Big Mama Montse

Alfredo Papo, a pioneer in spreading the word about jazz and the blues in Barcelona, described her as “that girl from the plain of Vic who sings as if she were black”. Montse Pratdesaba is the undisputed female pioneer of the Barcelona blues and one of the first performers of the genre in the whole of Spain. At eighteen she left her village and moved to Barcelona to become a sound engineer, a profession she abandoned for her true calling: to be a blues singer. From the moment she led her first band, Blues Reunion, at the beginning of the nineties — the seed of Big Mama & The Blues Messengers — to her presidency of the Societat de Blues de Barcelona, she has turned her hand to everything, from performing to teaching, by way of the journalistic dissemination of the blues. The warmth of her voice is matched by the quality of a passionate personality, given body and soul to African-American music and committed to any worthy cause within her reach. An enthusiastic fighter and a tireless worker, she has trodden hundreds of stages at home and abroad, always leaving an indelible mark on musicians of every generation, because the blues is her reason for living.