KÁLMÁN BALOGH, cimbalom artist was born in 1959 in Miskolc, Hungary. 

He became acquainted with the cimbalom in the age of 11, already. His first teacher was his uncle, Elemér Balogh. First he graduated in 1980 of cimbalom-solfeggio-singing Master degree and later in 2013 again of folk cimbalom MA degree. Since 2007 he is the active teacher of the cimbalom within the Folk Music Dept. in the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest, Hungary. 

He has been playing concerts wide across the globe from Lisboa to New York not only with folk musicians, in symphonic and jazz orchestras but also with contemporary bands, as well. He’s been playing on more than a hundred music albums released. Some of his many awards are the Zoltán Kodály Award, the György Martin Award, and the Prima Primissima Award. In 2025 he was honoured with the highest-level Hungarian State Award, the Kossuth Prize in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the fields of culture and arts. 

In the early years of his music career he was interested in Hungarian folk music and worked with the best among the Hungarian folk bands. Later on, he started to go in for the world of classical music and jazz. In 1994 he recorded the Hungarian Dances by Brahms with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, he went on tour with the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, the Miami Philharmonic Orchestra and played in the Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra. In Hungary he played with Budapest Ragtime Band and the world-famous jazz pianist, Béla Szakcsi Lakatos, as well. The evidence of being a versatile artist is that he also played in a movie film directed by Francis Ford Coppola. His own band, the Gipsy Cimbalom Band still has been playing great concerts all over the world ever since he founded it in 1993. In Cimbalomduo with the other cimbalom master, Miklós Lukács they interpret the fusion of world music and jazz together.