Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar Caballero, credited professionally as Pedro Almodóvar, is a Spanish filmmaker, screenwriter and former actor. He came to prominence as a director and screenwriter during La Movida Madrileña, a cultural renaissance that followed after the end of Francoist Spain, his first few films characterised the sense of political freedom of the period. In 1986, he established his own film production company, El Deseo, with his younger brother Agustín Almodóvar, responsible for producing all of his films since Law of Desire. Almodóvar achieved international recognition for his black comedy-drama film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, went on to more success with the dark romantic comedy film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, the melodrama High Heels and the romantic drama thriller Live Flesh. His subsequent two films won an Academy Award each: All About My Mother received the award for Best Foreign Language Film while Talk to Her earned him the award for Best Original Screenplay.
Almodóvar followed this with the drama Volver, the romantic thriller Broken Embraces, the psychological thriller The Skin I Live In and the drama Julieta, all of which were in competition for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. His films are marked by his employment of certain actors and creative personnel, complex narratives, pop culture, popular songs, irreverent humour, strong colours, glossy décor. Desire, passion and identity are among Almodóvar's most prevalent themes. Acclaimed as one of the most internationally successful Spanish filmmakers, Almodóvar and his films have gained worldwide interest and developed a cult following, he has won two Academy Awards, five British Academy Film Awards, six European Film Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, nine Goya Awards and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1997, Almodóvar received the French Legion of Honour, followed by the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts by the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1999, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and received an honorary doctoral degree in 2009 from Harvard University in addition to an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Oxford in 2016 for his contribution to the arts.
In 2013, he received an honorary European Film Academy Achievement in World Cinema Award. In January 2017 he was named as President of the Jury for the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born on 25 September 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, a small rural town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in Spain, he has two older sisters and María Jesús, one brother Agustín. His father, Antonio Almodóvar, was a winemaker, his mother, Francisca Caballero, who died in 1999, was a letter reader and transcriber for illiterate neighbours; when Almodóvar was eight years old, the family sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, in western Spain, with the hope that he might someday become a priest. His family joined him in Cáceres, where his father opened a gas station and his mother opened a bodega where she sold her own wine. Unlike Calzada, there was a cinema in Cáceres. "Cinema became my real education, much more than the one I received from the priest", he said in an interview.
Almodóvar was influenced by Luis Buñuel. Against his parents' wishes, Almodóvar moved to Madrid in 1967 to become a filmmaker; when caudillo Francisco Franco closed the National School of Cinema in Madrid, he became self-taught. To support himself, Almodóvar had a number of jobs, including selling used items in the famous Madrid flea market El Rastro and as an administrative assistant with Spanish phone company Telefónica, where he worked for twelve years. Since he worked only until three in the afternoon, he had the rest of the day to pursue his film-making. In the early 1970s, Almodóvar became interested in experimental theatre, he collaborated with the vanguard theatrical group Los Goliardos, in which he played his first professional roles and met actress Carmen Maura. Madrid's flourishing alternative cultural scene became the perfect scenario for Almodóvar's social talents, he was a crucial figure in La Movida Madrileña, a cultural renaissance that followed the death of Francisco Franco. Alongside Fabio McNamara, Almodóvar sang in a glam rock parody duo.
