The New, The Familiar and The 34th Miami Film Festival

14 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Home, In Other Words

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This piece appeared on the Knight Foundation blog in March, 2017

The 34th edition of Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival, celebrated March 3- 12, was not only a window to the world on film but also a timely showcase for diversity and inclusion, on and off the screen.

The top awards had a distinct Latin accent as “Family Life” (“Vida de Familia”), a Chilean film directed by Cristian Jiménez and Alicia Scherson, won Best Film in the Knight Competition at the Awards Night Gala on Saturday. The award includes a $30,000 cash prize. Daniel Hendler took the prize as Best Director, which carries a $5,000 cash prize, for “The Candidate” (“El Candidato”), from Uruguay; and Lola Amores and Eduardo Martínez shared the Best Actor award, which also has a $5,000 cash prize, for their work on “Santa y Andrés,” from Cuba.

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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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