Eleonora Strino is a Naples-born jazz guitarist, composer and educator who decided on her instrument and her genre at the same moment: hearing Jim Hall play alongside Bill Evans at fifteen. She trained first at Naples's Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella under guitarist Pietro Condorelli, earning both her first- and second-level diplomas with top marks, then continued at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam under Martijn van Iterson, Jesse van Ruller and Maarten van der Grinten. Her first professional chair was as lead guitarist in the orchestra of Italian composer and playwright Roberto De Simone.

A Berlin audition introduced her to bassist Greg Cohen - Tom Waits's longtime bass player, with credits alongside Ornette Coleman and Lee Konitz - and the two built a lasting musical partnership. It produced Tres Palabras (2014, Apogeo Records), with drummer Massimo Del Pezzo, and Si, Cy! The Music of Cy Coleman, a tribute record built around the American songwriter's catalog; neither title is indexed on Discogs at build time, so both are reported here on press and label sourcing rather than a Discogs release credit (see eleonora-strino_notes.md). In 2016 she also turns up on Discogs proper for the first time, on electric guitar for Janis (Casa del Jazz), a Janis Joplin tribute session credited to the vocal ensemble Giovani Leonesse alongside singers Camilla Battaglia and Daniela Spalletta - both already profiled elsewhere in this vault.

In 2018 she joined pianist Dado Moroni's touring band, a connection repeatedly reported in Italian press and on her own artist materials, though no Discogs-documented Moroni release lists her among its credits. The following October she won the composition prize at Romania's "Johnny Raducanu" International Jazz Festival. Recognition kept building: in February 2020, Jazz Guitar Today put her on its cover, an honor the magazine had recently reserved for Peter Bernstein, Kurt Rosenwinkel and John Scofield. Bernstein - himself already profiled on this site - has since praised her in his own words: "She has a maturity and developed musical identity well beyond her young age. Eleonora has a love and respect for the older songs and the pure sound of the guitar yet is always taking chances which keeps her playing in the moment and gives a very immediate feeling to her music."

Her sideman work widened further in the early 2020s. She joined saxophonist Emanuele Cisi's group on guitar and vocals for Far Away (2022, Warner Music Italy), an album featuring actor Filippo Timi and recorded aboard a sailing boat off the Tuscan coast, alongside bassist Marco Micheli and drummer Enzo Zirilli. In 2022 she also recorded Itamela at Casa del Jazz in Rome, produced by the Auditorium Parco della Musica. That same year she became the first woman to join The Great Guitars, the touring guitar-summit lineage founded in the 1970s by Barney Kessel, Charlie Byrd and Herb Ellis, performing alongside Martin Taylor and Ulf Wakenius, including a date in her home city of Naples. In 2023 she is also Discogs-credited on guitar and backing vocals for singer Ornella Vanoni's Calma Rivoluzionaria (Live 2023).

Strino's debut as a bandleader, I Got Strings (2023, C.A.M. Jazz), arrived after all of that groundwork: a guitar trio recorded live in Berlin in November 2021 with Greg Cohen on double bass and Joey Baron on drums, working through jazz standards - Duke Ellington staples, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," "I Got Rhythm" - alongside Luis Bacalov's "Il Postino" and Bruno Martino's "Estate," with liner notes by critic Brian Morton. The same year, Fundamental Changes published her instructional book Bebop Scales for Jazz Guitar; a second book, Motivic Soloing for Jazz Guitar, followed from the same publisher.

Her first album with a working quartet, Matilde (2025, C.A.M. Jazz), paired her with double bassist Giulio Corini, pianist Claudio Vignali and drummer Zeno De Rossi, all-original material apart from one composition co-written with Vignali. The record was inspired by a painting by her father, and its opening track, "Neapolitan Six for Lage," nods to one of her named contemporary influences, guitarist Julian Lage. Lumithia (2026, C.A.M. Jazz), a solo-guitar record, followed. Alongside her performing and recording career, Strino teaches as a jazz guitar professor at the Conservatory of Cosenza and has given masterclasses internationally, including at the Academie Rainier III in Monaco.

Strino's own playing sits inside the straight-ahead, standards-literate tradition she names as her foundation: Jim Hall and Bill Evans as the formative pair, with Barney Kessel, Grant Green, Wes Montgomery and Thelonious Monk cited (per her Vintage Guitar profile) as the vocabulary she built her bebop language on, and Bill Frisell, Julian Lage and Peter Bernstein named as the contemporary players she measures herself against. That range shows up across her catalog: a trio reading of the Great American Songbook with two American rhythm-section legends on I Got Strings, and a quartet of all-original writing with a Mediterranean, Spanish-tinged undertow on Matilde, which All About Jazz described as extending jazz guitar's reach beyond rock and fusion detours the instrument has sometimes taken. Her two instructional books for Fundamental Changes - built around bebop scales and motivic soloing - reflect the same vocabulary-first approach she brings to her own improvising and to her guitar students at the Conservatory of Cosenza.