Being a collaborative vocal improviser and circlesong leader encompasses my passion for music and community and brings together all the strands of my musical history and spirit. I feel blessed to have been practising these forms with amazing singers around the world and to be leading circlesongs and teaching others vocal improvisation for the last 10 years. 

I’ve been a keen vocal improviser since my beginnings as a jazz singer back in Buenos Aires in the 1990’s. I was fascinated by scat and studied Ella Fitzgerald, Jon Hendricks, Mark Murphy, Sheila Jordan and others. I saw Bobby McFerrin live in Buenos Aires in the 90’s and was blown away by how simply and seamlessly he included the audience in his performance. 

After moving to the UK, and without making any conscious connection with Bobby’s work, I began using circlesongs and experimenting with them intuitively since 2001 as a workshop leader. Every session I would make up songs using invented language and interlocking parts as a warmup for community choirs, and also sometimes would create more complex musical structures ‘in the moment’ as they enabled me to share the Latin American flavour and grooves without asking people to memorise long songs in Spanish.  

But it was only after having the privilege of meeting and working with Bobby McFerrin and other great vocal improvisers and teachers such as Rhiannon in 2011 that I realised circlesinging and collaborative vocal improvisation (CVI) were recognised as an artform and started to practice them, acquiring new skills and eventually began to offer circlesinging and CVI workshops.  Also, most crucially, I  realised that I was part of a growing worldwide community of vocal improvisers and circlesingers, and feel grateful for being part of it. 

Since then, I was fortunate to have encountered, learned from and collaborated with Rhiannon, Joey Blake, Roger Treece, Albert Hera and other great vocal improvisers and teachers. I have led and been part of many circlesinging courses and retreats in the UK and across Europe, mostly as a facilitator but also as a host and a participant, and I am excited at the potential for ongoing learning, growing and sharing.

In 2020 I launched a collaborative vocal improvisation project: Anthropos - Songs of Humanity alongside five other outstanding vocalists: Sylvia Schmidt, Kate Smith, Marcia Willis, Jaka Skapin and Uran Apak. It started with a question: did early humans sing before they could speak? This has led us to explore many ways into spontaneous, leaderless collective song without the use of language. 

I was also part of Remembering, a six-voice fully collaboratively improvised song based album.

If you are interested in my Singing for Health work, you can find more information about it here.