Associació Capibola Blues

Barcelona, 2003 

Festival de Blues de Barcelona, Escola-Taller de Blues de Barcelona, Les Nits de Capibola Blues, Pícnic de Blues, Nits de Blues at the Poble Espanyol, and the social concerts in hospitals and prisons

An old friendship, a night of blues-fuelled euphoria and a B.B. King concert were the origin of this association, the first devoted specifically to the blues in the city. The thing germinated in 2003, when Tomás López Villora “Güilli” and Ricard Chaure decided to organise a blues festival in Nou Barris. They appealed to the collaboration of their neighbours and, brimming with imagination and hard work and with the support of a group of diehards, they managed to raise a musical occasion marked by its social and charitable character, which in 2007 became the Festival de Blues de Barcelona. But their record goes much further than that. To them belongs the creation of the Escola Taller de Blues de Barcelona, Les Nits de Blues de Capibola, through which practically every musician in the city has passed, the Pícnic de Blues de Nou Barris, Les Nits de Blues at the Poble Espanyol and the concerts in hospitals and penitentiary institutions. From 2010 onwards Isaac Chacón and Héctor Infantes joined the team, becoming fundamental pieces in sustaining the activity of an association whose main aim is the promotion of blues culture in an open and accessible way, always in close collaboration with the social organisations of its neighbourhood, a battle they have been fighting against wind and tide for almost twenty-five years.