André Donni was born in a musical family, as his father, the guitar player Willy Donni, is a legendary figure on the Belgian blues scene. He has rapidly developed into a talented clarinet and saxophone player whose playing is firmly rooted in the the jazz tradition. His professional experience started at an early age, playing with his father, but with many other well known jazz musicians of the mainstream jazz scene of Belgium.

André Donni is one of the few young Belgian musician who have completely assimilated the jazz tradition. With Charles Loos they started revisiting the music of Jelly Roll Morton, of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, and the sound of André’s tenor sax, then in his twenties, already showed astonishing maturity, offering so much more than a simple homage to his favourite musicians, the great us tenor players Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins or Paul Gonsalves.