John Married

Juanma Casado’s encounter with the blues was a gradual process, the beginning of which he places in his adolescence, when he chanced upon a cassette tape by Jimmy Reed, which ended up in his pocket as discreetly as it did for free: “I was beginning to play the guitar and I pulled at the thread. The blues led me back to the roots, but also to all the genres that grew up around them.” In the early nineties he began performing live with the harmonica player Txetxu Álvarez, playing wherever they could, especially at the jam sessions organised by Joan Ventosa at the Kfé Olé in L’Hospitalet, as this musician, who declares himself seduced by the freedom and expressiveness of the genre, recalls: “What seduces me most is that freedom within very specific musical rules. It may seem a contradiction, but it is precisely part of its magic. I am drawn to improvisation and to the dialogue between musicians and, of course, to the enormous capacity to express feelings such as sadness, joy, irony, sensuality, anger or fun.” After years of playing in bands of every kind, in 2014 he formed the project Blueroomess alongside Donna Lee, where he has developed his own way of understanding music and of taking it into more personal territory.