Writing under the pseudonym Patty Diphusa, Almodóvar penned various articles for major newspapers and magazines, such as El País, Diario 16 and La Luna as well as contributing to comic strips and stories in counterculture magazines, such as Star, El Víbora and Vibraciones. He published a novella, Fuego en las entrañas and kept writing stories that were published in a compilation volume entitled El sueño de la razón. Almodóvar bought his first camera, a Super-8, with his first paycheck from Telefónica when he was 22 years old, began to make hand-held short films. Around 1974, he made his first short film, by the end of the 1970s they were shown in Madrid's night circuit and in Barcelona; these shorts had overtly sexual narratives and no soundtrack: Dos putas, o, Historia de amor que termina en boda in 1974. He remembers, "I showed them in bars, at parties… I could not add a soundtrack because it was v
Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank
Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, is a British architect whose company, Foster + Partners, maintains an international design practice famous for high-tech architecture. He is the President of the Norman Foster Foundation; the Norman Foster Foundation promotes interdisciplinary thinking and research to help new generations of architects and urbanists to anticipate the future. The foundation, which opened in June 2017, operates globally, he is one of Britain's most prolific architects of his generation. In 1999, he was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture. In 2009, Foster was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in the Arts category. In 1994, he received the AIA gold medal. Norman Foster was born to Robert Foster and Lilian Smith in 1935 in Reddish, Cheshire, they moved, soon after his birth, two miles to 4 Crescent Grove in Levenshulme, where they lived in poverty: Foster has no recollection of Reddish. Foster's parents were diligent, hard workers – so diligent that Foster, as an only child, felt their heavy workload restricted his relationship with them and he was looked after by neighbours or other family members.
He attended Burnage Grammar School for Boys in Burnage. In a Guardian interview in 1999, Foster said he always felt'different' at school and was bullied, he retired into the world of books, he considered himself quiet and awkward in his early years making faux pas. Foster described Manchester as "one of the workshops of the world" and "the embodiment of a great city", his father, worked at Metropolitan-Vickers, Trafford Park which fuelled Foster's interest in engineering and design, he was fascinated with the process of designing. He says. Specific interests included a hobby he maintains today. Foster's father convinced him to take the entrance exam for Manchester Town Hall's trainee scheme which he passed in 1951 and took a job as an office junior in the Treasurer's Department. A colleague, Mr Cobb's son, was studying architecture and his interest led to Foster considering a career in architecture. After working in the Manchester City Treasurer's office, Foster completed his National Service in 1953 serving in the Royal Air Force, a choice inspired by his passion for aircraft.
Foster returned to Manchester, not wanting to return to the town hall as his parents wished and unsure of which path to follow. Foster was searching for a world away from his working-class roots which led to the alienation of his parents. Foster took a job as assistant to a contract manager with John Bearshaw and Partners, a local architectural practice; the staff advised him, that if he wished to become an architect, he should prepare a portfolio of drawings using the perspective and shop drawings from Bearshaw's practice as an example. Bearshaw was so impressed with the drawings that he promoted the young Foster to the drawing department of the practice. In 1956 Foster won a place at the University of Manchester School of City Planning. Foster was not eligible for a maintenance grant so took up a number of part-time jobs to fund his studies, becoming an ice-cream salesman, night-club bouncer and working night shifts at a bakery to make crumpets, he combined these with self-tuition via visits to the local library in Levenshulme.
Foster took a keen interest in the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer and graduated from Manchester in 1961. Foster won the Henry Fellowship to the Yale School of Architecture, where he met future business partner Richard Rogers and earned his master's degree. Vincent Scully encouraged Rogers to travel in America for a year. After returning to the UK in 1963 he set up an architectural practice as Team 4 with Richard Rogers, Su Brumwell and the sisters Georgie and Wendy Cheesman. Georgie was the only one of the team that had passed her RIBA exams allowing them to set up in practice on their own. Team 4 earned a reputation for high-tech industrial design. After Team 4 went their separate ways and Wendy Cheesman founded Foster Associates in 1967, which became Foster and Partners in 1999. A long period of collaboration with American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller began in 1968 and continued until Fuller's death in 1983, they collaborated on several projects that became catalysts in the development of an environmentally sensitive approach to design – including the Samuel Beckett Theatre project.
