Camilla Battaglia

“The relationship between voice, music and instruments in jazz is complex, especially when vocals aren’t used to sing a song and deliver lyrics, but instead dialectically committed to create intersections, tensions, enchantments, counterpoint, harmonies and disharmonies. When you come across Camilla Battaglia, all these thoughts may appear superfluous. The artistic result in her personal research as a musician and composer it’s just immediately intelligible and tangible.” (Mario Grella for Off Topic Magazine) Camilla is a singer, improviser and composer born in Italy, who has always loved to play the piano and has been “fooling around” electronics and sound-design since 2015. Growing up in a musical family, her research as a musician has always been looking for a blend between her memories, her discoveries and experiences and the future unknown. A deep passion for sound and textures, a constant push beyond her comfort-zone as a singer and improviser, an ever-lasting love for literature and poetry, an obsession for composing through the combination of letters and numbers to imagine instruments dialoguing between each other in dense counterpoints and an intense respect for what Music represents in the world apart from anyone making or listening to it are the essentials of her work. Camilla’s next release ‘ELEkTRA’ will be release on November 22nd through the American label Ropeadope. Her main projects are ‘Perpetual Possibility’ solo performance for vocals and live electronics (Hout Records 2022), her quartet ‘CÀLÓR’ (Parco della Musica Records) with Julius Windisch, Nick Dunston and Lukas Akintaya, ‘ARSA’ with Simone Graziano and the participation of Julian Sartorius and HYLE with Scili Alma Napolitano and Giulia Barba. Camilla also released as a composer and band-leader ‘Tomorrow-2more Rows of Tomorrows’ (Dodicilune 2016) with the participation of Roberto Cecchetto and David Binney and ‘EMIT: Rotator Tenet’ (Dodicilune 2018) with the participation of Ambrose Akinmusire. Born in 1990 in Milan. Always wanted to be a writer and a journalist with an intense passion for philosophy, until at 19 years old she agreed to spend one day in a studio recording to sing some tunes, which turned into ‘JOYSPRING Renato Sellani Trio introducing Camilla Battaglia’ (Philology Jazz Records 2010). That day everything changed and Camilla decided she would want to record and make music for the rest of her life. Singing and improvising have always been part of her language as long as she can remember. After attending philosophy at Università Statale of Milan, she graduated at Siena Jazz University in 2016 in jazz vocals and then attended the European Jazz Master programme through which she travelled, lived and discovered different musical communities in Copenhagen (RMC), Berlin (JIB) and Amsterdam (CvA). Her album ‘Tomorrow-2more Rows of Tomorrows’ was chosen between the best 100 albums in 2016 by italian Jazz IT magazine; her album ‘EMIT: Rotator Tenet’ received a ‘three-and-a-half’ stars review on Downbeat Magazine in 2018 and it was selected to be part of ‘Nuova Generazione Jazz’ in Italy promoting the project at the European Jazz Conference in 2019 and her solo project ‘Perpetual Possibility’ was selected for the ‘PUSH2021’ programme by Italia Music Export to enhance the circulation of italian projects abroad. Played as bandleader and soloist around Europe, making various collaborations in very different musical environments. Camilla believes music is one. Songs, sonnets, melodies, intervals, harmony, no-harmony, rhythm (which exists even when it’s not explicitly there), improvised, written, graphical, traditional, experimental, main-stream, music will always have a meaning if it comes from a place of honesty.