Bio

Harpist, composer, improviser and teacher. The contemporary jazz of Marcella Carboni is made out of pure sound and electronics, scripture and improvisation. Above all the traditional educational steps, like the graduation in classical harp, the additional academic degree in jazz and the study of composition, it is really the artistic cooperation that leads her way. Well known names in the European jazz scene, like Bruno Tommaso, Rosario Giuliani and Enrico Intra wanted to work with her, often composing especially for her instrument or entrusting to her some of their own pages, like it happened with the giant of jazz, Enrico Pieranunzi. If, on the one side she has been influenced by mainstream jazz, on the other the engagement with Butch Morris, the Sonic Genome of Anthony Braxton or the collective improvisation laboratory of Franco Ferguson have contributed to form a part of her soul as a radical improviser. Her electroacoustic harp is often in the center of events in television, radio and in the web. Live and on disc she has been a part of a variety of ensembles from duo to orchestra. Despite her longest-running projects are the duos with female voices (one with Francesca Corrias and the other with Elisabetta Antonini), with the harmonicist Max De Aloe and with the saxophonist Simone Alessandrini. Marcella Carboni, in the front-line of confirming the harp as an instrument fit to be fully inserted in the jazz scene, since more than a decade is engaged in vivid didactic and promotional activities, introducing the jazz harp into the conservatories of South and Middle Europe and in the Italian harp schools. Her teachings culminated in 2018 in the publication of a musical manual JAZZ HARP – A Practical Method with the United States Vanderbilt Music Company, specialized in music for harp.

Discography

Discography as sideman

Soundtracks (composition and recording)