LiveJazz

LiveJazz's own homepage names its founders with more precision than almost anything else in this category: Alessandro Ricciardi, pianist, Master of Arts, 2008, from HKB in Bern, and his brother Romano Ricciardi, saxophonist, the same Master's degree, 2008, from ZHDK in Zurich, a different school in a different city. That line also puts a date on the business itself, "stands since 2004." The about-us page tells a slightly different version of the same story. It credits both brothers' Master of Arts and Pedagogy degrees to "the Music Academy in Bern" without naming ZHDK at all, and says the pair "decided in 2007" to go into music full time, a year the homepage never mentions. Neither page corrects the other, so what's actually established is 2 brothers with real conservatory training, and 2 competing accounts of exactly when and where.

The rest of the family gets a paragraph too. Their mother, Angela, sang pop professionally in the 70s and reached the Swiss final of the Eurovision Song Contest; their father, Arnaldo, trained at the School of Arts in Lugano and has worked as a painter for 20 years, with pieces hanging in the Federal Palace in Bern. Romano handles saxophone and management; Alessandro plays piano. Both still perform outside LiveJazz in the Swiss and international jazz scene, and the site quotes the Swiss jazz musician George Robert calling their playing a contemporary take on traditional jazz. It's an unusually well-documented origin story for a wedding act, even with the one date it can't settle among itself.

4 lineups, and who actually sings

LiveJazz books as one of 4 fixed formations. The Duo is just the brothers themselves, electric piano and saxophone, pitched at smaller events where the goal is tasteful background sound rather than a performance. The Trio adds a singer to that same core (vocals, saxophone, electric piano) and is the one the site points a couple toward for a dedicated wedding offer. The Party Band expands further, electric piano and bass, saxophone, drums and a singer, built for the dance floor, running foxtrot behind Sinatra standards through funk and soul from Stevie Wonder, James Brown and Amy Winehouse. Band & DJ pairs the live musicians with a DJ set for a modern lounge sound, pitched as the way to keep a party going past where a band alone would stop.

The site names exactly 2 singers on its own roster page: Justina Lee Brown, born in Lagos, Nigeria, who won the Women in Entertainment Award in London in 2009 for Best African Voice and has performed with Zucchero at the Sierre Blues Festival, and Miriam Dee, whose father toured in the 1960s with his own band and who has since sung as a long-standing member of the Pepe Lienhard Orchestra and for Swedish royalty. Customer feedback on other pages names at least 2 more singers who aren't profiled there, Brandy and Lilly, so the roster page reads as a sample of who might turn up rather than a complete staff list.

The wedding day, part by part

The wedding page walks through the day in order rather than describing the band in the abstract: the ceremony (in a church or outdoors), the aperitif, dinner and the dance. For the ceremony it offers 3 to 4 musical interludes, either from the standing repertoire or a couple's own requests, with a downloadable ceremony repertoire linked from the page for reference. Dinner runs on "subtle jazz, bossa nova and ballads," pitched as conversation-level background rather than a performance, before the Party Band formation takes over for what the site calls "an atmospheric finish" of swing, pop, funk-soul and disco. A separate "Wedding Complete Package" bundles all of it, ceremony through dinner, plus a DJ carrying the night past where the live set ends.

The claim behind that offer is specific rather than vague: over the last 10 years the band says it has played over 500 weddings, and in 2023 it was "again awarded the highest number of points, 16 golden ribbons," at the Swiss Wedding Award. The about-us page separately mentions unspecified "awards and accolades" in 2017, 2022 and 2023, without naming what each one was; the wedding page fills in at least the most recent one.

What shows up, and what it costs

LiveJazz says its musicians bring their own technology, including a wireless microphone that doubles for speeches, and its FAQ states plainly that the price includes everything, no separate charge for equipment. Setup takes 20 to 30 minutes, and the band aims to be on site 60 to 90 minutes before the start of a set. Space needs are modest: the site says 4 to 6 square metres is usually enough, whatever the venue.

On price, the FAQ gives one concrete figure rather than a full list: a small formation for an aperitif starts "from CHF 1 200.-." Beyond that it says cost depends on attendance time, venue and which formation a couple books, and doesn't publish a rate card. A deposit isn't mandatory, but the FAQ says the band typically asks for 50 percent at the point the contract is signed. Lead time gets a specific recommendation too: at least 6 months out, better 12. If a musician falls ill, the site says a replacement is contractually arranged, a case it describes as happening extremely rarely across more than 15 years of bookings, and it separately advertises money back for force majeure. What the site never states, on any page checked here, is a travel radius or a travel fee; a couple outside Zurich would need to ask directly rather than find it published.

An English page that keeps switching back to German

For a tenant built around English-reading couples, this matters more than it would elsewhere. 2 of the 4 formation pages, Duo and Trio, still carry a full paragraph of untranslated German sitting directly above the English paragraph that covers similar ground. The customer-feedback page and the wedding page's own embedded testimonials go further: every quote filed under weddings is in German or French, none in English, including 2 that name singers (Brandy, twice, and Lilly) who never appear on the singers page at all. The only English-language testimonials on the whole site are from corporate clients, not weddings. None of this touches the substance of what the band plays or how the day is structured, both of which the English pages describe fully and consistently, but a couple planning entirely in English would be reading around gaps the site hasn't closed.

What LiveJazz actually offers is uncommonly well specified for this category: 2 named musicians with real degrees, a defined 4-formation lineup, a stated ceremony-to-dance-floor structure, and enough of its own numbers, 500 weddings, 16 golden ribbons, a starting aperitif price, to check against each other rather than take on faith. The founding-year mismatch and the German-language leftovers are the kind of thing a careful reader notices rather than a reason to look elsewhere; nothing here suggests the band is anything other than what it says it is, a full-time professional act that has been booking Swiss weddings since 2004 or 2007, depending which of its own pages you read. A couple wanting a band that plays live through the ceremony and dinner, then hands off cleanly to a party set or a DJ, has a well-documented option here, with the caveat that the written reviews worth reading will mostly need translating.