Luciana Morelli

Luciana Morelli (1990) is an Argentinian singer, performer and composer based in Basel, Switzerland. Her music draws on a rich palette of influences from Argentinian music, jazz, sound poetry and free improvisation.

She leads her own project as a singer and composer and recently released her second album as a bandleader “Lo abismal, el agua” (ears&eyes records, 2021), in which she tells the story of her journey to Switzerland, not only with lyrics, but also with her wordless vocals and arrangements, building a bridge between her Argentinian musical roots and jazz.
The album received very good reviews in magazines and blogs such as Jazz N More, SKJazz, among others, and was chosen "Album of the Week" by NQ Jazz (UK) and by the radio program "Jazz am Sunntig" (Radio RaBe, CH). It was also part of the October selection of Club del Disco (Argentina) and has been broadcasted on Radio Swiss Jazz and on international radio programs such as Jazzkultura (Poland), WDR (Germany), NDR (Hamburg, Germany) and Radio Nacional (Argentina), among others.
In 2022-23 Luciana and her band went on tour and played at various venues in Argentina,
Switzerland, France (Festival Jazz á la Citè, Paris) and Germany, receiving a very good reception from the public and the press.
"Words of the wind" is the name of her new album, in which poems by Anne Carson, Robin Myers, Emily Brontë and Alejandra Pizarnik find their musical expression in the singer's voice and in her compositions and arrangements for different instrumentations and ensembles.

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She studied a MA in Jazz Performance and a MA in Composition at the Jazzcampus of the Musik Akademie Basel, with Lisette Spinnler, Guillermo Klein and Michel Roth, and improvisation with Alfred Zimmerlin and Andrea Neumann.
Her musical tastes range from jazz to folk, including improvised and experimental music. She is a very curious artist who likes to explore different artistic disciplines. She has a degree in Pedagogy of Arts from the University of Buenos Aires. She worked as a teacher in art schools and wrote about contemporary Argentine theater and cinema in specialized magazines and websites. She also worked in theater as an actress and as a composer, being her last work the music for Suyay (Pilar Ruiz, Buenos Aires 2020-2022).

Some of her most important musical projects were Luciana Morelli quintet (2012-2015), with which she recorded her first album "Mandala" of jazz standards and own compositions and participated in the cycle Música en Bares Notables and the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Jazz 2015, and Jazz at the movies (2015-2019), an audiovisual show of jazz and cinema that had a weekly cycle at Bebop Club and participated in the prestigious cycle Jazzología at the CC General San Martín and the cycle Música en Bares Notables 2018.

Since 2020, she leads a new group in which she explores her Argentine roots and her connection with jazz and improvised music, integrated by Philipp Hillebrand (Switzerland) on clarinet and bass clarinet, Mauricio Silva Orendain (Mexico) on piano, Senejana Prodanova (Bulgary) on double bass and Paulo Almeida (Brazil) on drums.

Her latest album "Lo abismal, el agua", is an album of her own compositions specially arranged for this band. The artist sought inspiration in poems, travels, photographs, dreams and her own experience related to migration, where the topic of the journey is present as an experience of transformation and learning. The name of the album refers to a hexagram from the "I-Ching, the book of mutations", a concept that crosses her work and inspired her to write one of the songs. The album was released on May 2021 through Ears and Eyes records with a special limited physical edition designed by Ignacio Morelli, with photographs and artwork by Jazmín Nogueira, and was selected "Album of the week" by NQ Jazz (UK) and by the Swiss Radio show "Jazz am Sunntig" (Radio RaBe). Also included in the "October selection" by El club del Disco (Argentina), and broadcasted in Radio Swiss Jazz and in international radio shows like "The Jaz Hole" (NY, USA, hosted by the Grammy awarded Linus Wyrsch), "Coco Jazz" (Canada) and radios like Jazzkultura (Poland), WDR (Germany), NDR (Hamburg, Germany) and Radio Nacional (Argentina).