LINER NOTES

by Miaoxuan Huang 

Ave de Luz: A Bird of Light Returns Home

Chilean Artist, Bandleader, and Producer Claudia Acuña Returns to Her Roots

In her new album, Ave de Luz (Bird of Light), Chilean singer, songwriter, bandleader, and educator Claudia Acuña showcases a kaleidoscope of sounds from Chile after spending three decades in New York and seven albums shaping her own voice within the jazz tradition. In returning both to her Chilean traditions and to her renewed artistry, Claudia is doing something she has never quite allowed herself to do before: she is crowning herself.

She doesn’t say it lightly. “I'm coming in with my crown, my poncho, my everything,” she says of this record. “This is a love letter to my country, to my root.”

Taking vocabulary from Chilean musical traditions and American jazz, Ave de Luz tells her story as a migrating musician in fluidity and flux. Growing up in Concepción in southern Chile, she spent her formative years living through dictatorship. That’s when jazz found her. A neighbor gave her a radio, and she learned to extend its antenna to catch signals from radio stations all over the world. Among these sounds, she gravitated towards American jazz legends Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, as well as R&B sounds by the Jackson 5. She felt her call from music, so strong that she used to wonder if she had been a musician in another life, sent back to finish what someone else had left undone.

That call brought her to New York, where she studied the jazz tradition with reverence. “No matter where you put your hands,” she says, “you have to study the tradition.” She did the work and earned her seat. And then she watched Dizzy Gillespie embrace Afro-Cuban music and realized she could embrace her own. She slipped Spanish songs into her records, one and then two and then more. She kept her promise to herself: she would always honor where she came from.

Yet, Ave de Luz is the first record where Claudia stops slipping things in and walks through the front door as a Chilean artist. The vision crystallized in conversation with producer Kabir Sehgal, who told her to focus on Chile. Just Chile. “He put this antenna in me,” she says, and the metaphor is not accidental. The girl with the radio in Concepción has become the artist with a fierce curiosity for the world’s music and a tender love for her home.

In the record store, Chilean jazz is often put under the category of “Latin jazz,” a category that she seeks to challenge with this album. When thinking about Latin jazz, people usually think about Cuba or Brazil, or, more simply, salsa. Yet, as she puts it: let's not confuse noodles with spaghetti. They taste different. The music of South America is incredibly diverse, and Chile has a distinct voice within that landscape. The rhythms, the folk tales, the imagery and the musical predecessors of her home country inform Claudia’s approach to this album. The album is simultaneously a research project, a tribute, and a conversation.

Across seven tracks, Ave de Luz draws on rhythms and instruments specific to Chile. We hear the sounds of Trutruka of the Mapuche people, Tormento of the cueca tradition, the Chilean Pandero, Accordion, and Zampoña across tracks such as Ave de Luz and Rezo. There is a song from the cold south near Patagonia, from the island of Chiloé, about a knitted hat (Un Gorro de Lana) for a loved one who left. There is a remake of La Jardinera originally by Violeta Parra, the artist Claudia calls Chile’s most important songwriter, a song as simple and heartwarming as a grandmother’s herbal tea for a broken heart. There is a duet of only voice and charango – Piececitos de Niño – a prayer to Mother Earth, blending Claudia’s long commitment to children’s welfare with Gabriel Mistral’s touching poetry.

There are the moments where Claudia opens the door wider to fusion, where she lets Moroccan percussion, organs and electronics carry her into the Afro-Chilean traditions too often left out of the country’s official story (Chinga La Ka Chinga). Singing through jazz, a tradition built by enslaved people, in the voice of an immigrant, she lets the rhythms of displacement and the rhythms of home talk to each other. “People are always moving,” she says. “Music moves with them. That's the beauty of humanity.”

As bandleader and producer, Claudia shapes not only what is sung but how the record breathes: the arrangements, the pacing, and the space each instrument is given. From there, the record built itself the way Claudia’s records always do – through a band she trusts like family. The drummer, Yayo Serka, the bassist, Carlos Henderson, and the pianist, Manu Koch, have been working with her for more than fifteen years. The album also features guest musicians including Andrés Pollak, Pablo Vergara, Pablo Zárate, Fredy Torrealba, Paulina García, and Daniel Kelly Acuña. Claudia pushes the ensemble into realms of music they never thought to visit. More often than not, a song appears before they realize it. Claudia refuses to be predictable, and jazz allows her to find beauty in the unpredictability. 

The spirit of the album is summarized in its title. Ave de Luz – bird of light. It is what this music is, and what it asks of you: be curious, be open, let it carry you somewhere unfamiliar. Claudia Acuña is reintroducing herself. In the wind from Chile and the light of hope, the bird takes flight. 

Ave de Luz was released on streaming platforms on July 10, 2026.