Javier Cortés

His contact with the blues came by intellectual means during his adolescent days: “It happened on reading a feature about the influence of the devil on twentieth-century music. Among bands with lots of hair, satanic imagery, studs and leather, I found the photo of a gentleman in an elegant suit and hat, smiling at the camera with a guitar. It was Robert Johnson and his story fascinated and unsettled me in equal measure”. He embraced that music with the same enthusiasm with which he had embraced that of the Ramones or the Clash. In 2013, three years after settling in Barcelona, he began to take to the stage professionally, letting himself be caught by roots music: “As the years have gone by, I’ve realised that all the music I like or that moves me pivots around the blues. I suppose I never deliberately decided to become a musician in the genre, it just happened naturally”. For this forceful double bassist with a rockabilly soul, the blues has given him a sense of belonging to a musical community, and it seduces him for its universality, its complex simplicity, its social history and its cathartic power: “The blues can make you cry, laugh or raise your body temperature”.