ARRAIGO (Rooting)

Arraigo is a story of my becoming. These songs follow my journey on a sometimes rough, sometimes gentle, but always fertile path.

I am a foreigner, a happy stranger, my language is music. It gives me the feeling of being at home everywhere, though my home is nowhere.

This awareness of being uprooted came to me quite late. Well after growing up, studying, meeting people, traveling... building my life with a certain carefree attitude... During that time I wondered about my life, my language, my identity without really paying attention.

As I grew older, the urge to make sense of a lot of questions crept in as if I truly realized that I had uprooted myself.

When you live between two countries, France and Spain, and you are not comfortable in either of them, you constantly hesitate between two languages, between two words. I feel like I have two mouths and never know which one to use. Or as if there was an ocean current in my head. I am searching for the right soil to put down roots...

Arraigo was born out of this need. Arraigo means rooting in spanish. Though it was in France, in the forest of Fontainebleau, that this word came to me, as if the earth, the trees, the vegetation chose me.

Arraigo tells of this rooting, but it also speaks to contradictory feelings. Feelings of the fear of being far from everything, the desire to escape, and the desire to be from somewhere.

Arraigo, it represents hope.

MONICA’S DREAM QUARTET

The quartet was born during a concert at the Sunset Jazz club in Paris in 2015.

The first EP was recorded in February 2016, then the second in 2017.

Monica’s Dream Quartet is the dream of a peaceful and colorful world. An unusual journey through multiple acoustic landscapes, Monica's compositions combine Celtic sounds brought back from Scotland, the rhythmic energy of New Orleans, the lightness of Colombian birdsongs….

Woody notes, voice with guttural inflections from her mother tongue, intermingled in organic and sensual compositions...

Listening to Monica‘s Dream Quartet is to live a musical and sensory experience, it is to vibrate with the strings of a feral and yet poised violin, to hear the breath of a volcanic and yet velvet voice.

At the crossroads of jazz fusion and world music, nurtured in classical music, Monica’s Dream Quartet creates a groove that is organic, poetic, deeply personal and at the same time universal.

THE ENSEMBLE:

Monica Acevedo de Pablo, voix, violin.

Diego Parada Suarez: guitar

Thibaud Pontet: drums and piano

Dominique Muzeau: bass-electroacoustic.

Musical Collaborations: Eva Slongo ( alto), Marie Ange Wachter ( cello), Jim Funnell ( piano), Hubert Colau ( percussions/voix).