UXIA

Uxía, "the Atlantic's voice", is considered the grand dame of Galician music and one of its greatest ambassadors. In her more than 30 years of artistic career she has renewed the traditional Galician music by connecting it with the Atlantic territories. Her work is a meeting point of different cultures. She has published 12 albums, for which she has received important awards; is the artistic director and alma mater of the International Festival of Lusophony, Cantos Na Mare; and has her own record label.

Uxía was born in Sanguiñeda (Mos) in 1962 in a very musical family; she started singing at a very young age, participating in different bands or as a soloist and composer. She studied Romance Philology at the University of Santiago, where she got to know in depth Galician literature and musical roots. Her career officially began in 1985. A year later Uxía joined the band Na Lúa, with which she toured many stages and recorded two albums, A estrela de maio (Edigal, 1987) and Ondas do mar de Vigo (GASA, 1989), which was awarded the Galician Critics' Prize.

In the nineties she resumed her solo career with the help of Xosé Ramón Paz Antón (member of the group Na Lúa), who produced her second album; Entre cidades (Sons Galiza, 1991), an emotional walk through the cities of the world in a literary key. Four years later an essential album in her career arrives: Estou vivindo no ceo (Nubenegra, 1995), produced by the Portuguese musician and composer Júlio Pereira, in which she shows a renewed glance on Galician traditional music. Acclaim from national and international critics. Released in Europe, USA and Canada, the album takes her on her first international tour, first in Europe (Germany, Austria, Italy and Scotland) and then in Cuba and Argentina.

Her album La sal de la vida (Nubenegra, 1997) is a song to diversity, together with Rasha (Sudan) and María Salgado (Castilla y León) and the flamenco guitar played by the Galician musician Cuchús Pimentel, as an integrating element. Three years later she published Danza das areas (Yerbabuena-Virgin, 2000), a complex musical proposal produced by Nani García with the participation of more than 40 musicians and voices, including Dulce Pontes, María del Mar Bonet, Budiño, Karen Matheson, Donald Shaw (Capercaillie), Michael McGoldrick, Susana Seivane, Filipa Pais and João Afonso.

At this time she also began to create and lead acclaimed groups of cantareiras (women who recover the traditional music of their environment). Always socially committed, she became the spokesperson of the citizen platform "Nunca máis" during the Prestige catastrophe of 2002, and also traveled on several occasions to sing at the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf. In 2003 she created one of her most outstanding projects, the International Festival of Lusophony "Cantos Na Maré", a pioneering cultural project that traces a common map between the Atlantic territories through music, rhythms and sounds that share common roots and origins. Every year, The Festival invites emerging and established artists from different Portuguese-speaking countries to create a collective show in which artists such as Chico César, Carlos do Carmo, Lenine, Tito Paris, Sara Tavares, Rui Veloso and Aline Frazão, have already participated.

Her fifth studio album, Eterno navegar (Harmonia Mundi, 2008), considered among the best in the World Music category by the BBC, is an album in which Uxía, together with pianist and producer Paulo Borges, manages to combine the most Galician roots with Portuguese and African songs in a natural, innovative and avant-garde way. With it, Uxía travels once again through the Peninsula and Latin America, offering a series of concerts in Cuba, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.

Given her connection with Brazilian culture, she decided to record her sixth album, Meu canto (Fol Música, 2011), in Rio de Janeiro, at the Biscoito Fino studios with Jaime Alem (musical director of Maria Bethânia) as producer and under the musical direction and arrangements of Brazilian multi-instrumentalist virtuoso Sérgio Tannus. The album, which is a celebration of her 25 years in music, contains re-readings of some historical songs of her career along with other unreleased ones. With it, she received important awards, such as “Best Roots Music Album” at the Spanish Independent Music Awards and the “Opinion Award for Best Folk Music Artist and Career”, and was chosen “Top of the World” by the British magazine Songlines. In 2015 she created her own record label, with which she self-produced Baladas da Galiza Imaxinaria (Damadriña, 2015) together with the Galician musician and composer Narf. The project -which combines the personal sound of the electric guitar with Galician vocals and tambourine- emerged on a tour through Chile, Uruguay and Argentina and led them to participate in the 26th National Chamamé Festival (Argentina) and to their first tour of the USA.

Some of the constants that can be identified in her musical career are the dialogue between cultures, the defense of linguistic identity, miscegenation and the search for a space for the female voice.

JAVIER RUIBAL

It is a scents seeker, a persecutor of the fable and fantasy, an explorer of beauty, an acolyte of the mystic of the profane; a healer through ecstasy. A teller of stories of rapturous love, of the irrevocable, of the indefeasible hour of the kisses, the urgency of the bodies without delay, the sweetest tear and the most beautiful laughter. Portraitist of profiles but at the same time, landscaper; what matters is the personage and the exotic place that surrounds it, where the unreal is almost touchable because is reflected in the real. And all of this it's seen, because it's heard.

