Ignasi Terraza

He is one of the greats of world jazz, and has assiduously travelled the path of the blues, in both cases from the most traditional of roots. At the beginning of the eighties he began playing in the venues where the musicians of Barcelona’s pioneering jazz bands, such as La Vella Dixieland and la Locomotora Negra, moved, to the point of working with stars such as Frank Wess, Teddy Edwards or Benny Golson. To summarise his CV here would be as difficult as it is redundant. His career vouches for him as a fundamental figure of African-American music in Barcelona, where he has accompanied the leading figures of the blues, a genre in which he is drawn to “its expressive, essential, root power”, and which provides him with “a very powerful form of expression, one that embraces rage, despair, loneliness, enjoyment and the celebration of life in a party, so that, from among dark or bright feelings, it draws out a wholly luminous music”, in the words of this enormous musician who discovered the piano after going blind at the age of nine, falling in love with music for ever.