They concentrated on industrial buildings. The turning point was the 1969 leisure center for Fred. Olsen Lines in London Docklands, where workers and managers are not separated any more. Foster and Partners' breakthrough building in the UK was the Willis Faber & Dumas headquarters in Ipswich, of 1974; the client was a family run insurance company which wanted to restore a sense of community to the workplace. Foster created open plan office floors. In a town not over-endowed with public facilities, the roof gardens, 25 metre swimming pool and gymnasium enhanced the quality of life for the company's 1200 employees; the building has a full-height glass façade moulded to the medieval street plan and contributes drama, subtly shifting from opaque, reflective black to a glowing backlit transparency as the sun sets. The design was inspired by the Daily Express Building in Manchester a work Foster admired in his youth; the building is now Grade I* listed. The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, an art gallery and museum on the campus of the University of East Ang
Sebastião Salgado
Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado Júnior is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist. He has traveled in over 120 countries for his photographic projects. Most of these have appeared in numerous press books. Touring exhibitions of his work have been presented throughout the world. Salgado is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, he was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant in 1982, Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992 and the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship in 1993. Since April 2016 he is a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts at the Institut de France. Salgado was born on February 8, 1944 in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. After a somewhat itinerant childhood, Salgado trained as an economist, earning a master’s degree in economics from the University of São Paulo in Brazil, he began work as an economist for the International Coffee Organization traveling to Africa on missions for the World Bank, when he first started taking photographs.
He chose to abandon a career as an economist and switched to photography in 1973, working on news assignments before veering more towards documentary-type work. Salgado worked with the photo agency Sygma and the Paris-based Gamma, but in 1979, he joined the international cooperative of photographers Magnum Photos, he left Magnum in 1994 and with his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado formed his own agency, Amazonas Images, in Paris, to represent his work. He is noted for his social documentary photography of workers in less developed nations, they reside in Paris. He has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2001. Salgado works on long term, self-assigned projects many of which have been published as books: The Other Americas, Workers and Genesis; the latter three are mammoth collections with hundreds of images each from all around the world. His most famous pictures are of a gold mine in Brazil called Serra Pelada. Between 2004 and 2011, Salgado worked on Genesis, aiming at the presentation of the unblemished faces of nature and humanity.
It consists of a series of photographs of landscapes and wildlife, as well as of human communities that continue to live in accordance with their ancestral traditions and cultures. This body of work is conceived as a potential path to humanity’s rediscovery of itself in nature. In September and October 2007, Salgado displayed his photographs of coffee workers from India, Guatemala and Brazil at the Brazilian Embassy in London; the aim of the project was to raise public awareness of the origins of the popular drink. Together, Lélia and Sebastião have worked since the 1990s on the restoration of a small part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. In 1998, they created the Instituto Terra; the institute is dedicated to a mission of reforestation and environmental education. Salgado and his work are the focus of the film The Salt of the Earth, directed by Wim Wenders and Salgado's son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado; the film won a special award at Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the best Documentary Feature at the 2015 Academy Awards.
1982: W. Eugene Smith Grant from the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund. 1985: Oskar Barnack Award. 1989: Hasselblad Award, Hasselblad Foundation, Sweden. 1992: Oskar Barnack Award. 1992: Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 1993: Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society. 1993: Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society. 1994: Grand Prix National French Ministry of Culture. 1998: Prince of Asturias Awards, Arts category. 1988: King of Spain International Journalism Awarad. 2003: International Award from the Photographic Society of Japan. 2007: M2-El Mundo People’s Choice Award for best exhibition a PhotoEspaña, for Africa. An Uncertain Grace. Essays by Eduardo Galeano and Fred Ritchin. Salgado, Sebastião. An uncertain grace. New York, N. Y: Aperture Foundation. ISBN 9780893814601. OCLC 22701623. Salgado, Sebastião. Sebastião Salgado: An uncertain grace. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 9780500284896. OCLC 56457689. Workers: Archaeology of the Industrial Age. Sebastião Salgado: Workers: an archaeology of the industrial age.
