Donna Lee

The daughter of Argentinians who fled the military dictatorship, Paola Graziano spent her childhood and youth between Venezuela, Argentina and Italy, before eventually settling in Barcelona in 2004, after a spell in Galicia where she took her first professional steps. In this coming and going she trained musically, beginning to study the saxophone before she was eight. And that girl who was captivated by a cassette of Lightnin’ Hopkins when she was thirteen, and whom her schoolmates nicknamed “trucker’s voice” because of her contralto voice, plunged into the roots of the blues and ended up caught by the great ladies of the genre, such as Bessie Smith, Koko Taylor or Ada Brown, discovering what she was capable of conveying, precisely thanks to that vocal range. At the head of Blueroomess, a band playing African-American roots music, she has become one of the city’s reference singers, with a repertoire that melts together folk, country, skiffle and blues, a music that seduces her basically for “its capacity to express deep emotions in a raw and direct way”.