Ornithology

This encounter pays tribute to Charlie Parker and Benny Harris’s classic Ornithology, and brings together two figures from Galicia who are both distinguished in their respective spheres: storyteller Quico Cadaval and jazz saxophonist Pablo Castaño.

Starting from one of the most popular and widely performed jazz standards, Cadaval sculpts a freeform story, revealing the experiences and the curiosities of the life, myth and sound persona of Bird, Parker’s nickname, placing them in dialogue with local music history. Castaño completes Cadaval’s narrations with his sax, reinterpreting musical landscapes that encompass Ornithology and other bebop classics. In a collaboration, both artists set forth an experience comprising oral and musical improvisation with comic, poetic and ironic flourishes.

The relation to birds culminates in a political and poetic conversation between word and music, with the flights of imagination and beauty, freedom and time opening an artistic and theatrical universe which suspends our usual modes of being and feeling.

Participants

Quico Cadaval is a storyteller, stage director and playwright. He began his career in the 1980s, founding the theatre company O Moucho Clerc with other artists from Galician theatre. He later started to work on a kind of individual performance he developed between traditional storytelling, the stage epic and literary cabaret. In recent years, he has converted this spectacle of oral narration, adapting it to environmental circumstances, the personal experiences of the artist and the audience’s biggest fears. Notable among his works are Obra (No comment) (2009), O Códice clandestino (1989) and Shakespeare para ignorantes (in a collaboration with Mofa&Befa, 2011 MAX Award). Throughout his career as a storyteller he has disseminated contemporary Galician storytelling at festivals like the Iber-American Theatre Festival, in Bogotá, the Buenos Aires International Literature Festival and the Palavras Andarilhas de Beja Festival.

Pablo Castaño is a saxophonist and composer. He obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Jazz Performance from the New School University in New York in 2007, and lived and worked as a freelance musician in the same city, also performing as a sideman in concerts and recordings with Tom Abbott, Stan Rubin and José James, among others. He currently resides in Galicia, where he regularly works with musicians such as Xacobe Martínez, Abe Rábade and Yago Vázquez, and leads his own septet and trio. He is part of the ensemble A opera dos 3 reás from the Galician Drama Centre (CDG), and lectures at the Professional Music Conservatoire of Ribeira (A Coruña) and the Escola ESTUDIO (Santiago de Compostela). In A-la-láa (aCentral Folque, 2018), his first record as an ensemble leader, he explores, through a jazz vocabulary, the melodies and forms of alalá, a core genre in the musical heritage of Galicia.