Vicente Zúmel

He fell in love with the blues at the age of eighteen, searching for the root of the music he was listening to back in the early seventies, when the genre was still in its infancy in our country. He created the Harmònica Zúmel Blues Band, a pioneering band on the Spanish scene and the seedbed of many of Barcelona’s first groups; he captained the residencies at La Cova del Drac, where many of the city’s musicians cut their teeth; he recorded the first blues record in Catalonia and he created a radio programme, La Hora del Blues, which has been on the air for more than forty years. At the side of his partner Roser, ever since they were little more than teenagers, he has been a privileged witness to the evolution of African-American roots music in our country, playing with most of the North American bluesmen who came to Barcelona in the seventies and eighties, to a great extent thanks to the work of this conscientious scholar, persistent polemicist and tireless populariser. A regular contributor to the international specialist press, he was part of the founding team of the Societat de Blues de Barcelona, of which he was the first president. He stopped playing in 1999 and since then he has devoted himself to programming weekly concerts at the Museu d’Art Modern de Barcelona and to acting as the historic missionary of the blues.