His sources: From his childhood, the family; from Flamenco, its “Cantes de ida y vuelta”, "Tanguillos" and "Bulerías"; from Rock, the Old School; from Jazz, the attitude and loyalty; from the Spanish Literature, the poets of the "27th Generation", with their exuberant words that are poetry with wings; from America, the Caribbean Singers and the "Magic Realism". From the popular, the humour and from his native land, the joy! His purpose: to rewrite a proverb, reconcile with his soul, emulate Federico García Lorca, and entertain..., perhaps touching the audience.

Thirty years of experience endorse this creative musician, different to those of his culture and generation. Composer, arranger, guitarist, singer, self-taught and heterodox; Ruibal is a frontier musician.

These and an endless number of definitions have been used to define this unclassifiable creator for the very personal nature of his artistic proposal. Bordering Flamenco, he always let himself be fascinated and wrapped by it, but taking care not to pass himself off as what he always wanted to make clear he was not: A Flamenco singer; but not for a lack of interest, but for an absolute respect to the style. However, a good part of the new flamenco is directly influenced by this artist who discovers himself as a true innovator of the musical and poetic language.

His music and lyrics are taken care of with the caring and strictness that characterize him. Well-billed arrangements and a guitar execution with personality and strength, but when he decides that his proposal needs further strength, he surrounds himself with the most creative and generous musicians.

The qualities of his voice allow him to travel free and relief through the sounds of flamenco, the music of the Maghreb, India and the Caribbean, in a constant and harmonious back and forth that invites us to firmly believe that the fusion of music and blood will bring us a meeting place for happiness, a new planet that still is in formation.

José Manuel Caballero Bonald

FROM YOUR HOUSE TO MINE

"From your house to mine" is a musical portrait of two universal poets, Rosalía and Lorca, from the hand and the feelings of two souls who try to put wings to the poetry made by both authors. And they will do it through melodies that will give us a deeper knowledge of their work and the deep admiration that Lorca felt for Rosalía, in a North-South union present in their poetry and that, in Lorca's case, will have its culmination in the "Six Galician Poems", published in 1935.

Uxía and Ruibal have a long experience in putting music to poetry; this work is a step further in a story of friendship and complicity that follows the path initiated by Lorca from Granada to Santiago, sealing that brotherhood and closeness of spirit and ideals; putting in the center what unites us and not what separates us, building bridges on the verses and the souls of two universal figures.

Both come from the Iberian popular music circuit that is projected to the world; they are two voices that imbibe from all that heritage that Lorca and Rosalía transferred to their verses and that are pure musicality and inspiration. Music, in fact, was also a main pillar for both poets, as many of the verses they created were inspired on popular tunes.

“I have held three meetings on the road that goes from your house to mine: First one, the happy twinning between Rosalía de Castro and Federico García Lorca. It is very difficult to understand contemporary Spanish poetry without the legacy of Rosalía, a poet who turned the romantic cry into whispered words and grandiloquent pain into intimate sadness. García Lorca immersed himself in her words during his adolescence and learned how to make himself in her lap. That's why he wanted to write his "Seis Poemas Galegos" (Six Galician Poems) when life offered him new emotional connections with Galicia through Ernesto Guerra da Cal. Encounters are a shared richness that widens one's own individual voice. As in love, the dialogue between cultures allows us to feel united while respecting individuality.

I also encounter the old brotherhood of poetry and song. The memory of the orality origins in literary expressions is strengthened by the popular lyric. Sometimes poets who seek very precise words, as it is their duty, end up by smelling like closed. In those cases, the best remedy is to open the windows so as to let life come in with the songs of the hand; as did Gil Vicente, Lope de Vega, Bécquer, Rosalía and Lorca. A collective feeling is condensed in every love, in every way of talking to nature, in every solitary rain, in every shared party and every journey of the moon.

The third encounter I celebrate in this "From your house to mine" is the one between two singers I truly admire: Uxía and Ruibal. If we talk about cultural understanding, about miscegenation, about the dialogues between the popular and the cultivated, between the present and the traditions, Ruibal and Uxía have taught us to hear at once the heartbeat of the earth and the most refined developments of that certain emotion that good songs pursue. Creating is a round trip, shared with teachers, readers, audience, followers... that starts beyond ourselves and takes you from your house to mine and from my house to yours through time and its legends. Artists need to know how to put themselves in the place of others in order to recognize their own place; hence the importance of readers for a poet or of the people sentimental education for a singer. The art opens our doors and windows, it shows us solidarity, it invites us to enter and leave from one house to the other. Uxía and Ruibal, for instance, are in my house.

Luis García Montero