London: Phaidon. 1993. ISBN 9780714829319. OCLC 471602337. Trabalho, uma arqueologia da era industrial. Portugal: Caminho. 1993. ISBN 9789722108348. OCLC 81101769. Salgado, Sebastião. Trabalhadores: uma arqueologia da era industrial. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. ISBN 9788571645882. OCLC 859535737. Salgado, Sebastião. Terra: struggle of the landless. London: Phaidon Press. ISBN 0714836362. OCLC 610974180. Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations: humanity in transition. New York: Aperture. ISBN 9780893818913. OCLC 914864396. Salgado, Sebastião. Exodus. Cologne: Taschen. ISBN 9783836561303. OCLC 959255065; the Children: Refugees and Migrants. New York, NY: Aperture, 2000. ISBN 978-0893818944. Sahel: The End of the Road. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0520241701. Africa. Cologne: Taschen, 2007. ISBN 978-3836523431. Genesis. Cologne: Taschen, 2013. ISBN 978-3836538725. From my Land to the Planet. Roma: Contrasto, 2014. ISBN 978-88-6965-537-1; the Scent of a Dream: Travels in the World of Coffee. New York: Abrams, 2015.
ISBN 978-1-4197-1921-9. Kuwait. A Desert on Fire. Cologne: Taschen, 2016. ISBN 978-3-8365-6125-9; the Salt of the Earth. Documentary about and including Salgado, directed by Wim Wenders and his son Juliano Ribeiro Salga
Asturias
Asturias the Principality of Asturias, is an autonomous community in north-west Spain. It is coextensive with the province of Asturias, contains some of the territory, part of the larger Kingdom of Asturias in the Middle Ages. Divided into eight comarcas, the autonomous community of Asturias is bordered by Cantabria to the east, by Castile and León to the south, by Galicia to the west, by the Bay of Biscay to the north; the most important cities are the communal capital, the seaport and largest city Gijón, the industrial town of Avilés. Other municipalities in Asturias include Cangas de Onís, Cangas del Narcea, Gozón, Langreo, Laviana, Llanes, Siero, Valdés, Vegadeo and Villaviciosa. Asturias is home of the Princess of Asturias Awards. Asturias was inhabited, first by Homo erectus by Neanderthals. Since the Lower Paleolithic era, during the Upper Paleolithic, Asturias was characterized by cave paintings in the eastern part of the area. In the Mesolithic period, a native culture developed, that of the Asturiense, with the introduction of the Bronze Age and tumuli were constructed.
In the Iron Age, the territory came under the cultural influence of the Celts. Today the Astur Celtic influence persists in place names, such as those of mountains. With the conquest of Asturias by the Romans under Augustus, the region entered into recorded history; the Astures were subdued by the Romans but were never conquered. After several centuries without foreign presence, they enjoyed a brief revival during the Germanic invasions of the late 4th century AD, resisting Suevi and Visigoth raids throughout the 5th Century AD, ending with the Moorish invasion of Spain. However, as it had been for the Romans and Visigoths, the Moors did not find mountainous territory easy to conquer, the lands along Spain's northern coast never became part of Islamic Spain. Rather, with the beginning of the Moorish conquest in the 8th century, this region became a refuge for Christian nobles, in 722, a de facto independent kingdom was established, the Regnum Asturorum, to become the cradle of the incipient Reconquista.
In the 10th century, the Kingdom of Asturias gave way to the Kingdom of León, during the Middle Ages the geographic isolation of the territory made historical references scarce. Through the rebellion of Henry II of Castile in the 14th century, the Principality of Asturias was established; the most famous proponents of independence were Gonzalo Peláez and Queen Urraca, while achieving significant victories, were defeated by Castilian troops. After its integration into the Kingdom of Spain, Asturias provided the Spanish court with high-ranking aristocrats and played an important role in the colonisation of America. Since 1388, the heir to the Castilian throne has been styled Prince of Asturias. In the 16th century, the population reached 100,000 for the first time, within another century that number would double due to the arrival of American corn. In the 18th century, Asturias was one of the centres of the Spanish Enlightenment; the renowned Galician thinker Benito de Feijóo settled in the Benedictine Monastery of San Vicente de Oviedo.
