Eleonora Strino: Today’s Italian Jazz Guitar Master

In this exclusive video interview, Jazz Guitar Today’s Bob Bakert talks to Italian jazz guitarist, Eleonora Strino.

Elenora Strino is a wonderful artist with a beautiful flair for combining creativity and sensitivity with a virtuosos technical mastery. Her compositions, singing, and guitar playing are overflowing with emotion and connectedness.  One of my tenants of performing is to communicate your soul to the world around you.  Elenora does that with such abundance it’s hard to find the right words to describe.  One must listen and watch her as she delivers her gifts.  She is the epitome of a “Jazz Guitarist Today”

Please enjoy our feature on Eleonora Strino – full video above.

Eleonora began playing guitar as a teenager, and from the first time she heard Jim Hall playing with Bill Evans she knew she wanted to be a jazz guitarist. She studied at the conservatory in Naples, then at the Conservatorium Van Amsterdam. She began her professional career as first guitar in the orchestra of Italian composer Roberto De Simone. 

Eleonora is also a composer/arranger and won a prize for the best composition at the international competition “Jhonny Radacanu” (Romania). In addition to being JGT’s featured artist of the month, Eleonora is working on her first album as a songwriter, and she will be touring North America with International Guitar Night in early 2022.

Watch the full video interview above, as well as additional questions she answered for Jazz Guitar Today (below).

JGT: When you come to the US will you plan a different show/set … is there a perceived difference in the audiences among your European colleagues?

The North America tour is the “International Guitar Night” , this is the description of the tour: International Guitar Night is the world’s premier touring guitar festival, each show bringing together the most interesting and innovative acoustic guitarists to exchange musical ideas in a public concert setting. For each tour, IGN founder Brian Gore brings together a new cast of guitar luminaries for special evenings of solos, duets, and quartets that highlight the dexterity and diversity within the world of acoustic guitar. Brian founded IGN in 1995 as a forum for the world’s finest guitarists/composers to play their latest original songs and share musical ideas and talent with their peers. So I will play some guitar solo and some music with the other musicians.

JGT: When putting together a performance for different areas/countries in the EU etc. does the music/setlist change?  Will you play the same set in Germany, Italy, UK?

The German tour is another tour called Nacht De Gitarren but the ensemble is the same: we are four guitarists, each one coming from a different place in the world put together by Brian Gore, this incredible American manager. So this tour will be the same as the North’s one. But when I played not in Italy but in the rest of Europe, it happens that I change my repertoire ‘cause they love really many Italian songs, so sometimes I included some beautiful Italian songs. I have another tour planned in Belgium with the great Greg Cohen but we don’t know when we could do it due to covid. Last year when we did it we played some great music by Duke Ellington and Monk and we included two or three Italian songs, I sang them. 

Eleonora Strino Performs Miles Davis “Flamenco Sketches”

JGT: In your teaching, do you find that different cultures want you to stress different aspects of the music?

Actually not so much, I teach all over the world, I had and have some students from China, Mexico, many in North America (California, North Carolina, Texas, etc..), some others from Africa or India and in Europe, but most of them want to learn bebop jazz guitar. Sometimes it happens that I have few students who come from rock music and they want to learn some jazz stuff to implement their language. This shows me how music, as well as jazz, is a universal language.

Eleonora Strino plays, ‘Historia de un Amor’ during Italy’s Covid-19 Quarantine.

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Eleonora Strino plays, ‘You Must Believe in Spring’ (B Evans) during Italy’s Covid-19 Quarantine.

For more on Eleonora Strino.