Portuguese singer and composer Sofia Ribeiro immediately attracts the listener to her unique musical universe. With a solid background in jazz studies, a deep connection to Portuguese Fado, and endless hours of listening to Brazilian legendary musicians, her artistry challenges the boundaries of music labels. Well-known for her strong, emotional and uplifting performances – where she enthusiastically tells stories about the songs and often invites the audience to sing – Sofia Ribeiro has been captivating listeners all over the world with her warm and powerful sound for almost two decades. Her music is “an engaging mixture of styles ranging from jazz to Fado˝ (Jazz History Online, USA).
With 11 albums as a leader plus several albums as a collaborator, Sofia has toured worldwide in more than 20 countries, and her 2012 album “Ar” got the Révélation award from the magazine Jazzman (Paris, France). She has been awarded in international vocal competitions on three occasions: Voicingers – 1st prize (Poland, 2008), the Crest Jazz Vocal – 1st prize (France, 2010), and the Brussels Young Jazz Singers competition – 2nd prize (Belgium, 2005), and in 2018 she was a TEDx guest speaker at CESA University (Colombia). She was an artist in residence at the Carnegie Hall in New York for three years, and has collaborated with multiple Grammy awarded artists such as Arooj Aftab, Marcelo Woloski, Marta Gómez and Michael League.
Thousands of people have attended her vocal retreats and improvisation workshops, and she is currently a faculty member at Circlesongs (USA) along ten-time Grammy award winner Bobby McFerrin and several other renowned singers from all over the world.
Sofia has a Jazz Performance degree from ESMAE (Portugal) and a Masters Degree from the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, and she held one-year exchange programs at ESMUC (Barcelona), Berklee College of Music (Boston) and CNSMD (Paris) during her studies. In 2002 she began studying vocal improvisation with the american singer and improviser Rhiannon, and in 2014 she completed Rhiannon’s “All the way In” advanced program – a three week long master class in Holland, Hawaii and New York – and has been selected to co-pilot her 2017 course.
“Her voice makes miracles” Cuadernos de Jazz, Spain