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, a polymath and prominent reformer and politician of the late 18th century, was born in the seaside town of Gijón. During the Napoleonic Wars, Asturias was the first Spanish province to rise up against the French following the abdication of King Ferdinand VII on 10 May 1808. Riots began in Oviedo and on 25 May the local government formally declared war on Napoleon with 18,000 men called to arms to resist invasion; the Industrial Revolution came to Asturias after 1830 with the discovery and systematic exploitation of coal mines and iron factories at the mining basins of Nalón and Caudal. At the same time, there was significant migration to the Americas; these entrepreneurs were known collectively as'Indianos', for having visited and made their fortunes in the West Indies and beyond. The heritage of these wealthy families can still be seen in Asturias today: many large'modernista' villas are dotted across the region, as well as cultural institutions such as free schools and public libraries.
Asturias played an important part in the events. In October 1934 Asturian miners and other workers staged an armed uprising to oppose the coming to power of the right-wing CEDA party, which had obtained three ministerial posts in the centralist government of the Second Spanish Republic. For a month, a Popular Front Committee exercised control in southern Asturias, while local workers committees sprang up elsewhere in the region. A war committee dominated by anarcho-syndicalist supporters took power in Oviedo. Troops under the command of a unknown general named Francisco Franco Bahamonde were brought from Spanish Morocco to suppress the revolt. Franco applied tactics reserved for overseas colonies, using troops of the Spanish Legion and Moroccan troops: ferocious oppression followed; as a result, Asturias remained loyal to the republican governme
Rafael Moneo
José Rafael Moneo Vallés is a Spanish architect. He won the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 1996 and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2003. Born in Tudela, Moneo studied at the ETSAM, Technical University of Madrid from which he received his architectural degree in 1961. From the Davis Art Museum at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and the Audrey Jones Beck Building. Moneo designed the Chace Center, a new building for the Rhode Island School of Design. In December 2010, the Northwest Corner Building at Columbia University in New York City first opened. Moneo's most recent work is Peretsman-Scully Hall and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, which houses the psychology and neuroscience departments at Princeton University and opened in December 2013. In 2012, he was awarded with 2012 Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts. According to the jury, Moneo is a Spanish architect of universal scope whose work enriches urban spaces with an architecture, serene and meticulous. An acknowledged master in both the academic and professional field, Moneo leaves his own mark on each of his creations, at the same time as combining aesthetics with functionality in the airy interiors that act as impeccable settings for great works of culture and the spirit.
Davis Art Museum, Massachusetts Moderna Museet and Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, Sweden Kursaal Congress Centre and Auditorium, San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain Audrey Jones Beck Building, Texas Library of Sciences, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles, California Valladolid Science Museum, Spain Museo del Prado expansion, Spain New Library of the University of Deusto, Basque Country, Spain Northwest Corner Building, New York City, New York Princeton Neuroscience Institute, New Jersey Museum University of Navarra, Spain Pritzker Prize RIBA Royal Gold Medal Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts Praemium Imperiale Architectural renderings of the Chace Center Children's Hospital of Madrid Harvard University Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering The Moneo Gallery: Works of José Rafael Moneo Vallés "Prado museum unveils spacious new extension" Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Short biography at www.greatbuildings.com
Spain
Spain the Kingdom of Spain, is a country located in Europe. Its continental European territory is situated on the Iberian Peninsula, its territory includes two archipelagoes: the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa, the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. The African enclaves of Ceuta, Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera make Spain the only European country to have a physical border with an African country. Several small islands in the Alboran Sea are part of Spanish territory; the country's mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea except for a small land boundary with Gibraltar. With an area of 505,990 km2, Spain is the largest country in Southern Europe, the second largest country in Western Europe and the European Union, the fourth largest country in the European continent. By population, Spain is the fifth in the European Union. Spain's capital and largest city is Madrid. Modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 35,000 years ago. Iberian cultures along with ancient Phoenician, Greek and Carthaginian settlements developed on the peninsula until it came under Roman rule around 200 BCE, after which the region was named Hispania, based on the earlier Phoenician name Spn or Spania.
