Alexis Cuadrado Group: A Lorca Soundscape

Alexis Cuadrado and his group perform at the 50th anniversary convention of the International Society of Bassists.

Long before terms like “1 percenters” entered our current vernacular, the great Spanish playwright and poet, Federico García Lorca, was writing in 1929 about the inequality he witnessed while in New York City. Premiéred in 2013, A Lorca Soundscape is Alexis Cuadrado’s critically acclaimed cycle of original jazz protest songs drawn from Lorca’s poetry. “Considering our current political situation, getting back to Poet in New York is my way of forming a protest. Even though the book was written over eighty years ago, it baffles me to see how the inequality, racism and injustice that Lorca describes are still present in our daily narrative. The characters may have changed, but the plot line is the same,” says Cuadrado.

The author and literary critic Melcion Mateu elaborates in the album’s liner notes: “Alexis Cuadrado is an artist in pursuit of lyricism, a lyricism that functions as a necessary contrast to the schizophrenic logic of a sick city and society; like the voice that prevails against chaos and injustice so as to make its message heard. Perhaps it’s for this reason that A Lorca Soundscape is an album both clear and complex at once: complex like the city depicted by Lorca, by means of his accumulation of discordant images, his rhythms and sounds; and clear by means of the sheer power of his words. On Cuadrado’s A Lorca Soundscape, the rhythms of the city-which move from swing to bolero, passing through flamenco and new music, live together with the exigency to express his message (…) And, there is always an emotion, an “ecstatic truth”, to put it in the words of the filmmaker Werner Herzog, words that Cuadrado often repeats, that reveals immediately the moment in which an individual recognizes him or herself before the agitating great metropolis.