He is performing this Tuesday at Luz de Gas after having presented his first album, Ineffable, at the Teatro Gran Vía in Madrid two weeks ago. But he is an old acquaintance from Catalonia. The Argentinian Maxi Martínez has a Catalan father, grandmother and children, he lived in Barcelona for ten years and, he recalls, “I went around all the towns in Catalonia on weekends doing bowling, San Juan festivals and a bit of everything, doing whatever played”. With an orchestra, trios, doing rock, blues, venues, private events, parties… “I had a soul band for a while with which we did standard versions, also soul funk, and I still have a jazz trio now half hidden there …”, smile.
Twenty years of career on stage that he combined with a technology company. “I dedicated my whole life to it. Technology always fed me and my passion was music. I combined it whenever I could. I had a technology consulting company in the banking field, I worked for very boring people”, he smiles, and, he recalls, “basically I had two lives at once.”
He sold his company and, he recalls, “in theory I had to dedicate myself to living calmer, but the first thing I did was get involved again and set up a performing arts production company, Show Prime, just before the pandemic. I always say that it is a production company 100% pandemic. The moment in which we started is horrific because we premiered our first musical the day that Ayuso closed Madrid,” he says now funny. A production company that has created a dozen pieces with which it is touring Spain and that has opted not for Broadway and West End musicals but for national talent, for newly created works, such as Lavar, marcar, bury. “It is being a very crazy, very beautiful adventure,” he underlines.
“Musical theater brought us contact with a lot of artists, I spent three years putting up with it, setting up musical theater for others and enjoying it from below the stage, producing and learning a lot from very talented people, but when we started recording someone else’s album, we no longer I could take it more and I said to myself: this is my moment”, he recapitulates. “I came up and put aside any kind of taboos and stereotypes, if I’m older or younger, if I was an entrepreneur before or not, in the end you have to push forward what you believe. And I was also lucky to meet to the producers Emilio Esteban and Rafa Sardina, who also tempted me in some way”.
And his first album of his own came, Inefable, with five songs by a quintet and six by a big band, which is presented with up to 30 performers on stage in its big band version and with ten, tonight, in its acoustic version. A title that defines the entire project, which cannot be expressed in words.
“It’s a combination of jazz with other styles that make it a friendly jazz, nice to listen to. It’s the combination of jazz with Latin rhythms, and within Latin rhythms there’s a great variety, because there’s salsa, there’s cha-cha-chá, there’s bachata, there is tango, even within the same song we jump from one to the other and always below with a base of Latin jazz. There are songs that even sound pop, some of the ballads or slower songs depending on how you listen to them can sound like pop, but always with the DNA of Latin jazz underneath,” he explains.
An album recorded in Los Angeles, with the Monk’estra who played with Michael Bublé and with a quintet of Spanish, Cuban and Chilean musicians at Abbey Road in London. With luxury collaborators such as Paquito de Rivera, Ara Malikian, Chucho Valdés or Antonio Carmona. A work with themes such as My luck in which, he points out, “there is a mixture of life experiences, something must be good about age, which is that one has stories, a backpack, a career, trips, loves, heartbreaks and everything that happens in life to human beings”.