At the end of the Western Roman Empire the Germanic tribal confederations migrated from Central Europe, invaded the Iberian peninsula and established independent realms in its western provinces, including the Suebi and Vandals. The Visigoths would forcibly integrate all remaining independent territories in the peninsula, including Byzantine provinces, into the Kingdom of Toledo, which more or less unified politically and all the former Roman provinces or successor kingdoms of what was documented as Hispania. In the early eighth century the Visigothic Kingdom fell to the Moors of the Umayyad Islamic Caliphate, who arrived to rule most of the peninsula in the year 726, leaving only a handful of small Christian realms in the north and lasting up to seven centuries in the Kingdom of Granada; this led to many wars during a long reconquering period across the Iberian Peninsula, which led to the creation of the Kingdom of Leon, Kingdom of Castile, Kingdom of Aragon and Kingdom of Navarre as the main Christian kingdoms to face the invasion.
Following the Moorish conquest, Europeans began a gradual process of retaking the region known as the Reconquista, which by the late 15th century culminated in the emergence of Spain as a unified country under the Catholic Monarchs. Until Aragon had been an independent kingdom, which had expanded toward the eastern Mediterranean, incorporating Sicily and Naples, had competed with Genoa and Venice. In the early modern period, Spain became the world's first global empire and the most powerful country in the world, leaving a large cultural and linguistic legacy that includes more than 570 million Hispanophones, making Spanish the world's second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese. During the Golden Age there were many advancements in the arts, with world-famous painters such as Diego Velázquez; the most famous Spanish literary work, Don Quixote, was published during the Golden Age. Spain hosts the world's third-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Spain is a secular parliamentary democracy and a parliamentary monarchy, with King Felipe VI as head of state.
It is a major developed country and a high income country, with the world's fourteenth largest economy by nominal GDP and sixteenth largest by purchasing power parity. It is a member of the United Nations, the European Union, the Eurozone, the Council of Europe, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the Union for the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Schengen Area, the World Trade Organization and many other international organisations. While not an official member, Spain has a "Permanent Invitation" to the G20 summits, participating in every summit, which makes Spain a de facto member of the group; the origins of the Roman name Hispania, from which the modern name España was derived, are uncertain due to inadequate evidence, although it is documented that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians referred to the region as Spania, therefore the most accepted etymology is a Semitic-Phoenician one.
Down the centuries there have been a number of accounts and hypotheses: The Renaissance scholar Antonio de Nebrija proposed that the word Hispania evolved from the Iberian word Hispalis, meaning "city of the western world". Jesús Luis Cunchillos argues that the root of the term span is the Phoenician word spy, meaning "to forge metals". Therefore, i-spn-ya would mean "the land where metals are forged", it may be a derivation of the Phoenician I-Shpania, meaning "island of rabbits", "land of rabbits" or "edge", a reference to Spain's location at the end of the Mediterranean. The word in question means "Hyrax" due to Phoenicians confusing the two animals. Hispania may derive from the poetic use of the term Hesperia, reflecting the Greek perception of Italy as a "western land" or "land of the setting sun" (Hesperia
Paco de Lucía
Francisco Gustavo Sánchez Gomes, known as Paco de Lucía, was a Spanish virtuoso flamenco guitarist and record producer. A leading proponent of the new flamenco style, he was one of the first flamenco guitarists to branch into classical and jazz. Richard Chapman and Eric Clapton, authors of Guitar: Music, Players, describe de Lucía as a "titanic figure in the world of flamenco guitar", Dennis Koster, author of Guitar Atlas, has referred to de Lucía as "one of history's greatest guitarists". De Lucía was noted for his fluent picados. A master of contrast, he juxtaposed picados and rasgueados with more sensitive playing and was known for adding abstract chords and scale tones to his compositions with jazz influences; these innovations saw him play a key role in the development of traditional flamenco and the evolution of new flamenco and Latin jazz fusion from the 1970s. He received acclaim for his recordings with flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla in the 1970s, recording ten albums which are considered some of the most important and influential in flamenco history.
