Singer and composer Manuela Sánchez Goubert was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and moved to New York when she was nine years old.
Music was already part of her family life. Her mother is an ethnomusicologist who works with indigenous communities in Colombia, and Manuela grew up around the traditional music she was studying. But it was only after leaving Colombia and eventually discovering jazz in New York that Manuela began to understand what that music might mean for her own identity as an artist.
She told me, “My mom, because she's an ethnomusicologist, she made sure that our whole childhood was filled with music and traditional music from Colombia… When she was out doing field work, I would be the one, the little girl holding the recorder.”
After moving to New York, Manuela attended LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts. And like a lot of young musicians trying to figure out where they belong, for a while she moved away from the music she had grown up with.
“When I went to LaGuardia, it was kind of funny because I kind of strayed away from all of that tradition and learned what was more familiar there, which was jazz, which was fantastic,” she remembered.
She fell in love with jazz. But toward the end of high school, in a composition class, another question started to emerge.
She explained, “I started, you know, asking myself what makes me unique, like, what makes me different. I'm not just a jazz singer. I'm not just, you know, somebody who does Hispanic music. And so I started combining these two worlds — music that I knew from my mom and from my country and culture, with jazz.”
At Berklee College of Music, where she studied at the Global Jazz Institute under pianist Danilo Pérez, that idea expanded. She met musicians from across Latin America and started hearing connections between Colombian folklore and music from Peru, Brazil, Chile and elsewhere.
And as so often happens, leaving Colombia had also allowed her to hear Colombian music differently. I asked her whether she thought she would have connected so deeply with those traditions if she had never left.
“I absolutely needed that distance,” she said without hesitation.
“I really think that the distance was something that totally changed my way of looking at my roots… It was this exploration of what is gonna make me stand out in the industry and what makes me different that really led me to study the folklore from afar,” she went on.
And there was another benefit to that distance. In New York and at Berklee, Manuela found herself in communities of musicians from all over Latin America; people who recognized pieces of their own traditions in hers.
Manuela remembered: “We all sort of started sharing our own cultures and finding that there was a huge common ground, obviously, of the rhythms, of the tradition, of the culture…”
Jazz became the meeting place.
“Jazz was really just a language, a platform, a way to connect with people who weren't Spanish speakers, who weren't playing this music,” she told me. “There's just this great common ground. “There's so many similarities within jazz and these cultures… the call and response in the folklore is the same as improvisation in the jazz world. It just really felt like a common ground, and it was a platform for me to then take off and realize what can I do with these two worlds, which are pretty much one.”
That idea is at the center of the music Manuela Sánchez Goubert is making now. She sees these traditions as something living, something that can continue to change as they move between people, places and generations.
“Traditions are evolving,” she said. “They keep evolving all the time, and just because we make something new with this tradition doesn't mean that we're disrespecting it.”
Manuela Sánchez Goubert released her first album, Raíces, in 2024, and has since toured with her band throughout the United States and Latin America. A second album is on the way.
You can see her in action here
