Three Cultures Festival: a meeting place for Mediterranean music
The Three Cultures Foundation is offering three concerts on 22, 23 and 24 June with renowned artists from the current scene who represent the best of the music and rhythms of the three Mediterranean cultures.
From Morocco comes the group Med Ziani and Amazigh Groove, a group of six artists that investigates and fuses different music, using the Berber/Amazigh of the Rif as a traditional and modernist cultural bridge to different current musical styles with a conciliatory and universal social message. To do so, the band has surrounded itself with great musicians such as the Swiss Nicolas Huguenin on drums, Daniel Salas from Malaga on bass and, from Granada, Karima Toré Gursel on sax, Juana Larreta on percussion and the violinist Jose Antonio Rodríguez.
Groove, North African, soul, jazz, funk, electronica and other styles, the mestizo sound is the main characteristic of this group of multiple and varied essences.
Med Ziani, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, musician and singer born in Al Hoceima who started his musical career with his first band Sorif in 1997 and founded several bands such as Bybus in Granada (2005) or Jammin Dose in Malaga (2010) is the architect of this adventure in which traditional and electronic music, voices from here and there are intertwined in an intercultural project that integrates fusion, solidarity and twinning.
Israeli Lala Tamar, of Brazilian-Moroccan parents, discovered the mystery of the ancient Ladino hymns of her heritage when she was in her early twenties. Ladino, and more specifically Haqetiya, a unique dialect spoken among the Jews of Spanish Morocco, fits perfectly with Tamar's hybrid identity; a woman deeply rooted in the cultural seam between Latin and Arabic, Jewish and Muslim, East and West.
Parallel to her work with Z'aaluk, Tamar joined forces with Israeli flamenco master Ofer Ronen to complete the trio Ancient Groove, performing throughout Europe and Israel.
Their first single, "Bellida", was released on radio and is sung in a language called haqetiya, the Ladino of Spanish Morocco.
The festival closes with the Andalusian Laura Vital from Sanlúcar de Barrameda. With a voice of rapturous maturity, an undeniable Mediterranean temperament and an extremely elegant staging, Laura Vital cultivates in these compositions a love for history, culture and traditional music, through its poets and composers. This restless and multifaceted artist presents "Mεδιτεrrαnεα", a recital in which she gives free rein to her love for the different types of music that make up this particular microcosm, in which she brings us closer to common links by twinning flamenco with neighbouring cultures. Part of the soul of flamenco is built on cave, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Arab, Christian and converse melopeas, bricks of a musical wall to which the Andalusians put their battlements: El Quejío. Laura is accompanied by guitarist Eduardo Rebollar, Emilio Martín on violin and David Chupete on percussion.
The Three Cultures Festival offers this sample of Mediterranean music in keeping with its usual philosophy and spirit of dialogue and fusion of cultures.