Some of de Lucía's best known recordings include Río Ancho, Entre dos aguas, La Barrosa, Ímpetu, Cepa Andaluza and Gloria al Niño Ricardo. His collaborations with guitarists John McLaughlin, Al Di Meola and Larry Coryell in the late 1970s saw him gain wider popularity outside his native Spain. De Lucía formed the Paco de Lucía Sextet in 1981 with his brothers, singer Pepe de Lucía and guitarist Ramón de Algeciras, collaborated with jazz pianist Chick Corea on their 1990 album, Zyryab. In 1992, he performed live at Expo'92 in Seville and a year on the Plaza Mayor in Madrid. After 2004 he reduced his public performances, retiring from full touring, only gave several concerts a year in Spain and Germany and at European festivals during the summer months. Paco de Lucía was born on 21 December 1947 as Francisco Sánchez Gomes in Algeciras, a city near the far southern point of Spain in the province of Cádiz, he was the youngest of the five children of flamenco guitarist Antonio Sánchez Pecino and Portuguese mother Lucía Gomes.
Playing in the streets as a young boy, there were many Pablos in Algeciras. In Spain and Latin America, any of these children with common first names would be referred to as follows:'"Name of Child", of "Name of Mother,"' or "Paco of Lucia" in his case, instead of using the child's last name. After learning to play the guitar and tasked with figuring out a way to bill himself, wanting to honor his Portuguese mother Lucía Gomes, he adopted the stage name Paco de Lucía, his father Antonio received guitar lessons from the hand of a cousin of Melchor de Marchena: Manuel Fernández, a guitarist who arrived in Algeciras in the 1920s and established a school there. Antonio introduced Paco to the guitar at a young age and was strict in his upbringing from the age of 5, forcing him to practice up to 12 hours a day, every day, to ensure that he could find success as a professional musician. At one point, his father took him out of school to concentrate on his guitar development. In a 2012 interview de Lucía stated that, "I learned the guitar like a child learns to speak."
Flamenco guitarist and biographer Donn Pohren and record producer José Torregrosa compared Paco's relationship with his father to the relationship of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Leopold Mozart in the way both fathers "moulded their sons" into becoming world-class musicians, both continued to dictate after the latter became famous. Paco's brother Ramón idolized Niño Ricardo, taught his complex falsetas to his young brother, who would learn them with relative ease and change them to his own liking and embellish them; this angered Ramón, who considered Ricardo's works to be sacred and thought his brother was showing off. As with Ramón, Ricardo was Paco's most important influence, his first guitar hero. In 1958, at age 11, Paco made his first public appearance on Radio Algeciras; that year, he met Sabicas for the first time in Málaga. A year he was awarded a special prize at the Festival Concurso International Flamenco de Jerez de la Frontera flamenco competition. At the age of 14 he made his first record with Los Chiquitos de Algeciras.
In the early 1960s, de Lucía toured with the flamenco troupe of dancer José Greco. In New York City in 1963, at the age of 15, he had his second encounter with Sabicas and his first encounter with Mario Escudero, both of whom became de Lucía's mentors and close friends, they urged him to start writing advice he took to heart. In 1964, he met Madrileño guitarist Ricardo Modrego with whom he recorded three albums: Dos guitarras flamencas, 12 canciones de García Lorca para guitarra and 12 éxitos para 2 guitarras flamencas, his early albums were traditional flamenco recordings and he recorded classics such as Malagueña on the 12 éxitos para 2 guitarras flamencas album. He toured again with José Greco in 1966 and recorded Ímpetu, a bulerias composed by Mario Escudero, for his debut solo album, La fabulosa guitarra de Paco de Lucía, he appeared at the 1967 Berlin Jazz Festival. According to Gerhard Klingenstein, top jazz musicians who appeared at th
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