ABOUT US
BANDBIOGRAPHY
The FAYA trio exists since November 2018, with its first concerts in Lisbon clubs and several subsequent tours to Italy and Germany, the musicians’ home countries. In September 2019, the newly formed ensemble achieved a breakthrough as winners of the CREOLE WORLD MUSIC AWARD in Berlin. With the award in their luggage, the trio was able to secure further appearances at major festivals and concert series such as the Göttinger Kultursommer, the Niederrhein Musikfestival (DE), the Outono Quente festival (PT) and the Effetto Venezia festival (IT). However, the situation changed drastically in March 2020. Most of the planned tours were canceled or postponed due to the pandemic. The trio was only able to play a few concerts during this phase, including at the online festival “Worldwide Wo*men in Concert”, in a line-up with renowned artists such as Badi Assad, Loli Molina, La Perla, Surma, as well as newcomer bands from the UNESCO Cities of Music, who supported the project. In November 2021, founding member Chiara Pellegrini had to move to Italy for private and pandemic reasons, which called into question whether the ensemble could continue to exist. A wonderful replacement was found for an already planned tour of Germany in summer 2022: the Spanish composer, singer and guitarist Mili Vizcaíno. The tour also took the trio to the Elbphilharmonie, where the musicians took part in the production “O Canto da Baleia” and met their future agent Christoph Hauptmann at a concert at the Golbekhaus. Since then, the ensemble has been constantly working on their own compositions and the release of a debut EP planned for winter 2024, preceded by a single + video clip release and a release tour in Portugal/Spain and Germany.
MILI VIZCAÍNO JAÉN (vocals, guitar/guitalele, cajón, composition) a native of Spain, began her musical career at the Badajoz Conservatory and studied jazz singing in Évora and Lisbon, with the renowned jazz singer Maria João. She taught western music at the University of Chennai and completed two semesters of music studies in Indian classical music there. Inspired by these influences, she made Carnatic music the subject of her master’s thesis and founded the ensemble AAMA, for which she wrote compositions in a fusion of jazz and Indian music. She has also completed postgraduate studies in music education for children (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) as well as Estill Voice Craft Level I +II (with Helen Rowson and Paul Farrington) and the body alphabet by Zygmunt Molik (Grotowski) with Jorge Parente. She is currently doing a PhD in Musicology at the University of Évora on the topic of music and ecology.
KRISTINA VAN DE SAND (violin, viola, vocals, percussion) was born in Mönchengladbach (Germany). She studied Applied Cultural Sciences at the University of Hildesheim, Jazz Violin at the HMTM Hannover and the ESMAE in Porto and Elementary Music Education with Jule Greiner (UdK Berlin). Before and during her studies, she traveled to Ecuador, Peru and Brazil and has since become passionate about South American folklore. With the string quartet Quartett PLUS 1 she realized interdisciplinary concert formats for Herbstgold Festival, Sanssouci Musikfestspiele, Kölner Philharmonie and Konzerthaus Berlin and worked in several theatre productions as a stage musician. Actually, she is living in Lisbon, working as a music teacher at Deutsche Schule Lissabon and performing with FAYA and MOSAICOLLECTIVE, throughout Europe
Elena La Conte (vocals, flute, asalato, composition) born in Italy and living in Lisbon since 2017, Elena is a flutist, singer and music pedagogue. Before moving to Portugal, she lived for over 10 years in Paris, where she studied Anthropology of music at the University Vincennes Saint-Denis, Pedagogy of Music at the University Paris 11 and Jazz Studies at the Conservatoire de Villejuif and Montreuil. During this time, she worked as a music teacher in schools and conservatories and spent a year in Berlin to conduct research for her bachelor thesis on the music from the Turkish community in the German capital. Passionate also about Brazilian music, she studied Choro and Brazilian folklore in Paris and Brazil. Since living in Lisbon, she continued her profession as a music teacher in different schools . As a musician, she currently performs with the trio Faya, and the vocal improvisation group Circular (https://www.circularvoices.com) and as part of the project Mosaicollective, which creates music performances for children, such as the audio-visual concert “O canto da Baleia (https://mosaicollective.com). She performs as flutist with the Cristina Clara’s project and with the brazilian singer song writer Cleison Monteiro.