Musicians
Tarik Banzi, descended from Moorish Andalusians who fled Spain during the Spanish Reconquest, is a visual artist as well as a musician and composer. He holds a doctorate in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain and his paintings have been exhibited internationally. He was also an active member of the Madrid flamenco music scene since the late 1970s until the early 1980s, including membership in the jazz-flamenco fusion band Guadalquivir. He performed and recorded with flamenco master musicians such as Paco de Lucia, Manolo Sanlucar, Enrique Morente and Jorge Pardo and it has been claimed that Tarik introduced the use of the darbuka and Udu to flamenco music. Two of his students, Fain Duenas and Vicente Molina, went on to form the Grammy-nominated world music group Radio Tarifa.
Julia Banzi holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and specializes in flamenco and women's performance of Andalusian music. She lived in Spain for many years and studied flamenco with Isidro Munoz, Manolo Sanlucar, David Serva and Juan Maya "Marote." She is one of a very few female flamenco guitarists worldwide. Her PhD dissertation from the University of California at Santa Barbara discusses modern changes in flamenco and is titled "Flamenco Guitar Innovation and the Circumscription of Tradition" (2007). Her Master thesis "“Women’s Andalusian Ensembles of Tetuan, Morocco" (2002) is the result of over 15 years of research into women's ensembles in North Africa (Morocco). She contributed two chapters on Moroccan and Spanish food and women's performance to the multi-authored book The Ethnomusicologists' Cookbook: Complete Meals from Around the World (Routledge 2006). She teaches guitar at Reed College and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
The ensemble's membership of musicians and dancers shifts with its performance needs, and past and current members have include Arab-American violinist Charlie Bisharat, Billy Oskay Nightnoise, Jorge Pardo, Gavin Bondy and Martin Zarzar, Anthony Jones, Joe Heinemann, Ranjani Krishnan and Margarita Bruce. and Pink Martini members Martin Zarzar and Gavin Bondy as well as Moroccan musician Noureddine Chekara, Spanish singer Virtudes Sanchez, American singer Emily Miles, Basque flamenco dancer Laura Dubroca and Spanish flamenco dancer MaJose Franco.
Read more about this topic: Al Andalus Ensemble
Famous quotes containing the word musicians:
“How are we to know that a Dracula is a key-pounding pianist who lifts his hands up to his face, or that a bass fiddle is the doghouse, or that shmaltz musicians are four-button suit guys and long underwear boys?”
—In New York City, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“As if the musicians did not so much play the little phrase as execute the rites required by it to appear, and they proceeded to the necessary incantations to obtain and prolong for a few instants the miracle of its evocation, Swann, who could no more see the phrase than if it belonged to an ultraviolet world ... Swann felt it as a presence, as a protective goddess and a confidante to his love, who to arrive to him ... had clothed the disguise of this sonorous appearance.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)