Susana Santos Silva

Susana Santos Silva is one of the world’s foremost improvising trumpeters, honing a musical approach that undercuts categories and knits scenes together across Europe and beyond. Highly in demand, recent years have seen Silva touring near constantly with the likes of Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, Joëlle Léandre, Mat Maneri, Paul Lovens, Hamid Drake, Mats Gustafsson, the late Catherine Christer Hennix, and others besides. Alongside these prolific collaborations, Silva’s innovative solo work reveals her to be both a unique instrumental voice and a profound musical thinker.

A virtuoso and  tireless experimenter, Silva easily slides between instrumental approaches, from jagged free improvisation to elegant melodic lines to surveys of the trumpet’s expressive edges. On her latest solo album, All The Birds And A Telephone Ringing, Silva takes inspiration from the likes John Cage and Lester Bowie to explore the relationship between humans and nature, recording her gurgling horn underwater and blending it with field recordings of train stations and harbors.  On another recent release—Grow, recorded as a duo with longstanding collaborator pianist Kaja Draksler—she displays the extraordinary range of her extended techniques and how they can be used to break with standard divisions between soloist and accompanist. Loyal to the generative constraints of her horn and yet never content to stay within them, Silva's extensive collaborations and focused solo work continually stretch musical horizons—both hers and our own.