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History
Founded in 1980, in Barcelona, La Vella is the most well known traditional jazz band in Spain. La Vella jazz Band began as an encounter of friends that would get together to play the music they liked the most: classical jazz. Their proposal has achieved great success, playing at numerous Festivals, recording seven albums of which more than 35.000 copies have been sold, and participating in various events that have been an important part of Spanish cultural life (the '92 Olympic Games), in a task to spread their music throughout a country like Spain that has so little jazz tradition. a Vella has appeared in and around Europe in the year 1996, participating in diverse jazz festivals in Germany, Holland, Hungary, and Scotland, and has been described by the press as being the audience's favorite group in the Dresden Jazz Festival and the group that's done away with the isolation of Spanish jazz in the Breda Jazz Festival.
Festivals
Along these 26 years, La Vella has performed in these Festivals: New Orleans Jazz & Heritage 98' (USA); Kobe Jazz Street 98' (Japan); Riverboat Jazz-festival 98' (Silkeborg, Denmark); Hamburg Hot Jazz Meeting 96, Dresden Jazz Festival, Dreieich, Weisbaden, Gelsenkirchen. (Germany); Gorinchem Jazz Festival, Breda Jazz Festival 96'-97', Eindhoven Jazz Festival i Enkuizen Jazz Festival (Holland); Bohem & Ragtime Festival, Salgotarjan Dixieland Festival 97' (Hungary); Edinburgh Jazz Festival 96' ; Mississippi Dream 98', April Jazz Espoo 99 (Finland),Salzburg, Barcelona, Vitoria, Madrid.........
La Vella offers in live performance a musical trip back through the origins of jazz. Their repertoire includes a multitude of styles starting from New Orleans on through swing, mainstream, blues, spirituals and ragtime. La Vella places special importance in their musical arrangements of tunes by such authors as Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Duke Ellington or Lester Young keeping each tune in its original sound and style.
Press
Edinburgh Daily:
The Barcelona-based La Vella was the most impressive of all the foreign groups.
Kenny Mathieson
El País:
Their latest show contains a wide range of different rhythms, but with a nexus of union: a contagious optimism. There is no other group in Spain that plays these rhythms better than La Vella, that knows how to transmit this optimism and fill all of it with that catching rhythm.
Miquel Jurado
Dresdener Neueste Nachrichten:
The audience's favorite groups were those that play a racial jazz, which is the case of the SpanishLa Vella.
Siegfried Thiele
La Vanguardia:
The musicians in this orchestra have reached their zenith. They have managed to capture the atmosphere and maintain it elegant, jubilant and communicative.
Albert Mallofré
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage
Dresden dixieland festival
