Oleándole
Oleándole is a collective that combines two styles of music with deep roots: jazz and flamenco. In this show, flamenco singing and dancing dialogue with jazz improvisation, each drinking from the source of the other in a powerful and creative symbiosis.
It is also the meeting point of some of the best jazz and flamenco artists in Barcelona. These artists with proven solvency and a long career, with personal projects, come to Oleándole to expand their records, attracted by this adventure of free and rewarding music.
Oleándole, in addition to his original compositions, adapts jazz standards, film music, soul and pop songs to flamenco rhythms, alternating them with pure flamenco singing and dancing, creating an original, virtuoso “fission” of genres and jubilant.
Wayne Shorter goes flamenco
Oleándole is a flamenco jazz group founded and led by the percussionist and composer Ramón Olivares, an emblematic figure of the Barcelona scene. It is made up of some of the best musicians from both worlds, jazz and flamenco, who have joined their project.
Oleándole performs jazz or popular music standards, in a flamenco key, that is, adapting to flamenco styles: soleá, seguiriyas, bulerías or tanguillos, great songs by other authors to give them a totally new air. Oleale's proposal is a new and original contribution to the fusion of both musics, which already has a long tradition, but which had never been distilled with this depth and “know how”.
For this tribute show to Wayne Shorter, one of the best living composers of contemporary jazz, the group has selected seven of his compositions, plus an original by Ramón Olivares, and subjects them to a magnificent, innovative and personal interpretation.
The project brings together more than 30 performers, some of them well-known from the flamenco jazz scene, such as Jorge Pardo (Chick Corea's last tour) and Carles Benavent, members of Paco de Lucía's sextet for years, new talents such as the guitarist Marc López, Juan José Villar (from the Villar flamenco dynasty) or Luís de la Fefa, a singer of great depth, along with other soloists from the jazz orbit such as Albert Bover, Benet Palet, the great guitarist Jordi Bonell, the saxophonist Martí Serra, and thus up to thirty artists contribute, with this tribute to Wayne Shorter, to open a new avenue of flamenco jazz.
Also notable is the work of the arrangers, five on this album: Jordi Gaspar, Narcís Vidal, Lluc Casares, Josep M Durán and the great Joan Albert Amargós, a great connoisseur of flamenco thanks to his work with Camarón de la Isla and Miguel Poveda for example, and that with their orchestrations create a timbral framework of an orchestral character.
“Wayne Shorter goes flamenco” is a phenomenal sum of talents that, as a result of great collective work, give us a reinterpretation of these Shorter pieces, which from now on we will listen to in a different way.
Photos (h.r.)
