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Dani Gurgel

Brazilian scat singing

About Me

Dani Gurgel is a Brazilian singer and composer, whose precise scatting is a mix of the percussive and syncopated sounds of Brazil with the swaying curves of jazz: “A fantastic syllabary” (Badische Zeitung), and “scatted vocal adventures” (Jazzthetik). With her feet in Brazil and her body stretching throughout the world, Dani Gurgel makes that mixture the motto of her most recent releases. Reaching out of so many boxes, genres and stereotypes, Dani navigates with her rhythmic and syllabic Brasilities through jazz, rock, pop, electronica; either in English, Portuguese or lyricless compositions, mixing her experience as a big band saxophonist and rock band bassist with her original music. Dani has presented live to full houses in Japan, USA, China, Germany, Uruguay and Brazil.

Dani Gurgel’s music is “groovy, with fast prosody and mind-blowing improvisation” (Estado de SP). Dani began her musical rhapsody as a 3-year-old and grew up searching for her instrument, under the tutelage of her mother, the pianist, composer and arrangerDebora Gurgel. After 15 years of playing the bass in rock bands and the saxophone in renowned big bands, Dani Gurgel finally found her instrument: her voice. Her singing relates to her bass grooves, her saxophone articulations, and Brazilian percussion.

For the past two decades, Dani has released 6 albums of her own and 8 albums with “Dani & Debora Gurgel Quarteto”, which was nicknamed “DDG4” by their Japanese fans.They have been awarded the Brazilian Music Professionals and Japan’s Best Brazilian Album awards multiple times, as well as Digital Innovation Prize and Cultural Action Program, and toured extensively through Japan, South America, and Europe.

Gurgel has begun 2024 with a USA tour, in which her music was the theme of her residency an concert at Berklee College of Music, and with performances in New York, California and SXSW. She will follow to Europe and Japan for the second semester of the year, releasing her brand new Inside and DDG19 Big Band projects.