Samuel Cerra is a Calabrian vibraphonist, percussionist and composer whose training runs from an Italian state conservatory to Boston's two best-known jazz schools. He began formal music study at age 13, first as a trumpeter under Enzo Minieri, then in classical percussion under Vittorino Naso at the Conservatorio Statale di Musica "Fausto Torrefranca" in Vibo Valentia. In 2017 he earned a Master's degree there in Music, Science and Sound Technology with highest honors, and in the same year won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he completed a degree in Jazz Performance Summa Cum Laude in 2021 under mentors including Ed Saindon and David Santoro. Later that year he received the Cherubini Scholarship to Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a Master's in Jazz and Contemporary Music Performance under Eric Hofbauer, earning the President Scholar distinction in both 2022 and 2023 and a further full scholarship for post-Master specialization in 2024. Between 2014 and 2017 he taught percussion at the Istituto Musicale "Leonardo Vinci" in Crotone and served as a tutor in the percussion class at the Torrefranca conservatory.

In the United States, Cerra has performed with the Longy Big Band, the NECJ Big Band and the David Wright Big Band, opened for saxophonist Paquito D'Rivera at a Longy gala concert, and played Boston's Scullers Jazz Club. Back in Calabria, he performs regularly on the regional jazz-festival circuit: the Peperoncino Jazz Festival (2023, in a quartet with guitarist Roy Panebianco, bassist Frank Marino and drummer Marcello Surace), the Torrefranca Jazz Festival (as leader of the Samuel Cerra Quartet with pianist Bruno Montrone, bassist Giuseppe Lanzo and percussionist Alessandro Marzano), and the Filagramma Jazz Festival, where he gave a solo vibraphone concert in December 2024 with the festival's Resident Jazz Ensemble under director Ferruccio Messinese. He also performs "Piano meets Vibes," a jazz duo program with Messinese pairing standards and original compositions. According to his own biography page on Jazzitalia, he has recorded two albums fronting his own groups, Nebula with the Calabrian Jazz Experience (alongside Massimo Russo and Frank Marino) and Rosso Porpora with the SWAT 4tet (with Giuseppe Cutuli, Giovanni Brunetti and Giuseppe Gugliotta); neither title turns up on Discogs, Spotify or Bandcamp, so both are reported here as bio-stated credits rather than independently verified releases.

Alongside his straight-ahead jazz work, Cerra is one half of an Electro Swing duo with American vocalist-producer Valerie Giglio, whom he met as a fellow Berklee student. Their debut single "Starlite Ballroom" (2021), which blends vintage big-band swing and jazz vibraphone with electronic production, won a Bronze Medal at the Global Music Awards and was placed on the first-round ballot for the 64th Grammy Awards in the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance category - a ballot placement, not a nomination. The track later appeared on Giglio's 2023 album Midnight at the Speakeasy. A separate duo track, "The Illusionist," is Discogs-verified: it appears, in a Glenn Gatsby remix, on the 2023 various-artists compilation Roaring Halloween 2 (Electro Swing), with Cerra credited as a featured performer. Earlier in his career Cerra was also a member of the Wizdom Drum Band, a percussion ensemble that performed at national and international venues, outside the jazz idiom.

Cerra describes his own playing as a "pianistic" approach to the vibraphone, shaped by his classical percussion training, by the jazz-vibraphone pedagogy of Berklee mentor Ed Saindon (author of the standard Berklee vibraphone method books), and by Calabrian and broader regional folk material he folds into his jazz writing. That same range carries into his output: small-group, combo-format jazz in Calabria and Boston's big-band circuit on one side, and the Electro Swing fusion of vintage big-band swing with electronic dance production on the other, a hybrid the site's own subgenre taxonomy recognizes as a jazz-lineage style in its own right.