Alvaro Imperial - Calima (2022)

Calima is suspension, density, a sensation that sticks to the bodies. It’s orange on the horizon. It’s the South. In his debut album, the guitarist Alvaro Imperial has captured his way of understanding jazz in the last years, embracing forms that take us from Berlin to Barcelona and that seek to look beyond, to his own musical origins, at the time of the Calima.

His compositions combine tradition and experimentation and seek to place the interplay of live music in a leading space, the lofty place for jazz. For this reason, a quartet and quintet formation are offered to explore, from different tones and sonorities, the creation of a music that gets into the bodies and fuses influences and forms.

In this album, Imperial is accompanied by musicians who delve into this game and offer diverse views of jazz that come together in the seven compositions in Calima: Txema Riera (piano), Ancor Miranda (drums), Héctor Tejedo (double bass) and the special collaboration by Perico Sambeat, a benchmark of jazz in Spain and essential to this work.