María José Llergo is the ideal person to meet when you are having a bad day, the one who speaks positively to you, the one who draws lessons rather than resentments, the one who in the middle of the conversation starts singing and you don’t know where the music started and where the words “I live in love with the world around me,” she explains during her visit to Barcelona, ??the city where she studied for 6 years, to promote her new album, Ultrabelleza (Sony). “I was already in love when I came here and discovered that the society was incredibly diverse and large,” which is why she wanted to dedicate her new album “to all the different ways of inhabiting the body, of loving, of skin, to that multicultural solidarity that gives us “It allows us to learn from our diverse origins and walk the streets together.” This Wednesday it will be shown in Barcelona before the public at the Paral·lel 62 room within the Voll-Damm Jazz Festival.
After debuting with Sanación and winning the Goya for best song with The Sea Waits for You, the artist from Córdoba has created a song to life and plurality, to love for oneself and for others in all possible ways. Musically, she takes another step in her exploration of new sounds, with the doors open to electronics from the flamenco home where her heart resides, “it makes my roots be wings, and my wings are rooted.” Supported by producers such as Lost Twin, Zahara and Martí Perarnau, Oddliquor or Antonio Narváez, Llergo has expanded her color palette so that each song sounds different, “In Sanación I already started to play with that atmosphere, but I have developed and nourished it more” .
“I can be a bullfighter, a sword and a bull at the same time,” says Llergo in Superpoder, another superlative term for an autobiographical song where he claims the strength, the power, that gives him the ability to express his feelings, no matter what they are. “Being sensitive is a superpower, it allows me to turn ugly into pretty, pain into beauty, it allows me to realize things, sometimes long before others, to connect with the world around me in a deeper tone, not only superficial, asking transcendental questions that interest me very much.”
“My origin gives me a lot of home,” he comments when remembering Pozoblanco, the town in Córdoba where he was born and where his family lives. “Many times they think that being from a rural area is something bad, that there are retrograde environments, but for me it is the opposite.” That is why he takes advantage of any opportunity to return there, forming a vital triangle between the city of Madrid where he works, the capital’s mountains where he currently resides, and the family home, where he is reunited with his grandparents, who are the soundtrack of his childhood. .
His first songs had the voice of his grandfather, “his boleros, his fandangos, his serranas, which is the palo that he sings best.” That’s why he considers her his teacher of life and singing, also because there was no money for records in his house. “Until I was nine years old I only listened to my grandfather, I learned his songs, I sang them and played around. Then sometimes on TV I would be amazed watching people sing, but it was so ephemeral that I didn’t have time to learn the song.”
At the age of nine, the first computer arrived at his house, and with it the discovery of the blues, “which for me was the flamenco of the African-American people,” by Muddy Waters or Billie Holiday, “it was like a Girl with the Combs, it has a voice.” very similar”. The discography of Camarón, Enrique Morente, Lole and Manuel, modern music and jazz followed, “I loved how Etta James sang those beautiful soul songs.”
From there he went to the conservatory, he learned violin for ten years before arriving in Barcelona where he studied at Esmuc and the Conservatori del Liceu, but he has never forgotten his own learning. “The way of learning the violin is very different from how I learned to sing with my grandfather in the middle of the countryside. The beat was the lesson of him opening the furrows, I learned to sing by playing to dodge the water, because he opened the furrow, the water ran past and running he had to water, and while he was singing. Learning to Fly is dedicated to him, a song that he turns into a ritual to exorcise the fear of finding himself far from his side “when the sky claims you.”
And while little María José played to decorate the melodies with her voice, “to make it sound different every time, to create, because my grandfather created. Every time I had a conflict with the neighbor I would make a fandango, and I didn’t know how to read or write, but I created and was teaching myself to compose, to sing in the here and now, to reflect what I felt at the moment.”
That’s why now María José Llergo goes to the recording studios with nothing prepared “but sure of myself, all the songs on the album have been written, composed and recorded at the moment” in a conscientious job where she discarded more than 20 songs beforehand. to stay with the 12 winners, songs that travel through the urban area to return to the roots. “The link with flamenco is in me, in my voice, in my way of writing, in the reminiscence I make of Lola and Manuel or Valdelomar in Vision and Reflection, of the boleros in Tanto tiempo, it is in oneself, in maintaining that purity.”
