Afro-Venezuelan jazz band Pataruco are playing a free concert at the Bolivar Hall this Thursday (21 May) to promote their eponymously titled studio album to be released this summer.
Pataruco are Quentin Collins on trumpet, Michele Montolli on bass, Aleph Aguiar on guitar, Charlie Stacey on piano, Eddie Hick on drums, and Wilmer Sifontes on percussion.
The group are led by Aleph Aguiar who was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and when aged 12 began playing traditional Venezuelan folkloric rhythms including calypso, merengue and sangueos.
He moved to Barcelona in his late teens to pursue his musical career and enrolled at the prestigious Taller de Musics to study contemporary music and jazz. He later took a degree in Orchestration for Films & TV at the Berklee School of Music.
In 2002 he formed The Aleph Aguiar Trio and played as a session guitarist. He has performed at The International Jazz Festival of Andorra, The Voll Damm Jazz Festival of Barcelona, and The Festival of Ciutat Vella in Barcelona.
Now based in London he put together Pataruco where he fuses Afro-Venezuelan music and contemporary jazz.
“I came to London three years ago and put the band together about a year ago,” he told Fitzrovia News.
“I’ve hosted two Jazz jam sessions in London since I arrived here and that’s how I met most of the musicians in the band,” he says.
Last year they recorded an album entitled “Pataruco”, at The Fish Factory Studios in Dollis Hill, which will go on sale in late July.
The music fuses the folklore of Venezuela with the vocabulary of Jazz and contemporary music to create new ways of expression. Four key rhythms are explored — sangueos, foropos, patanemo and merengue caraqueño, all of which have a strong influence on the Venezuelan tradition but yet to be explored and shared more widely.
Pataruco Afro-Venezuelan Jazz Project play at the Bolivar Hall, 54 Grafton Way, Fitzrovia, London W1T 5DL, at 7pm Thursday 21 May 2015. Free admission. Doors open 6.30pm. More at pataruco.com and facebook.com/patarucoband.