Gallo/Flórez

The Gallo/Flórez Duo (pianist Ricardo Gallo and guitarist Alejandro Flórez) combines allusions to Colombian Andean folk music with layers of improvised harmonic and rhythmic richness, rendering the music expansive and visceral. Relying on the lushness of bandola and tiple, two traditional Colombian guitars, the duo’s sound—lyrical and colorful, angular and virtuosic, at times dystopian and ironic— moves effortlessly in the worlds of jazz, contemporary music, and South American music. 

Gallo and Flórez have presented their work in several venues in New York and Bogotá, as well as in Ottawa and Montreal, invited by the Embassy of Colombia in Canada. Their debut album Meleyólamente was recorded in August 2008 in Bogotá and released in 2009 under the Colombian independent label Festina Lente Discos. It was among the best 10 CDs from Colombia in 2009 according to Semana magazine. Their second album Algo más melódico was released in 2019 again with Festina Lente Discos. Their current repertoire includes unreleased original material, their unique developed approach to improvisation, as well as spontaneous arrangements on traditional Colombian indigenous flute melodies. 

Pianist and composer Ricardo Gallo, born in Bogotá, has written for acoustic and electro-acoustic formats, for short films, videos, dance, installations, and multimedia stage productions, and has performed and written for jazz and improvisatory groups. He has released 15 albums as a leader or co-leader. Gallo has received commissions from the Colombia National Symphony Orchestra, Big Band Bogotá, and contemporary ensembles in New York and Bogotá. 

His current projects include his Bogotá-based quartet, which has released six albums, the tropical-electric-groovy band Los ALiENs, and the acoustic quartet Horse’s Mouth in New York. Since 2016 Gallo has collaborated with Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña, performing as a duo in the US and South America. For Vicuña’s Brain Forest Quipu, her commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London in 2022, Gallo directed the contributions of several musicians, arranging the sonic component of the piece. He created the sound design for Cecilia’s Disappeared Quipu (2018), a multimedia installation for the Brooklyn Museum and MFA in Boston, and later collaborated on other sound pieces based on her voice and poetry for several art institutions. They released the album La niebla vital, Wiraqochan in 2022 with Hueso Records, and Tejiendo nubes contra la muerte, their collaboration with the Colombian trio Hombre de Barro in July 2026 with BUH Records. 

Gallo has received support for his work from the Queens Council of the Arts, as a finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and funds for tours and residencies from the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia, The Banff Centre, and the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. Gallo is a MacDowell fellow and has also been in residence at Lijiang Studio in Yunnan, China. He has performed his music in Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Puerto Rico, and the United States, as well as China, Germany, Italy, Kenya, Poland, Spain, and Switzerland. 

Guitarist Alejandro Flórez, born in Bogotá, has been called "a high-flying guitarist with an often biting tone and an adventurous compositional style” (Jeremy Shatan, AnEarful) and “a truly original and gifted composer” (Dominic Hartley, Fanfare). Other current projects include the Alejandro Flórez Trio, where, alongside drummer Satoshi Takeishi and saxophonist Daniel Blake, he works in deconstructing his own written material via multiple approaches to improvisation, and a duo with guitarist Dan Lippel, where he writes pieces for two guitars that blur the line between the through-composed and the improvised.