I am a musician, in its broadest sense, I feel a musician, specialized in diversity, although I have finally found a music style, Gospel, which is soaked in spirituality and fulfills my musical and personal interests.
Gospel is the perfect tool to express emotions and connect with oneself, with others and with the universe, its force lies in the universality of its message, which goes beyond what is strictly musical and touches the domain of the most ancestral human emotions.
People of every origin and faith connect from the voice and, therefore, from their heart, blending into a unit from diversity, becoming part of something wonderful, without losing their own identity, their own voice.
All my projects, all my musical dreams, nourish from my experience gathered over the years, at the roots of the “black churches” in the U.S., Europe and Africa, and evolve towards my personal experience where my passion for Gospel manifests itself in an intense, visceral, close, natural and sincere way, as well as the musical and spiritual experience it entails.
My wish is to bring Gospel closer to everyone, help them grasp its universal message, assume the essential role of music in our lives, not only as passive consumers but as 100% active elements.
Through all my activities, I invite you to live in first person and in community, the happiness, energy and simple love that is generated from gospel, where all and every one of us is as important as the group we are part of.
“When I am on the stage I forget everything that is not happening at that
very moment, I live it as a long wonderful attentive meditation which
naturally generates a state of absolute inner and outer connection”.
From medicine student to self-taught musician
I started to seriously learn when I was 21, after three years of studying medicine, although since I was young I had had a passion for music. My family didn’t wish for me to follow that path so they didn’t help at all.
This made me become self-sufficient from very early on, and, after surviving from occasional and varied jobs outside the musical field, I started participating in dance shows basically driven by my huge desire to become a professional, and that way, starting from cero, and with very little training, I started finding my way and learning everything I had at reach: rumba, pasodoble, the repertoire of a singer, some jazz, something Latin music, anything really… My dream at that time was to be able to live from music, music of any kind.
From freelancing to having my own projects
After several years of learning on the field accompanied by people as varied as Dyango, Raimon, Lucrecia, Dagoll Dagom, Els Comediants and many others, I started to gain interest in black music and specifically jazz and this was what gave me wings to start looking for my own language.
Chance or causality lead me to form part of such a charismatic group in the 90s as is Vella Dixieland, where I took a decisive step in my musical development: I went from accompanying to being an “artist”, a situation which gave more visibility to what and how I played. Those years were crucial in my learning and they launched me into starting to express by my own creative interests.
I that time, my first personal projects were born, such as my own Jazz Trio or the Barcelona Big Latin Band, still active, among other proposals beyond gospel that I have been developing over the years.
First steps in Gospel
At the end of my time with the Vella Dixieland, we went on tour and released an album with Afro-American signer from New York Michelle McCain, who at the end of the tour offered me the opportunity to become the musical director of her new blues and soul project. I accepted without hesitation, it was my first great chance to work and learn from someone who would teach me first hand the exact sound that I was looking for at that time. Michelle’s offer came at the right time!
After two years of going on several tours, some of them eventful, with her blues project, she suggested creating a new project inspired in Gospel and then and there, a musical and personal universe opened up for me. From a very young age, my father, a huge fan of black music, had taken me to watch a couple of Gospel concerts, I can’t remember where but I do remember the amazing impression it made on me, despite my young age… their voices, the rhythm, the harmonies, I can still evoke it. I didn’t know at that time that Michelle’s proposal would connect me with a hidden part of my childhood which became determinant for everything that came later. The doors of the future had been opened!
Gospel pioneer
We, the few musicians who were interested in Gospel at the start of this century, would learn from where we could and how we could, there was no tradition, no information and we were moving forward blindly, but full of enthusiasm and passion for the music which was charming us more and more.
After the tours with Michelle (1996/97) and later, with Mónica Green (1998/99), I funded my first choir in Manresa in January 2000, Esclat Gospel Singers and that way, almost unintentionally, the first concerts started. In a couple of years, we became spokespersons of something new that until then could only be heard at the rare occasions when Afro-American choirs visited us.
Public interest grew quickly and with it, the interest of groups of people in forming new choirs. This led me to form, without a prior plan, about 25 choirs between 2000 and 2007, as a result of the enthusiasm of the groups after having lived an initial workshop with me and to form Xarxa Gospel de Catalunya that brought us all together under the same musical and experiential idea.
From 2008 the growth was quick: I started teaching plenty of workshops, first in my most immediate environment and later in the rest of the country, Europe and even Africa. I funded Messengers, the first professional Gospel choir in Catalunya, I funded Goizargi Gospel Choir, the first professional Gospel choir in the Basque Country, I opened two school specialized in Gospel, one in Barcelona and the other in the Basque Country; with Esclat Gospel Singers we organized the Campus Gospel Rajadell of which 15 editions have been held so far, and with a broader group, in April 2019 we created the first edition of One Heart Festival, the first International Gospel festival in Barcelona, with its second edition now being prepared.
At the same time, I started travelling and collaborating with great International Gospel names, such as Bazil Meade, Donald Lawrence, Isaac Cates, Trey Mclaughlin, Lurine Cato and Daniel Thomas, and starting the intense work of connecting the choirs and the European directors, which in 2020 will take me to Firenze, Sardinia, Hull, London, Galway, Genève and Copenhagen, as well as San Francisco, Chicago and Barbados, with the clear objective of sharing experiences beyond music, shedding light on a great message of unity, with Gospel and music as inclusive universal languages.