Luis Diomedis Guerra Pérez, known as Luiso, is a saxophonist, composer, and educator born in Cuba and based in Miami. He began playing at five years old, taught by his father, and the line running from that first lesson to the stages he plays today is a single unbroken one: the sound. He grew up in a family of artists. His father, a Cuban saxophonist and educator, was his first teacher; his mother is a dancer. Music at home was a discipline rather than a pastime, and it shaped a musician who treats performing and teaching as two halves of the same craft.
At ten, he entered the Escuela Vocacional de Arte in Matanzas and left five years later with a Gold Diploma in saxophone. He continued at the Escuela Nacional de Arte in Havana, where he met and accompanied Wynton Marsalis, competed in international jazz competitions, and played in the academy’s JazzBand—a formative period that set the direction for everything that followed. In January 2013, he auditioned for the Universidad de las Artes (ISA) and won one of only five places awarded nationwide.
His training was deliberately broad: classical, jazz, pop, funk, ballad, and Latin jazz, all living in the same instrument. That range became his signature as a working musician, and it explains a career that has never settled into a single genre. His first work as a lead saxophonist came with Waldo Mendoza, Habana Abierta, and Leoni Torres. The collaboration with Leoni Torres stands among the most significant of his career: together they toured Cuba, recorded albums and music videos that won awards on the island, and took the music abroad on tours through Europe and Latin America. Along the way, he accompanied Pablo Milanés, Gente de Zona, Pancho Céspedes, Willy Chirino, and Jacob Forever, among many other Cuban artists.
In 2021, he moved to Miami, and the city opened the door to the Billboard Latin Music Awards, where he performed with Elvis Crespo in 2022 and Olga Tañón in 2023. Studio work followed with Paulina Rubio and Maffio. In early 2024, he received the call to join the band of Armando Christian Pérez, Pitbull. It began with a full United States tour and has continued around the world, in arenas and stadiums across several continents, sharing the stage with T-Pain, Jon Bon Jovi, Lil Jon, Mariah Carey, and Wiz Khalifa. With that band, he has played BST Hyde Park in London, Lollapalooza Berlin, Stagecoach, Tinderbox, Werchter Boutique, Bésame Mucho, and MDLBEAST Soundstorm in Riyadh, as well as televised productions such as the Latin GRAMMYs and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest. Hyde Park — a full park and a Guinness World Record on the same night — remains the high-water mark.
His Yamaha YAS-62 has traveled with him since his student years in Cuba, in the same case, from one island to another continent; by now it is less an instrument than a voice. To the tradition of the saxophone he adds the Electronic Wind Instrument (EWI), which opens another palette of color and another way of moving on stage. The technique is classical; the result is contemporary. He is a Yamaha, D’Addario, and Akai Professional artist. And he still teaches, the other half of the craft—the half he learned at home.