Danielle DeGruttola

Danielle DeGruttola is an improvising cellist and composer whose improvisations fuse multiple genres, room acoustics, and electronic sound, creating thoughtful and powerful compositions that interweave elements of contemporary jazz, classical, electronica, folk, blues, rock, and hardcore. Her sublime sound is adventuresome and exploratory yet maintains concrete form. “Her contributions are uniformly excellent” (Exclaim!).

DeGruttola began exploring electronic music and improvisation while studying at Smith College, concentrating on jazz performance, and electronic music synthesis at Berklee College of Music and the Center of New Music at Mills College.

She has created original cello music for the Werner Herzog films: Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World and appears alongside Herzog in the documentary In The Edges: The Grizzly Man Sessions. She has co-written multiple pieces with singer-songwriter Richard Thompson for film and the television series The Grizzly Man Diaries and performed with outstanding improvisers including Henry Kaiser, Jim O’Rourke, Buckethead, Cecil Taylor, Miya Masaoka, Lukas Ligeti, Michael Manring, Tania Chen, Soo-Yeon Lyuh, and Wu Na.