Biography"Onstage, Ojos de Brujo played as if musical energy could drive a revolution." - The New York Times "Unlike lesser bands that create clunky fusions with all the components showing, Ojos de Brujo cooks up an organic blend from disparate elements — edgy scratching, syncopated hand-clapping, polyrhythmic Afro-Cuban and Middle Eastern percussion, scintillating acoustic guitar and hypnotic echoes of India, the original homeland of the Gypsies. The whole — which it dubs jip-jop flamenkillo — is truly greater than the sum of its parts." - Los Angeles Times ******************* Ojos De Brujo were recently (June 20, 2007) featured on NPR's "Day to Day" and PRI's "The World". Click on the links below to hear the entire segments: NPR - Day to Day
PRI - The World
******************** Barcelona is one of contemporary Europe’s cultural powerhouses – a simmering Mediterranean melting pot, perpetually bubbling over with restless creative energy and a dynamic, DIY spirit. Musically, the city is in a league all its own. Sitting at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean, the Catalan capital is Spain’s great gateway; attracting talent from every corner of the globe and continually brewing up new sounds for hungry Spanish ears. Barcelona has long supported one of the most important alternative music scenes in Europe as well as a thriving market for flamenco and other traditional music. Yet, despite all this creative ferment, it’s rare that flamenco and Barcelona’s musical underground ever coalesce to offer up something entirely new – and rarer still when we get to hear about it on this side of the Atlantic.
Enter Ojos de Brujo, (Eyes of the Wizard), a seven-man/ one-woman collective from Barcelona which fuses flamenco’s driving rhythms with hip-hop, funk, punk, and other stray sounds snatched from the Barcelona street. The group calls this musical mashup “Jip Jop Flamenkillo"; a sound that catapults flamenco into the 21st century without losing any of the power or passion of the music’s roots. Anyone who’s heard the Gypsy Kings’ brand of rumba catalana – which married traditional flamenco guitars to fiery Latin percussion – will recognize Ojos as the latest installment in flamenco’s inclusive ida y vuelta (or “gone and back again”) tradition of assimilating New World sounds into the repertoire.
Founded in 1996 as an informal pickup group, Ojos de Brujo (pronounced “OH-hose day BRU-hoe”) has evolved to include members from all over Spain. Ramón Giménez and Paco Lomena provide the intricate fretwork with their tandem flamenco guitars, while the new bassplayer Javier Martin adds additional firepower with funked-up basslines. Xavi Turull, Sergio Ramos and Maxwell Wright keep the beat with a battery of percussion that includes everything from tablas, congas, derbouka, beatbox and trap drums to the traditional wooden box (cajon) and syncopated handclaps (palmas) of classic flamenco. DJ Panko brings his considerable skills as a turntablist and vocalist to bear while the enigmatic Max does his thing as MC and hypeman. But the real secret weapon in the Ojos arsenal is Marina “Las Canillas” Abad, whose soaring, impassioned vocals and pointed, socially-conscious lyrics capture the wild, anarchic spirit at the heart of the music.
Together onstage they ignite like a Molotov cocktail, serving up flamenco sounds with punk rock intensity and hip-hop attitude – as if a caravan of Roma (Gypsies) found itself temporarily transported to the Warped Tour. The group’s searing live performances have won them legions of fans all over Spain and the European festival circuit.
Meanwhile, their two self-produced studio albums (2000’s Vengue and 2002’s Barí, the latter on their own independent record label, La Fábrica de Colores now Diquela Records) made the critics sit up and take notice -- with Barí recently netting them a prestigious BBC Radio 3 World Music Award in February 2004.
Ojos de Brujo began with their North American debut in February as part of Flamenco Festival USA 2004 (Miami, Ny and a club concert in Chicago shut down by police for overcrowding) and followed by the May 11th stateside release of Barí on World Village Records. In July 2004 followed their second US Westcoast-tour (Philadelphia, Ny Summerstage, Chicago) and in October 2004 they played the Eastcoast (Los Angeles and San Francisco). In November came over for the forth time in the same year and played at the Banda Elastica Latin Awards at Long Beach (LA).
Barí is the perfect introduction to Ojos de Brujo for American ears. The album takes its name from a word in Caló -- the Roma dialect -- that means, roughly, finding the groove in life the same way you do in music. Xavi, the group’s percussionist, explains: “Barí is a word that Ramon, who’s Gypsy, picked up from his grandmother. It means jewel, pretty, precious, or more profoundly, the Barí is kind of like the feeling that everything in life is in perfect harmony”. That’s an apt description of the album, too – eleven original tracks (and two remixes) where everything works right and feels good.
Barí begins with the slow-burning “Tiempo de Solea,” giving listeners a taste of elegant flamenco guitars leavened with downtempo hip-hop breaks and fluid rapping from Marina; but turns up the heat considerably with the percussive, explosive hip-hop rumba of “Ventilaor R-80.” Classic flamenco is given an airing on the plaintive, defiant “Naita,” that ends on electric bass, while Mediterranean funk duels it out with South Asian breakbeats on “Quien Engaña no Gana.” “Zambra” is the root of their madness and experimentation and together with “Ley de Gravedad” are gorgeous, atmospheric laments, while “Memorias Perdias” combines a mournful violin with subtle jazz flourishes and “Tanguillo de Maria” erupts into a full-fledged rumba attack. “Bulería del Ay!” takes an experimental flamenco-funk turn, and “Cale Barí” unleashes a simmering, dubby hip-hop elegy for Barcelona street life.
Throughout it all, Ojos display an easy mastery of – and respect for – flamenco’s roots. Says Xavi: “We are in Barcelona, a cosmopolitan city where we live strong – always out in the streets, so we’ve always lived rumba catalana and flamenco puro really strongly, and always next to all the music styles that have been little by little imported from all over the world including reggae, rock, punk, hip hop, break, funk... With Marina as our main vocalist, we became even more focused on the flamenco and our roots are getting stronger. We became more confident when we experimented with other styles and with Max, Sergio and Paco incorporated into the group, we became more solid – more of a band.”
Marina also brought an authentic social activism – often depicting the plight of those left behind by Barcelona’s booming information economy and steep housing market. “She takes her lyrics from the things she sees in the street; she sometimes writes whole songs riding the Metro,” explains Xavi. “That’s why our songs still have the feel of the city and that flavor of the way people live here.”
Ojos de Brujos’ social vision also manifests itself in the way the group does business: They took the DIY route by releasing Barí overseas on their own production company, La Fábrica de Colores now Diquela Records. Ojos de Brujo work as a loose collective of various artists (graffiti, multimedia, designers, filmers, between others) that share in Ojos’ grassroots, anti-corporate philosophy. “I don’t want to say we belong to a political party,” says Xavi. “We don’t like those kind of associations. We do believe in doing things for ourselves, in controlling our own productions, in being free and having a social commitment, trying to do something to make this a better world… and in this sense we maybe also a little political, since politics are also social.”
Whatever you want to call it, Ojos de Brujos is fresh, fierce and uncompromising – a nonstop punk rock flamenco party with a digital backbeat that resurrects the ghosts of Orwell’s Barcelona – and invites them to come out and dance.
|
