Sister Marion

A classically trained pianist, she allowed herself to be seduced by the improvisation of the blues and by its ability to take emotion to the limit. She immersed herself in the genre by practising a kind of musical archaeology that led her from her father’s Ray Charles records and the rock of the Rolling Stones to the music of Memphis Slim, Katie Webster, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nina Simone, Wynona Carr and Otis Spann, to name but a small part of her own particular calendar of sonic saints. An artist and a woman of deep culture, both musical and otherwise, she displays an elegant instrumental mastery and a subtle, captivating voice, along with an unusual discretion and a blues militancy that led her to preside over the Societat de Blues de Barcelona between 2010 and 2016. She shares her knowledge of the blues and of music in general with her students of Musical Language and Piano. Her nickname crystallises a link between the profane and the divine, stemming from the years when she played the piano in the church of the religious school where she studied and where she had her first encounter with gospel, following the duality between pulpit and stage that is characteristic of African-American roots music, or, as she herself defines it: music in black and white.