YAWAUD

PRESENTATION OF THE NEW DISK BY EDUARDO LAGUILLO

 

For a long time I’ve been wanting to unite and embody on a single disk many of the musical influences that have worked on me since the beginning of my musical career. It’s a long list. The Beatles, American folksongs, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Paul Simon and James Taylor branded my childhood and puberty years. The symphonic rock of Genesis (Boy, early Genesis with Peter Gabriel . . . What a lot of nights spent listening, spellbound, to the magical world they had to offer). The timbric quality of Yes, the breadth of Pink Floyd, the lyricism of Lake (Emerson, Lake & Palmer) and the crudity of King Crimson –I remember my first concert was King Crimson in Granollers, with Bruford on the drums, playing standing up. With David Cross on the violin, John Wetton . . . . It hit me hard; I was 16 years old. All that plus the freshness of Jethro Tull, Premiata Forneria Marconi, deTráffic, the madness of Split Enz and the intellectual quality of Hatfield and the North and Corea fed my teenage years. Zappa always impressed me. Mahavishnu opened up my mind, and later Jobim and Brazilian music (Chico Buarque, Gal Costa, Simone, Milton Nascimento, Nana Vasconcelos) gave me the magic of the mystery of harmony. In the meantime I learned to play the flamenco guitar with an old-school master from Jerez, Francisco Espinosa. Paco (de Lucía) was my teacher as well; what an incredible musician and an incredible person!

Later, Música Urbana, Steely Dan, Donald Fagen, Pat Metheny Group, Oregón, Bach, Mahler, Liszt, Richard Strauss and Schönberg made me into a structured musician. I loved symphonic music and its orchestral writing. And of course Mompou and the Mediterranean light of Barcelona gave me the melancholy and the mist that there sometimes is in my music. Years later, I learned to love Indian devotional music, which I found by accident on a journey of spiritual questing in India. I became initiated in the classical music of northern India by learning to play the sarod, a 25-stringed instrument with which I fell, and still remain, in love. And lastly from Eliseo Parra I learned to know and love our own music, that of our elders. Incredibly rich music.

I want this disk to accompany and bring peace to the life of people in transit on our planet. Children too are represented on one track of the disk, supplying with their voices the innocence we search for so hard.
Voice, piano, sarod, guitars, harmonium, bass and keyboards are the instruments I play myself. Excellent musicians and friends play with me on the double bass, percussion instruments, wind instruments, bowed string instruments, santur and choruses.
This recording contains a larger number of “songs” than instrumental tunes, and that’s a new formula for me. The deep-register voice à la Tom Waits; the reedy register of the Renaissance contratenor; playful references to pop music; all run through with texts in different languages such as Sanskrit, English, Latin and German –These show my approach to different cultures at different points in my life.
I hope you find listening to this music an agreeable, renewing experience.

Affectionately yours,



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