Événement

New World Flamenco Music w/ Thomas Michaud &; John Gilliat

New World Flamenco Music
w/ Thomas Michaud & John Gilliat

Sunday, June 20th at 7pm

$20 advance, $25 at the door

John Gilliat, widely recognized as one of Western Canada's premier Flamenco guitarists, was surfing the internet in 2001 when he came across the music of a Bay Area artist that shared his genre.

Mesmerized by a sound that infused Flamenco with slow jazz and a plethora of world rhythms, Gilliat began emailing other Vancouver musicians with links to the songs on Tomas Michaud's third CD, I Must Be Dreaming. One of Gilliat's more web-savvy colleagues did a bit of online research and emailed back with the phone number to the Alameda music store that Michaud owned.

Thus did Michaud and Gilliat begin comparing notes and forging a friendship that, after six years, finally resulted in several concerts together including a 2007 Vancouver concert hailed by one critic as "a world symphony of two."

The encore unfolds on June 20th when the two guitarists perform "New World Flamenco" at Alameda's Rhythmix Cultural Works.

"This time I have home-field advantage," said Michaud, who has just launch his sixth CD, Beauty and Fire, this past September.

"Clearly, Beauty and Fire is the best work of Tomas' career, and that's really saying something because he is a master craftsman with the guitar," said former Santana bassist David Margen, who will back Michaud and Gilliat at the Rhythmix concert. "There's a certain genius to marrying the beauty of Flamenco to the melody of jazz and then taking it up a notch by instilling world all these rhythms."

Michaud, a Cal State Hayward who has owned Starland Music Center in Alameda since 1980, is performing for the first time at the 3 year-old Rhythmix Cultural Center, his hometown's premier acoustical venue. "I've wanted to get behind the microphone at this place since I saw the blueprints for it," he noted.

For Gilliat, who has released four CDs and bills himself as a practitioner of Rumba Flamenco, the concert offers the opportunity to further an international collaboration. "John's a Californian who spent a lot of his musically formative years in Latin and South America. I'm a Canadian who drew a lot of musical inspiration from touring Japan. There is truly a world influence in our convergence."