El Tolo

“Instead of me reaching the blues, the blues reached me.” The description has the same apparent simplicity as the blues itself, but also the same deep substance, and it describes the crossroads of musics and people that led him to a genre he stumbled upon in a way he describes with irony: “I arrived at it sober and decided to play it drunk.” This versatile and talented guitarist is as capable of spinning phrases of ingenious lucidity as of seducing the audience with a blues played with the most exquisite fingerpicking, of moving them with a ballad with a country air, or of stirring the most rusted of spirits with a frenetic rock’n’roll. Professionally devoted to music for a little over fifteen years, in addition to his regular bands he puts his guitar at the service of ensembles as prestigious as the Barcelona Big Blues Band (B4) or the Saxofonistas Salvajes. The blues seduced him for its ability to convey deep feelings with few means, its universal language and “of course, its blasphemous capacity”. It also gave him a family called A Contra Blues, with whom he has trodden hundreds of stages and lived experiences that have enriched his soul, as he himself confesses.