Martí Elias Vinyals

This elegant, precise and refined drummer had the good fortune to hear blues and jazz at home from the time he was small, and it is therefore natural that he should have set his steps towards the conservatoire, which he left in order to join Down Home, a group in which he had the chance to delve deeper into a genre that ended up fascinating him. He gave his first paid concert when he was only eleven years old, and three decades later he has become one of the most appreciated drummers on the African-American music circuit, of which the blues is the foundation that he would recommend any musician, whatever their genre, to know and master: “I love the blues for its great variety of possibilities. It can be energetic and intense, but at the same time gentle and melancholic. And between those two points there is a whole scale of colours and possibilities.” With his courteous amiability he states that the best thing the blues has given him is interaction with other musicians: “The possibility of meeting anywhere in the world and saying: ‘Shall we play?’”