Leonel Kaplan
Leonel Kaplan (Buenos Aires, 1973) plays the cornet. He has been part of the international experimental music and free improvisation scene since the early 2000s, working between free jazz, European reductionism, and the post-Onkyo currents.
Paul Serralheiro, writing in Squid’s Ear, placed his work outside the era of Miles — the trumpet (and now the cornet) treated as a resonating body, a drone device, a breath zone before a tone. Dan Warburton, in Paris Transatlantic, called it “relaxed intensity”. The descriptions stuck.
He has recorded with Axel Dörner and Diego Chamy (Absence, Creative Sources, 2005), Audrey Chen and Nate Wooley (Silo, Utech, 2006), Tetuzi Akiyama and Edén Carrasco (Moments of Falling Petals, Dromos, 2009), Christof Kurzmann (Una Casa / Observatorio, Casa Corp, Pandemic Conversations), John Butcher (Shortening Distance, L’innomable, 2013), Klaus Filip (Tocando Fondo, Another Timbre, 2015), and on his own (Trumpet, Another Timbre). Live and on record he has worked with Michel Doneda, Lê Quan Ninh, Tatsuya Nakatani, Greg Kelley, Franz Hautzinger, Ivar Grydeland, and Wade Matthews, among many others.
From the early 2000s through 2024 he kept a parallel practice composing for theatre, dance, and light installations — Hotel der Immigranten with Anna-Sophie Mahler (Kaserne Basel, Gessnerallee Zürich, Hellerau Dresden), Orlando with Julie Beauvais and Christophe Fellay (FIBA Buenos Aires), and pieces with Nicole Bindler and Ly Thanh Thien. The longest thread was with light artist Aleksandra Stratimirović: Underworld, Brilliance – Inside the Sun, Great Minds, Color Wheels, Waves, shown across Sweden, Finland, Norway, Austria, Slovenia, Italy, North Macedonia, Bosnia, Singapore, and Brazil.
He has lived in Belgrade since 2018. He plays regularly at KC Grad, UK Parobrod, Club Ciglana, Ring Ring Festival, and the Belgrade Festival of Light, in formations with Marina Džukljev, Milana Zarić, Branislav Radojković, Ilia Belorukov, María Valencia, and Franz Hautzinger, and brings longtime interlocutors — Filip, Kurzmann, Hautzinger — through the city.
