Mel Freire Brazilian and Italian Singer

Singer and songwriter, she was born in Belo Horizonte and began her artistic activity in Italy, where she has lived for over 25 years. Throughout his twenty years of musical career, Mel has experienced different cultural worlds, in intense dialogue, populating his repertoire with various influences, such as samba, jazz, MPB and trends in Italian “leggera” music.

In Rome, she studied vocal technique and jazz improvisation, performance, music theory and musicalization. In Belo Horizonte, where she settled in 2008, she improved his studies in vocal technique, interpretation and percussion.
Mel Freire has been performing in public since the 1990s, joining groups of diverse backgrounds, focusing on Brazilian rhythms such as baião, samba, choro, maracatu and bossa nova, as well as jazz.

Her work as a guitar and voice duo with the Italian guitarist Giulia Salsone, focused on the language of MPB, choro and samba, took part in the 6th Festival Roma-Napoli-Rio (Italy) and the Iniscealtra Festival of Arts (Ireland). In the Brazilian space, Mel Freire has been performing since 2008, when she started his duo project with guitarist Luís Bisaggio. The repertoire, based on MPB, samba and bossa nova, earned him participation in the Clara Nunes Festival (Caetanópolis-MG, 2008 and 2010), a tour of Italy (2010), as well as an invitation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to work in the cultural project School of Music/Centenary of Vinícius de Moraes in São Tomé and Príncipe, Africa, in 2013. The duo has a CD recorded in 2010.

She also had experience in event production as a production assistant for the tour of the Italian band Acustimantico in Japan, Germany, Belgium, France and Italian regions in 2006 and 2007, as well as Brazilian bands in Italy like Trio Corrente, for example.

Mel Freire is one of the winning voices of the Cantoras Daqui BDMG 2009 competition (Belo Horizonte) and a finalist for the 2nd Minas Gerais Music Prize 2013, with the samba she composed “Vou me mudar” which is part of the event's recently released CD.

She has performed in Montevideo, alongside local musicians; there are many appearances and interviews on radio and television in Brazil, Uruguay and Italy.

Between 2014 and 2016, Mel Freire presented his show “Diálogos Musicais Brasil-Itália" in Belo Horizonte, in several main theatres in the capital of Minas Gerais, with which he also participated in the Italian language week event in the world, promoted annually by the Italian government in several countries.

In October 2016, she performed with the Italian group Choroma, as part of the celebrations of the “100 years of Samba”, at the invitation of the Brazilian Embassy in Rome.
In 2017, the singer and songwriter released her first original CD “Clarão”, recorded between Brazil, Italy and Portugal. The album was launched in the same year at the beautiful "Palazzo Pamphilj", headquarters of the Brazilian Embassy in Italy, in the presence of more than 300 guests.

She currently appears in festivals and concerts with her band "Fino Samba Trio/Quartet" and in special participations and international tours with Italian and Brazilian musicians including Gino Marcelli, Lula Galvão, Giulia Salsone, Paolo Recchia, Triology, Pierpaolo Principato, Roberto Bernardini, Alex Rocha, Marcelo Costa, Simoninha, Eddy Palermo, Fred Martins and Jaques Morelenbaum.