Quico Pi de la Serra

When Big Bill Broonzy became the first bluesman to perform in Barcelona, Quico Pi de la Serra was not yet eleven years old, but when at twenty he began to play the guitar in his first group he did so inspired by that African-American musician he had come to know through the few blues records that reached Barcelona in the early sixties, when he formed the group Els 4 Gats with some friends, making it a pioneer of the genre in Barcelona. Ironic, sharp and mordant, his lyrics made him one of the most incisive singer-songwriters of the Nova Cançó, the Catalan protest song, with the blues always dwelling at the bottom of his musical heart, and sharing it for almost three decades through his radio programme T’agrada el blues? A virtuoso and eternal lover of African-American music, in recent years he has forcefully taken up this side of his work again in collaboration with two fundamental figures of the Barcelona scene: Amadeu Casas and Joan Pau Cumellas. The many prizes and awards he has received throughout his career have neither dulled his lucidity when it comes to analysing the society in which he lives nor diminished his commitment to denouncing injustice and abuse.