The José Saramago Room in Arrecife will host this Thursday, the 26th, the presentation of the book "Va por el aire. Notes on Canarian popular culture", by the timple player and researcher Benito Cabrera. The event will take place at 8:30 p.m.
The author of the book will be accompanied by Miguel Ángel Corujo, director of the traditional music and dance group from Lanzarote, Los Campesinos, who will bring the public closer to the reading keys of Benito Cabrera's work.
Benito Cabrera, timple soloist and folklorist, has been the first performer to take the timple to the symphonic field, performing numerous concerts and recordings with formations such as the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra, the Córdoba Symphony Orchestra or the Galicia Symphony Orchestra.
Apart from offering recitals throughout the islands and participating in macro-festivals such as Womad, Atlántica or Son Latinos, he has performed in the most important cities in Spain, as well as in other countries (Cuba, United States, Puerto Rico, Bélgica, France, Holland, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Venezuela, Uruguay, Norway, Germany, England, Japan, Argentina…), highlighting the concerts in theaters such as the Konzerthaus in Berlín or the Carnegie Hall in New York.
In his recordings as a timple soloist, he combines trends such as folk, classical music and pop. His work of dissemination and didacticism has been reflected in the edition of several ethnographic research books, in several encyclopedias on Canarian culture and in the realization of two methods (one of them audiovisual) that have been edited for learning the timple.
He has also given many didactic concerts with different formations and was the coordinator of the didactic area of the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra for several seasons. He has been a professor at the Higher Conservatory of Music of the Canary Islands of the subjects "Introduction to music and traditional instruments of the Canary Islands" and "Timple".
A "brief and superficial vision of music and traditions"
Currently, he is the musical director of the Los Sabandeños group and curator-conservator of the Casa-Museo del Timple de Canarias. The book "Va por el aire", published by LeCanarien ediciones, collects a selection of almost a hundred articles that appeared weekly in the "Diario de Avisos" since 2011, in which Benito Cabrera addressed different aspects of the popular culture of the Islands and whose main objective was to offer a global, brief and superficial vision of Canarian music and traditions.
With this compilation, the author has tried to accommodate those aspects not very well known or valued of popular culture, some of them even already fallen into disuse such as sword dances or the ancient ways of celebrating Corpus Christi. Others attend to genres that have been extensively studied and talked about, such as the isa, the seguidilla or the folía, which are incorporated due to the undeniable heritage value and the remarkable roots they have in the Canary Islands.
"The work, in short, responds to the need to transmit the cultural legacy of our archipelago, offering us a synthetic, as well as documented and rigorous, tour of the most outstanding intricacies of Canarian popular culture", said the César Manrique Foundation through a statement.
Alexis Lemes will perform some songs
To close the event, the timple player Alexis Lemes Socas will perform some of his songs. Alexis Lemes (Lanzarote, 1977) completes his self-taught training with courses and workshops by musicians such as Domingo Rodríguez el Colorao, José Antonio Ramos, Aldo Vázquez, Alex Janssen, Manuel Jiménez or René González, director of the Canary Islands Jazz Orchestra.
Author of his own compositions for timple, he fuses the sound of this instrument with island chords and jazzy melodies. Since 2001 he has presented this musical fusion to the public in different Spanish and European cities.
