“An artist of rare imagination and formidable arranging skills. An exciting new voice in European jazz.”

PETER QUINN, JAZZWISE, UK ****

“Her voice is like a warm, inviting, whispered breath as the poetic alluring lyrics are released into air. Throughout this repertoire, warmth and affection abound. For her part the inimitable Wiesnerová breathes her way into this extraordinary music with imagination and infectious musicality.”

RAUL DE GAMA, THE WHOLE NOTE, CA

 "Wiesnerova's compositions and arrangements are nothing but striking... the sheer beauty of her voice exerts a pull. She is certainly well worth hearing."

RICHARD SALVUCCI, ALL ABOUT JAZZ, USA

short bio

Ester Wiesnerova is a Slovak vocalist, composer, and educator whose music sits at the intersection of contemporary jazz and the singer-songwriter tradition — intimate, colorful, and harmonically rich, built around an unconventional core of harp and percussion. She spent several years training and performing in the United States before returning to divide her time between New York City and Slovakia. Her 2022 debut, Blue Journal, was placed on the Grammy ballot for Best Jazz Vocal Album and Best Recording Package, and drew acclaim from DownBeat, JazzWise (“an exciting new voice in European jazz”), and All About Jazz. A graduate of Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, where she received the Gunther Schuller Jazz Composer Medal, Wiesnerova has performed with Lionel Richie, Dave Holland, and Luciana Souza, and was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Slovakia. She serves as a Recording Academy voting member.

full version

Ester Wiesnerova grew up in Partizánske, a small town in central Slovakia, where her mother — a singer-songwriter whose spiritual songs were banned under Slovakia’s totalitarian regime, and who was prosecuted for writing them — was her first piano teacher and, later, her first bandmate. It’s where the instinct behind everything Wiesnerova writes comes from: a voice, once silenced, is worth fighting to get back.  

At eighteen, with no clear path to a jazz education available to her at home, she began emailing some of Slovakia’s most prominent people to help fund her way to Boston’s Berklee College of Music — equal parts research, persistence, and nerve. It worked. She went on to earn a master’s degree in jazz composition at the New England Conservatory, where she received the Gunther Schuller Jazz Composer Medal and the Sylvia M. Zunz Endowed Scholarship.

Since then, Wiesnerova has built a career defined less by jazz’s traditional virtuosic display and more by atmosphere, harmonic richness, and lyrical honesty. Her arrangements are colorful and inventive, built around an unusual core instrumentation of harp and percussion rather than drums, with real room left for improvisation — even at its most rhythmically alive, the music keeps a fragile, open quality. Her 2022 debut album, Blue Journal, an international-quintet recording exploring identity and authenticity, was placed on the Grammy ballot in the Best Jazz Vocal Album and Best Recording Package categories and drew reviews across DownBeat, JazzWise, All About Jazz, and The WholeNote.

Jazzwise’s Peter Quinn called her “an artist of rare imagination and formidable arranging skills” and welcomed “an exciting new voice in European jazz”; The WholeNote’s Raul de Gama praised a voice with “warmth and affection”; All About Jazz’s Richard Salvucci singled out her “striking” compositions.

She has performed with Lionel Richie, Dave Holland, and Luciana Souza, performed music from The Lord of the Rings for Howard Shore, the composer of the trilogy’s score, and appeared at the Panama and Guatemala Jazz Festivals, EUROJAZZ, Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai, and TEDx stages in Boston and Bratislava — as well as for the President of the Slovak Republic and members of the European Parliament in Brussels. She was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Slovakia, won “Discovery of the Year” at the New Faces of Slovak Jazz competition, and serves as a voting member of the Recording Academy.

Alongside her performing career, Wiesnerova co-founded Za hranice s hudbou (“Beyond Borders with Music”), a nonprofit bringing workshops, jam sessions, and concerts to young musicians across Slovakia, and regularly performs in hospitals, psychiatric wards, prisons, and homeless shelters. She currently divides her time between New York City and Slovakia, and is completing her second album, written in the wake of slowly losing someone she loved deeply.