New video: "VERDE"

Check out my hot-off-the-computer video now available on YouTube and Vimeo. Links in all the social media icon on my site, or just look me up by name there.

This video contains footage shot by the incredibly talented and soft spoken Jamie Dowd, one of my artistic muses. :)

And the other natural images are from my latest travels near (to my backyard) and far (to favourite beaches).

This cover is my tribute to the song "Verde que te quiero verde" that I learned to play while performing music and poetry with the group "Voces Poéticas" run by one of my former students, Mariángeles Pérez, and including members of her family who are originally from Nicaragua, and another former student of mine, Leslie Usín Rojas, an amazing young Cuban-Canadian poet. I loved playing rumba flamenca in this group! We were 4 guitarists, a lead singer from Colombia, and the poet Leslie. When those guitars start strumming together in those rhythms, it makes you spirit sing and your feet tap. José Pérez was the lead guitarist, very talented solos. I had known this song for many years prior as a listener, as also as a text that I taught for decade in my university courses. The musical group has changed now, but the legacy of those initial years remain in its repetoire.

In this track I do my solo version, channelling all those past experiences and taking on the full guitar responsibility. The video of my performance was filmed by Jamie Dowd in the summer of 2021. I release it now with this video/imagery montage to honour Federico García Lorca, one of the world's best poets/authors, and one of my personal favourites. His poetry and dramatic texts are part of the canon of every major literature program at the university level. My favourite poem of his, of course, is "La guitarra." I have linked to the text (with English translation) here. I wrote a scholarly article about it once and will upload it soon, for those of you who'd like to read it.

This is my acoustic version of the song based on a poem by this Generation of 27 poet, Federico García Lorca. The poem, titled "Romance sonámbulo," was published in Lorca's 1928 poem collection, *Romancero gitano*. Lorca was a poet fascinated by flamenco music, and it served as his 'duende' motif of profound passion and inspiration as a poet and for the deep vein of golden spirit in life. Lorca's verses are already musical in their rhythmic verse and melodic setting of verbal tones, while they are also at once rooted in his love of music of his native Spain. He lived from 1898 until his untimely death in 1936 at the break of the Spanish Civil War.

The song based on Lorca's poem was composed by José Manuel Ortega Heredia as a rumba flamenca. It's song that's super well-known, made famous by artists such as Manzanita and Ana Belén, to name only two. This song is very well-known in the Spanish-speaking world.

For more about poetry set to music, which is an area I love to focus on in my work, check out more on my website, such as here.

Thank you for watching! Let me know what you think! And if you'd like to jam on it with me.

And thank you, again, to Jamie Dowd for recording the song and filming the video footage of my performance.

(c) 2022 Maria Figueredo, all rights reserved.