67: Alexis Cuadrado, bassist / composer

Alexis Cuadrado is on a quest for the ecstatic truth. It either started in Spain when he was a young boy, or it started 20,000 years ago, depending on how you look at it. 

The product of 1980s, post-Franco Spain, Alexis was drawn to a life in music despite his parents’ desire for him to do anything he wanted to do “that was normal and not music”. He paid his early dues as a bass player in the early 1990s Barcelona scene where American musicians mingled regularly with Spanish players, and a new form of modern folk music was developing called Nuevo Flamenco.

Eventually he felt the siren song of city and crossed over. He moved to New York nearly two decades ago and got to work. It was only after having logged nearly a dozen years in America that Alexis started thinking about the music he left behind. Through a process he refers to as “decoding and recoding” Flamenco, he sought to integrate the folk music of Spain and the jazz, chamber music, and world elements that he had been exploring. 

"Two Twilights" and "Transbordaments" Music © by Alexis Cuadrado Poetry © by Melcion Mateu and Rowan Ricardo Phillips POETICA is a multi-disciplinary collaborative new work with music by Alexis Cuadrado crossing languages and poetry with authors/poets Rowan Ricardo Philips and Melcion Mateu. Recorded live at SEEDS:Brooklyn on May 2 2014.

THE IMMIGRANT (1917) Silent film by Charlie Chaplin. Music score composed and conducted by Alexis Cuadrado in 2015. Score Commissioned by The New School - College of Performing Arts - School of Jazz. Performed Live at John L. Tishman Auditorium at The New School University Center, New York City on April 27 2015.

HEAR THE FULL INTERVIEW AND PERFORMANCE: http://wny.cc/HetAp8 Eighty years before terms like "1 percenter" and "the Occupy movement" entered our conversations, the great Spanish playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote about the inequalities he saw while living in 1930s America. Now, Spanish bassist and composer Alexis Cuadrado has set those poems to music.

"Alexis Cuadrado is carving a place for his exceptional bass playing and his most impressive composing abilities. 'Noneto Iberico' is a successful brilliant endeavor embracing the complexities of Spanish Flamenco rhythms while embedding contemporary American jazz improvisations and harmonies. Alexis' unique compositions are passionate with tons of clarity throughout!

We met recently to discuss everything from Gypsy weddings to music as a form of protest, reconnecting with Flamenco, and becoming an American citizen. He says, “I think the most American thing I can do is be myself.” 

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