There is a specific kind of music education that does not happen in a classroom. In Samara, it happened on a cassette of Al Jarreau’s Breakin’ Away, brought home by a jazz trombonist returning from an international tour, and played by his daughter until the tape physically wore out.
That daughter is Kristina Aglinz, now a Los Angeles-based vocalist, songwriter and classical concert pianist, and she does not describe those hours as a hobby. She memorized the melodies, the phrasing and the vocal improvisations. “That was my real musical education,” she says.
The circumstances made the recording more valuable than it would have been anywhere else. Her father spent roughly 35 years performing with a big band, and his tours abroad gave him access to American jazz, soul and funk records that were difficult to obtain in the Soviet Union. Her mother taught piano. Between them, the household ran on music that arrived from two very different directions.
Four decades of stage work later, that inheritance has finally produced a record of her own. “Heaven Is Shining Bright” is out now, the first original single Aglinz has released under her own name and the opening move toward a debut album expected in early 2027.
The formal half of her training ran parallel to the cassette. Aglinz entered music school at five and eventually earned a master’s degree in piano performance, a level of technique that later let her play classical repertoire professionally while working simultaneously as a jazz vocalist, songwriter and bandleader. Asked how she managed the two, she does not accept the premise of the question. “It was all in one,” she says. “Everything all in one.”
The single itself was written by Aglinz with lyrics by Anatoly Berlin, and it carries the belief that has increasingly organized her work: that love, hope and beauty function as practical sources of strength rather than decoration. “I believe God is love,” she says. “That belief is at the heart of my life and my music.”
One song is a narrow window onto a project still more than a year from release, and Aglinz is not asking anyone to judge the album on it. What it does establish is provenance. The Jarreau tape, the trombone tours, the conservatory hours and the eventual move to Los Angeles are all upstream of this release, and the record arriving in 2027 will presumably keep drawing on all of them.
A video for the single is out alongside it, on the YouTube channel that also documents much of her live work. Further album news will surface at kristinaaglinz.com.
