MA Lonesome

Ingenious, sharp, caustic and with a streak of irreverence, this restless harmonica player landed in the world of the blues by way of the Escola de Blues de Barcelona, although his encounter — or rather his collision — with the genre had a far more prosaic and accidental setting: “I came to the blues because first I came to Ikea to keep my friend Susana company, and she gave me a toy harmonica. From there on, everything went from bad to worse.” His Galician sense of humour, the land his family comes from, has allowed him to move about with ease and to pour out humour and love for a musical genre whose deepest side captivated him: “The expressive and authentic side, what in flamenco would be the ‘duende’. That to play it, feeling it matters more than understanding it. And the mystique that surrounds it.” A born stage animal, he discovered his vocation in the most conspicuous way, as he himself confesses: “I started singing to carry the tune, if you’ll pardon the redundancy. That is, when I realised that everybody follows whoever is singing. And also to stand out, to make myself noticed, I mean.” One day he stepped onto a stage and never came down again, but not content with that, he decided to widen his range and seek new audiences and new accomplices in Argentine lands, and ever since he has lived in a permanent musical summer.