Career

Mass. The beginning.

Music first reached her through singing at Mass in her neighbourhood in Lima. There was no instrument and no music school — just a voice, and a place to use it.

At 16 she co-founded Arpegio with Mónica Gastelumendi, a women's vocal group that is still active thirty years later.

The Orquesta Juvenil de Música Nueva.

At seventeen she founded the Orquesta Juvenil de Música Nueva: young people from every corner of Lima united by jazz, long before Peruvian universities taught music. Big bands, choirs and real training. In time it became Jazz Jaus, a landmark of Peruvian musical life for eighteen years.

Belén, Iquitos. The red nose and the saxophone.

With Bola Roja she carried her saxophone to Belén, in Iquitos — houses on stilts, the jungle and the river for neighbours. She put on the red nose and played. Not to give a concert, but simply to be there.

The same impulse led her to direct a project supported by the Prince Claus Fund, bringing music to some of the country's most vulnerable communities. Carolina led the artistic direction and delivery, with the PUCP Institute of Ethnomusicology administering the funds.

Texas. “Do it, Carolina.”

In 2002 she arrived at the University of North Texas with less than a year of saxophone behind her. She practised eight hours a day, and in those long hours she thought of Carlos Espinoza, her first teacher, who believed in her and told her simply: “Do it, Carolina.”

She finished her degree in three years and moved to New York, working at the Juilliard School and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In 2019 she completed her master's at Berklee College of Music in Valencia. And she stayed in Spain.

The silence that changed everything.

In 2010 she lost her voice; years of leading big bands had taken their toll. She had surgery, and in that enforced silence the words began to arrive. Bloom was born. Since then she has met all music without judgement — respecting every kind, and longing to learn it all.

Susana Baca. The mentor who changed her course.

Susana Baca has been her mentor since 2008. Carolina had spent years leading Jazz Jaus and building big bands when Susana told her what no one else had dared to say:

“Enough with all this jazz. Go and get to know the saxophone of Peru. Find out what your land sounds like.”

The Mantaro Valley. She went to teach. She ended up learning.

Carolina arrived in the Mantaro Valley with Sinfonía por el Perú, expecting to teach. What she found left her speechless: orchestras of eight to twenty saxophones with harp, violin and clarinet — and, during the Tunantada, moments when more than two thousand saxophonists play the same melody as one.

The orchestra that touched her most deeply was the Orquesta Mucha Hermanos, and in February 2025, when she launched Tribus at Teatro Segura in Lima, they stood on stage beside her. With the Hurtado Bonilla family of Kuyayky she learnt to hear her own instrument in her own country. And by Paca lagoon she wrote Paca, one of the songs on Tribus.