Luciana Morelli

Basel based, Argentinian singer/composer Luciana Morelli (*1990) draws on her Argentinian roots, jazz and improvised music to tell meaningful stories through music and lyrics.

Her last album ‘Words of the Wind’ (habitable records, 2024) sees the vocalist set poems by Emily Brontë, Alejandra Pizarnik, Anne Carson and Robin Myers to music across a series of eclectic ensembles.
The record follows her 2021 release ‘Lo abismal, el agua’ (ears&eyes records, 2021) - a musical reflection of her journey from her home in Argentina to her new world in Switzerland, met by international acclaim from radio and publications across Europe, the UK, the USA and Argentina.

Driven by her inherently curious nature as well a desire to stimulate her listeners’ imaginations, Morelli’s creative process stemmed from an exploration of several contrasting compositional techniques in dialogue with a selection of her favorite female poets across the ages.

Delving into themes of nature, love, death, loneliness, identity, madness, desire, family, and memory, each poem revealed a universe of its own, inviting the composer to experiment with timbres and instrumentation. With influences ranging from Argentinian music, jazz, folk and sound poetry, Morelli’s imaginative arrangements see her expressive voice guide the listener through carefully curated worlds of raw instrumental and vocal textures. From a typical jazz quintet, to voice accompanied by string quartet, to solo viola and vocal ensemble, each piece blends storytelling, rich harmony, and a distinct palette of musical colors in a wide-reaching and dynamic picture of the human experience.

Morelli celebrated her release with an album tour, with concerts in Argentina, Uruguay, Germany, Switzerland and France, featuring her songs specially re-arranged for her quintet ‘Luciana Morelli Group’ with Philipp Hillebrand (clarinets), Mauricio Silva Orendain (piano), Snejana Prodanova (double bass) and Paulo Almeida (drums).

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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.
 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.