Veracruz, MX · latin-folk · singer-songwriter

Silvana Estrada

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Veracruz songwriter with a cuatro and one of the most arresting voices in Latin folk — jazz-schooled, heartbreak-fluent.

Silvana Estrada was born in Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1997, to parents who worked as luthiers building stringed instruments. She began performing in bars around her hometown as a child, and at sixteen entered a jazz program at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, where she trained as a singer before turning to her own songwriting.

Unable to connect with the piano while composing, Estrada started writing on a Venezuelan cuatro borrowed from her father, and the four-string instrument has anchored her music since. Her songs draw on the son jarocho tradition of her home region alongside jazz phrasing, sung in Spanish over spare arrangements built around her contralto voice.

She met the American guitarist Charlie Hunter at a jazz seminar, and the two recorded the album Lo Sagrado at her parents' cabin in Coatepec, released in 2017. A second collaboration, featuring drummer Carter McLean, followed in 2018, the same year she released the EP Primeras Canciones and toured Mexico alongside Natalia Lafourcade, Mon Laferte and Julieta Venegas.

In 2020 Estrada signed to Glassnote Records, becoming the label's first Latin American artist. Her solo debut, Marchita, produced by Gustavo Guerrero, was released in 2022 to critical acclaim and toured widely in the United States. That year she shared the Latin Grammy Award for Best New Artist with Angela Alvarez.

Her singing draws on the American jazz vocalists Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan, and on Latin American folk singers including Chavela Vargas, Violeta Parra, Mercedes Sosa and Toña la Negra.

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