piano
DISCOGRAPHY
Abe Rábade has published 15 recording works, since he debuted in 2001 with Babel de Sons. His proposals make up a varied range of formats: solo piano, trio, quintet, sextet, octet and symphony orchestra.
Babel de Sons (2001) Xingra Records.
Simetrías (2002) Xingra Records.
GHU! Project vol. 1 (2004) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Playing on Light -7 sounding photos (2006) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Open Doors (2008) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Piano Solo (2009) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Zigurat (2010) Nuba / Karonte Records.
A Modo (2012) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Versons (2013) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Tránsitos (2015) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Once (2016) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Doravante (2018) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Piano Solo (2020) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Sorte (2021) Nuba / Karonte Records.
Botánica (2022) Nuba / Karonte Records.
"For Abe Rábade there are no cultural barriers,
that why he is one of the most brilliant musicians on the national jazz scene"
Carlos Lara, Tomajazz
BOTÁNICA
Released on November 18th, BOTÁNICA is the new album by Abe Rábade for Karonte Records.
14 original compositions dedicated to Galicia's native vegetation form a field of vision open to the world that merges the rural with the urban.
The musical writing and the piano of Abe Rábade they meet the traditional Galician voice and percussion of one of the most prestigious values of today: Davide Salvado.
Daniel Juarez to the tenor saxophone, Virxilio da Silva to the guitar Ton Risco to the vibraphone, Jimena Andión to the cello, Pablo Martin Caminero to the double bass and Naíma Acuña to the drums they complete a heterogeneous artistic collective, based on the integration of musical aesthetics and the exploration free of prejudices.
The album is number 15 in Abe Rábade's discography. BOTÁNICA was presented live in Santiago de Compostela on September 24, at the Teatro Principal.
"It is possible that in this spontaneous crossing, in this precise and inspired construction of the whole, this open and truthful music could have been the best example of that week [Málaga Jazz Festival] of what jazz meant, means and will be”
Jesús Gonzalo, Tomajazz
ABE RÁBADE TRIO
Abe Rábade Trio is a project born in Boston in 1996, lead by Abe, by Paco Charlín and Val Tzenkov.
Shortly after he will settle in Galicia with his first album "Babel de Sons"; with the addition of the trio of Ramón Angel Rey.
Since then, the group's musical career has not stopped growing, with a lot of projects and albums behind them.
Currently the formation is composed of Abe Rábade on the piano, Pablo Martín Caminero to the double bass and Bruno Pedrosot o the drums, with already six recording projects edited together. The last one, Doravante, presented at the Monterey Jazz Festival (California, USA).
"The connection between classical music and jazz was one of the areas that Abe Rábade had in mind for a long time and when the opportunity presented itself
faced the challenge and the result [the album Tránsitos, with the Real Philharmonic of Galicia] it cannot be more spectacular”
Blog Preso Ventanilla
SYMPHONIC WORK
Abe Rábade has been cultivating his facet as a composer for large format for years.
He premiered several pieces for jazz orchestra as early as the 1990s at Berklee College, when he was writing for the Bigband directed by Greg Hopkins.
In the 2000s he recorded two originals for bigband with the René González Bigband in the Canary Islands.
In the 2010s, he premiered the pieces Paseo dos Gafos and Vieiros de Luz for Symphonic Band, as well as the works Prana and Babel de Sons for Jazz orchestra.
He had the opportunity to receive classes from Antón García Abril from 2012 to 2016. This great composer supervised Abe Rábade's two premieres for symphony orchestra to date: Tránsitos (2015) and Tempos Velados (2018), both with the Real Filharmonía de Galicia.
In 2021 he wrote an hour and a half original music program for the Espinho Jazz Orchestra (Portugal), in which he is the main soloist.
"The Compostelan pianist in his two decades of always restless search had never reached so far, in splendor and sophistication, as with Botánica. Because here the syntax is not only jazzy, but also traditional, folkloric and close to chamber music"
Fernando Neira, Undiscoaldía
HARMONIZED VOICES
Orality is, indisputably, one of the richest sources of human expressiveness. Considering this, listening, imitating, transcribing (and eventually, playing in real time or even harmonizing) fragments of orality needs an in-depth study of expressive resources, that ends having a spectacular return in “conventional” music.
This was well known by the great Hermeto Pascoal, one of the pioneers of this technique. He baptized these transcriptions/harmonizations with the eloquent name of “Aura de of the Voice”.
Abe Rábade has experimented in this area since 2008. The pieces range from humor to poetry, passing throught the demanding, trascendental and random.
"The most remarkable thing about Rábade's work is the formal work, the labored motivic development and its coexistence in a very natural way with more openly improvised moments. Because the pianist's music is still understood within the terms of jazz, but of a modern jazz that drinks from music that has resonances both in the gospel and in the jazz tradition and Galician"
Juan Carlos Justiniano, Codalario
LORCA NAMORADO
The work Lorca Namorado was premiered in the Praza da Quintana (Santiago de Compostela) on May 30, 2019. The composer and pianist Abe Rábade brought to the stage a personal version of the 6 Galician Poems by Federico Garcia Lorca, the only work of the brilliant Granadan author written in a language other than Spanish.
The fact that Lorca chose the Galician language for a collection of poems is, in addition to a historic gift, a statement of intent that delves into the experimental and risky conception of the arts.
Lorca Namorado includes different grooves such as “xota” and “muiñeira vella” (traditional from Galiza) or “soleá” and “bulería” (traditional from Andalucía). A lullaby and a jazz ballad complete the show atmosphere. One foot in the Galician tradition, another in the flamenco world and both hands in jazz, which knows how to hybridize because Jazz was born grandiosely impure.
The project presents songs based on the 6 Galician Poems, respecting the delicious rhythm that connects each line with a touch of “foliada” (traditional Galician concert format) or “tablao” (typical venue for flamenco performance).
EIVISSA JAZZ EXPERIENCE
Since 2006 Abe Rábade has been the artistic director of the Eivissa Jazz Experience, a very original proposal of the Eivissa Jazz Festival. It consists of designing a different band each year, with musicians who have participated in any previous edition of the festival. The repertoire is always put together by all the members of the band, rehearsed only on the eve of the performance. Each of these "ephemeral" formations of the Eivissa Jazz Experience is therefore born and dies in an edition of the Eivissa Jazz, which gives them a unique appeal.
In 2016, Marco Torres Walker made the documentary "Ibiza Jazz, the Experience", which shows the process of preparation and assembly of the Ibiza Jazz Experience of that year.
"The connection between classical music and jazz was one of the areas that Abe Rábade had in mind for a long time and when the opportunity presented itself
faced the challenge and the result [the album Tránsitos, with the Real Philharmonic of Galicia] it cannot be more spectacular”
Blog Preso Ventanilla
"Rábade's ability to fuse jazz elements with Galician traditional music and chamber music is impressive and shows a solid understanding of musical diversity.
Botánica is a captivating musical journey that takes the listener through nature and tradition, while exploring the fusion of musical genres. The richness of the instrumentation, the inclusion of literary texts and the skill of the pianist / composer, make this album an exceptional listening experience that delights and surprises each time."
Carlos Monje, Diario Folk