Marie Kruttli

Born in the small Swiss-French village of Saint-Imier, Marie Kruttli has played piano since she was six years old and trained herself first in classical music and then later in jazz. Her entire life has always been immersed in music. She was born into a family of musicians and she studied at the University of Lausanne, where she got a Bachelor of Music in Jazz, specializing in jazz piano at the age of 20. She continued her studies in Lucerne, the German part of Switzerland to get her Master of Music in performance, with a concentration in jazz performance. After her studies and some time in New York, Marie moved to Berlin and went on to composing her diverse projects, from solo to septets. She worked mostly with a trio of her namesake, the Marie Kruttli trio, over the years. They performed at numerous venues and festivals all over Europe, as well as being recognized with awards such as the ZKB Jazz Prize in 2016.

Marie Kruttli admires the musical work of FKA Twigs, Björk, Craig Taborn, and Petter Eldh, to name a few (in which the latter two worked on her upcoming project), as well as the work of visual artists like Basquiat, Monet, and Doris Salcedo. This variety of taste and teachings in her life shows up in her work as well, exploring electronic music more in the last five years. She juggles these sounds outside of her solo piano work, leading a jazz trio, having a duet with saxophonist Ganesh Geymeier, and more. She follows up her solo piano album, Transparence, with an EP called Vif, which is a marriage of all of these influences and the manifestation of Dragon Life, her electronic duo where she sings and produces with drummer Fabian Rösch. She explores introspective subjects on love, life, nature, time and her own struggles using synthesizers to create an array of expressive, distorted, and spaced-out textures for this jazzy, experimental dream pop electronic project.