Majagua

Abstract

CLAUDIA GOMEZ- BIOGRAPHY

Claudia Gómez has a long and fruitful musical career that started in San Francisco twenty-five years ago, where she earned a reputation as one of the most graceful and moving singer-songwriters of the San Francisco Bay Area. Her starkly beautiful lyrics - intensely honest, insistently personal - float elegantly on waves of lush harmony and supple rhythm, delivering an experience that is at once ancient and entirely original.

Her mastery of the American jazz idiom, combined with her fluency in the broad spectrum of Latin American traditions and her flawless voice, have allowed her to transcend the conventional boundaries of genre to create a music universal in its appeal. The San Francisco Chronicle called her "one of the best singers in town"; the San Francisco Examiner called her "a Bay Area treasure"; and she has entranced audiences from London to Bogotá to Tokyo with her dazzling performances. Born into a musical family in Medellín, Colombia - at the feet of the Andes, between the rainforests and the Caribbean - Claudia began playing guitar at the age of twelve. She made her performance debut at age 14, and by the time she was 18 had begun touring her native country with an all-female group called Cuarteto Ellas. After extensive periods of study and performance in London and Colombia - during which she absorbed the musical heritages not only of Latin America (Cuban son, Brazilian samba, Colombian cumbia) but of Europe as well (particularly folk and rock) - Claudia settled into the fertile artistic soil of the Bay Area, where she quickly established herself as a central figure in the Latin music community. In subsequent years she has continued to expand and strengthen her skills with arrangement and composition, mastering the American art form of jazz and merging it with her rich international background and tremendous vocal talents to develop a unique musical identity.

In San Francisco, Claudia performed alongside the masters of jazz and Latin American music, including Toninho Horta, Tuck & Patti, Kenny Rankin and Alex de Grassi. In 1995, Claudia became a member of the vocal- percussion ensemble Crosspulse, with whom she travelled nationally and internationally. Claudia has performed regularly at premier Bay Area venues such as Yoshi's Nitespot, the Great American Music Hall, the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, Kimball's, and the Noe Valley Ministry. She has played major music festivals throughout California, including the San Francisco Jazz Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Russian River Jazz Festival, the San Jose Jazz Festival, Festival at the Lake, and the Filoli Jazz Series, among others. There Claudia recorded three albums as a solo artist: CLAUDIA CANTA BRASIL (Arete Records, 1989's), SALAMANDRA (1992, Clarity Audio Recordings) and TIERRADENTRO, originally released by Green Linnet Records in 1996.

Claudia left the Bay Area in 1998 to search for her music and poetry roots in Spain, where she lived until 2002. There she played with various Latin American musicians, among them, Gladston Galliza (from Brazil), Pavel Urkiza, from Cuba, Antonio Serrano, from Spain, Orlando Sandoval, from Colombia, and with them she recorded her fourth album VIVIR CANTANDO. In 2002 she moved back to Colombia to go deeper into her music traditions and from there she travels the world, presenting her unique and personal vocal and guitar interpretation of Colombian musics as well as her own compositions. Upon the returning to her native Colombia, in 2004 Claudia records MAJAGUA, considered by many to be one of the best albums of Colombian music to come out in that year.

Having Colombia as her home base since 2002, Claudia continues to travel around the world performing her own music or representing Colombia in various settings: United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Spain, England, Holland, France, Germany and Japan, among others.

In 2009 Claudia released ARROPAME QUE TENGO FRIO, an exquisite album with a selection of 16 Romances from the Atrato River (Colombia) which won a grant from the Colombian government and it’s the joint result of a doctoral research by Alejandro Tobón and Claudia’s desire to recognize and appropriate vocally other musical models present in the cultural diversity of Colombia.

At the end of 2010, Claudia puts out a challenging album, a live studio recording featuring her own compositions with only her guitar playing and her singing. Twelve songs that speak of love to nature, love to animals, love to brothers, family and friends. CLAUDIA GOMEZ TAL CUAL is an intimate and acoustic delivery of her most inner feelings, a dialogue between her voice and her guitar. No editing, no technical tricks, a live recording, truly unplugged.