As the great singer José Domínguez Muñoz ‘El Cabrero’ once said: “There is no one to stop the voice, neither bars nor walls.” That trail of freedom is fulfilled and continues perfectly Mayte Martin, one of the most personal and authentic national voices of recent decades. Forged in flamenco clubs and competitions during her adolescence, little by little, the essence of singing penetrated her to the bones, from the roots to the branches that touch the stars, demonstrating in each work her unstoppable spirit, her need to metamorphose and search. new artistic paths. Recognitions from very early on: from the Mining Lamp in 1987, the highest award for Cante de las Minas and one of the most important in flamenco itself, to the Antonio Chacón award at the XII national flamenco art competition in Córdoba in 1989, until reaching his debut album, “Very fragile” (94), an album in which he already demonstrated his love and mastery of cante jondo, covering different styles and opening with a calm and sorrowful joy in his own words, “Sail alone”establishing his art and dazzling from those first grooves with a powerful fragility full of nuances. “Oh, love… you are my cross and my wound, / I will carry your love on my back, oh, for the remains of life.”
Next blink and “neither bars nor walls”, or as she says, “flamenco is her origin and not her yoke”, signing with maestro Tete Montoliu on the keys her second album, a “Free Boleros” (96) in which, “beginning,” he ended up making it clear that his sensitivity was totally uncontrollable, embracing bolero and jazz, tearing with each interpretation with an open heart. Naked and throbbing songs, more real in your mouth than life itself, woven with nostalgia “to extinguish a crazy love that more than love is suffering.” And so the years go by and Mayte, getting off the moving world, leaving aside all ephemeral fashion and commercial rush, after six more vibrant albums, calm and personal like few others, with the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts along the way. (2021), reappears (almost seven years after his previous work), with another kind of artistic eclipse on the surface, “Tattoos”. Project in which, taking up the quartet format and jazz pulse (voice, piano, double bass and drums), he reinterprets a dozen immortal works that every mortal should have internalized from beginning to end. Universal songs that do not understand surroundings, but rather leave a mark on the collective memory and on each body, from generation to generation, and that now Mayte strips and filters through her prodigious voice as if it were the last night on Earth.
This genuine journey that makes our skin crawl without respite with every listen, full of aromas, memories and scars, begins, as it could not be otherwise, gratefully, with the approval of Violeta Parra in a very beautiful “Thanks to life” that Mayte makes her own, to continue with two of “the most beautiful love stories we had and will have,” the “Lucy” by Serrat, in which “forgetfulness only took half of it,” and those “five minutes in which life is eternal” by “I remember you Amanda”with Víctor Jara under the wings.
We are breathless and we will continue like this. Of the least known “Zamba so as not to die”, popularized by Mercedes Sosa, who is reborn in Mayte’s mouth like the morning dew, with a double bass that exudes class in each attack and hits us on the left side of the chest; to the torn beauty of “My love”, con Mayte Martin burning the ships in Italian, and shortly after doing so in French, with the mourner “Do not leave me” by Jacques Brel, after passing through a “Alfonsina and the sea” that stops the hands of the clock and borders on the miracle.
After the equator “the imagination continues celebrating” and we float with another sublime interpretation of the Marta Valdés theme, the one that Silvia Pérez Cruz and Javier Colina embroidered years ago, “In the imagination”, to continue the bossa nova rhythm with the classic by Vinicius de Moraes and Tom Jobim, “I know I will love you”caressing us and squeezing our hearts with the delicacy of the greatest.
We return to Cuba and continue in that love that never ends up coming back and never completely leaves, a “The brief space in which it is not” that brings tears and smiles to Pablo Milanés himself, wherever he is. Finishing us off with Argentine tango, pure fire that opens and melts wounds with each step of sensuality, laughter and crying, plus a “I’m leaving your side and ‘forget’ me now”couplet among couplets, “It pays well”which only fuels the flame that never ceases.
Eternal love for music, the art of baring your soul without asking for anything in return, interpreting each verse opening your flesh, throwing yourself into the songs as if it were the first and the last time, singing like Mayte Martin.