Category Archives: On Music

New and noteworthy

01 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by in Home, In Other Words, Jazz, Latin Jazz, On Music

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The GFS Trio, comprising Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu, Italian trumpeter Paolo Fresu and Cuban pianist Omar Sosa, headline the just announced Miami International Jazz Festival, April 27-29.

Sosa and Fresu have recorded two albums as a duo, Alma (2012) and Eros (2016), including collaborators such as Brazilian cellist Jacques Morelenbaum and the Egyptian-Belgian vocalist Natacha Atlas, and they have been touring as a trio with Gurtu since 2014. (Check them here at the Ravenna Festival, Italy, a bit earlier, in 2011). This is the trio’s North American tour debut.

For complete lineup and more info check Miami International Jazz Festival.

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Josemi Carmona, Javier Colina and a World of Music Beyond Flamenco

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Home, Latin Jazz, On Music

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Javier Colina (left) and Josemi Carmona.
Photo Credit Anya Bartels

This piece was posted by Artburst Miami in March, 2017

 

Guitarist, composer and producer Josemi Carmona embodies the spirit of Nuevo Flamenco. Rooted firmly in tradition, he has proven a restless, curious artist, ignoring the boundaries of genres and collaborating with musicians as disparate as jazz bassist Dave Holland, British Indian musician Nitin Sawhney, Norwegian pianist Bugge Wesseltoft and pop superstar Alejandro Sanz. He was 14 when he joined Ketama, the enormously successful flamenco pop group co-founded by his brother, Juan Carmona. And if an endorsement was still necessary, flamenco virtuoso Paco de Lucía called him “one of the guitarists who will define guitar playing in the 21st century.”

So it’s only fitting that Carmona and Javier Colina, one of the premier and most versatile bassists in Spain, as comfortable in jazz as in flamenco, open the two-concert Flamenco Eñe series at the intimate Carnival Studio Theater at the Arsht Center, Sunday at 7 p.m. The duo, with the addition of percussionist José Ruiz, “Bandolero,” will be performing music from their recently released album De Cerca (Up Close), which includes nods to flamenco, jazz and the Great Latin American Songbook.

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YoungArts Salon explores the art and business of music

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Home, On Music

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Bruno Del Granado, Arthur Baker and Victoria Canal at the YoungArts  Salon

This piece was posted on the Knight Foundation blog  in February, 2017

For the past 30 years, seemingly every aspect of the music industry—from creation and presentation to the ways the product may be distributed, acquired and consumed—has been disrupted by technological developments. But for every benefit of the democratization of the creative and dissemination process there’s a real and practical challenge for the artist to get paid for his labor and make a living of it.

Such was the backdrop of the “Discovery + Emerging Talent” conversation between producer, remixer and DJ Arthur Baker, agent Bruno Del Granado and moderator, singer and songwriter Victoria Canal, part of the YoungArts Salon Series, Wednesday. The talk was held at Ted’s, a performance lounge on the seventh floor of the National YoungArts Foundation headquarters in Miami, in front of a full house.
The discussion covered the arc from discovery to, well, making a living and while there were not cure-all recommendations for the young artists in the audience, all three, each at a different stage in their careers, offered substantive insights.

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