Andres Belmonte - Tariq (2019)

Andrés Belmonte publishes Tariq, a round trip between Arabic music and the Valencian tradition. The Valencian flautist is accompanied on this album by Efrén López, an international reference in oriental music; the percussionist David Gadea and the contrabass player Ales Cesarini.

The album will be presented on March 3 at Café Mercedes (València)
Tariq (Sedajazz, 2019) is a tribute to the magical encounter between the Arab and Valencian cultures. An album that distills the experience accumulated by the flautist Andrés Belmonte (1980, València) throughout his stays in Greece, Egypt and Turkey. In his second studio album, which goes on sale on March 1, the young Valencian musician performs a very personal reinterpretation of the Mediterranean tradition and the modal oriental music, passed by the modern jazz sieve cultivated during his years of training at the prestigious Codarts school in Rotterdam (Holland).
 
Andrés Belmonte belongs to a new generation of musicians who look at traditional music with new eyes. To do so, he has surrounded himself with the best musicians in his field: Efrén López, one of the great references in Turkish and Persian music in Europe; the percussionist David Gadea and the contrabass player Alas Cesarini. Belmonte, on the other hand, uses both conventional flutes and the ney, a type of ancestral reed flute very common in the Arabic repertoire and, most likely, the flute itself in Al-Andalús.
 
Tariq - a title that in Arabic means "way" - starts with a composition written by Mohamed Abdel Wahab -the "Mozart of Egyptian music" - and says goodbye with a song of Valencian batre. The album is in itself an exciting journey through time and space.

Andrés Belmonte studied classical and jazz at the Conservatory of Valencia and at the Codarts in Rotterdam respectively. He later studied Turkish Ney and Ottoman classical music with Ömer Erdoğdular, while in the field of Arabic Ney he trained at the Arab Music Conservatory in Cairo with Mahmoud Kamal and Mohamed Fouda.
He has played with Albert Sanz, Perico Sambeat, Carles Denia, Claudio Roditi, Jorge Rossy, Ronald Sniders and Hazem Shaheen. In 2005 he was a finalist for the Tete Montoliu Prize. In 2007 he published his first recording as leader, JAZZ-7. He is currently focused on the repertoire of Turkish and Arabic music with the flute "ney". He regularly collaborates with musicians of all kinds of genres: Brazilian music, jazz, hip-hop, classical or Mediterranean.