, Richard Oschanitzky and Johnny Răducanu. He played Oschanitzky's Double Concerto for piano, tenor saxophone, symphony orchestra and big band with the pianist Florian Weber. His own scores include Canzoniere Sacrale, Hommage à Richard Oschanitzky and Ecouri de la Rășinari. Radio România Cultural puts his discography above fifty albums and calls him one of the most prolific Romanian jazz musicians, and one of the main voices of Romanian jazz on the international stage.

Honours followed the work. The Austrian Ministry of Culture awarded him the Theodor Körner Förderpreis. AGERPRES dates that prize to 1995. In 2015 he received the WDR Jazz Prize in the improvisation category. The Union of Composers and Musicologists of Romania honoured him, including a 2014 prize for the piece Jocul copiilor. AGERPRES, announcing his death, also named collaborations with the same international circle and described a style that kept jazz, Romanian tradition, folklore and contemporary language in one conversation.

He was back in his home country in the last weeks of August 2026. A friend writing on the Organissimo forum said they had talked about music, eaten together, and exchanged messages two days before the news broke. On the evening of Saturday 29 August he played in Brașov, a short distance from Dumbrăvița. Hours later he was dead, at 67. On the morning of 30 August, Radio România Cultural published the family's words: the good heart of their beloved Nicolas Simion had stopped beating, after his last concert in Brașov. The funeral was announced for Dumbrăvița. The ceremony date was still to be given. No detailed medical cause was published. German Wikipedia lists the death as 29 August 2026 in Brașov. The family announcement carried on 30 August, and TVR's memorial note dating his death to 30 August after the Brașov concert, are the basis for the date used here.

Asked whether he could imagine a world without jazz, he answered that it would be like a world without poetry. That sentence is as close as his public voice comes to a last instruction. The recordings, the label, and the Transylvanian tunes inside the improvisation are the rest.

This page is for Nicolas Simion, the Romanian jazz saxophonist born Nicolae Simion in Dumbrăvița. It is not a page for George Simion, the Romanian politician. It is not a page for Eugen Simion, the literary critic. It is not a page for Nicola Simionato.