“Tellado is a gifted optimist. She sings about the second chance in life, about love, about trust and gratitude, about the beautiful, about living the moment. All this comes evocatively wrapped with the sound of the Caribbean, which she carries in her heart in a melange of jazz, bolero and singer-songwriter echoes“
– Lippstädter Zeitung, August 10th, 2022
A latin-jazz-singer-songwriter and symbolist painter from Puerto Rico, now living in Germany – Judith Tellado’s story is an intricate one full of change, new beginnings, love, pain, nostalgia and the insatiable hunger for the new. Growing up in the caribbean countryside surrounded by guava trees and avocados, music was ever present with her mother singing along to latin boleros and her father playing the güiro, a percussion instrument that Judith inherited playing as well.
As a teenager she created her first paintings, and as a university student discovered her love for jazz music in the voice of Ella Fitzgerald and the saxophone of John Coltrane. Meeting the love of her life on a trip to Canada meant she would marry a German musician and move to Hamburg to start anew and pursue her artist career there.
Becoming an immigrant and living in a new reality far away from her family and caribbean island are frequent subjects of Judith’s artistic expression. Embracing diversity, she published several CDs with songs she wrote in Spanish, English and Portuguese – all the while combining her music with her visual art, a self-made dress she wears in a music video or even a short story revisiting the characters of her songs.
Recently, Judith left Hamburg and moved to the northern German countryside, embracing rural life once again – far away from the tropical nature of her childhood, but peaceful, refreshing and green nonetheless. New stories are waiting to be told, songs to be written, paintings to be painted, concerts to be played. Judith Tellado likes to celebrate creativity and endeavour in whatever new idea comes to her mind, all the while allowing herself to be surprised by the turn life might take next.