Kodjo Senyo

A member of the Ewe people, with a long tradition of singing and oral transmission, he began playing self-taught as a teenager, curiously influenced by the black music of the other side of the Atlantic: blues, jazz, soul and funk. He began performing professionally in 1995, but it was after his arrival in Catalonia, in 2001, that he set out on a reverse journey and took on the influence of the traditionalist singers and of the black diaspora, fusing the language and music of his people with rhythms from artists such as Tracy Chapman, Ry Cooder and Lokua Kanza, or, as he usually puts it: “My music begins when the diaspora meets the root”. Settled in Barcelona in 2014, he describes himself as an “Ewe singer-songwriter” and asserts the ancestral roots of his blues: “I didn’t decide to play this genre. It is the music that comes out of me naturally. We all know that the blues in its current form was born in Africa. I can say that I was born in the cradle of the blues”. A genre that defines him intimately: “I think it has allowed me to be what I have always been”.