It was one of the first posts to this blog, where I was talking about the initial impulses to create this kind of guitar album, and I was then talking about the influences of the reknown tap dancer Guillem Alonso. Now, two days ago he was here again and I had the chance to accompany his dancing on the guitar. The event was tha annual “Jazz’n’tap” that is enourmously popular so that this year we had two concerts: 27th and 28th of Apr. Both nights full theatre! This year it was also connected to the celebrations of Alexander Ivaskevitsh‘s jubilee.

When I first met Guillem in 2007 then we did the Asturias. That is also why it is on “The Dance Album”. This year we used it as encore but we had to do it on both concerts:) The new things for me were the “Candilejas” by Charles Chaplin. Guillem’s father had arranged it for the solo guitar and I know you think now: “But this is not a dance at all, it’s a song!”. Anyway, that’s what I thought when I first saw the score. But it was a very beautiful dance after all.

The other thing that we did, was the famous Arena, a sand dance by Guillem. You can see the DVD version from here. So that’s what I had to study and memorize and when in 2007 it came so suddenly that I had to play Asturias from the sheet (see the old picture above) then now I had time to prepare and of course played everything by heart. In fact – it took just one day to memorize the rumba and the Candilejas.

I don’t play flamenco rhytms often so now I had a good chance to spend some time with the rumba flamenca right hand strumming patterns. At some point I feel quite confident, especially together with the dance. But alone with the metronome I’m not happy yet 🙂

Thanks to Guillem and Alexander for a wonderful dance event like that!