Surrounded by her group of musicians who accompanied her on percussion, guitar and violin, Amaia also showed her skills as an instrumentalist this Thursday on NPR’s Tiny Desk. It was the most commented image of the 22 minutes that this concert lasted: the Navarrese playing a folding chair like a flute for the introduction of Nanaone of the six songs he performed live. Then they rang This is life, Zorongo, Auxiliar, Giratutto y Yamaguchi.
The Catalan polyinstrumentalist Xavier Lozano is the culprit of Amaia’s ‘saddle flute’. “Her brother called me. They were very surprised with what I did and they wanted her to play one of my instruments at the Tiny Desk. They came to see me in Badalona, she played the chair and did it quite well. I hesitated, she didn’t play it like me, who has been playing for many years, but she is from a family of musicians and has always been surrounded by instruments,” she explains to EL PAÍS.
This artist is capable of making music with almost anything. He says he started with his grandfather’s crutch. “I looked at it and realized that it was a tube with holes and that it could be played like a flute. I played it and it sounded like always, quite in tune,” he says. He thought the same thing about a chair leg: even if it didn’t have holes, he could make them. The trigger for a world of objects that could make holes.
He says that he designed a special chair for this concert with the holes he needed for this song, so that it would be easier for him to perform it: “It’s easy to play it a little, it’s difficult to do it very well, but if you are a flutist you have many points, top parts.” Lozano insists that there were more proposals on the table, such as a stool, a lamp or a cane, but the chair fascinated the brothers. Once done, he assures that Amaia was practicing and that she sent him several videos so that he could evaluate how she used it: “It’s as if I had sponsored his idea. He said that it was my invention, it’s not appropriation of ideas. On day 1 he returns it to me. It’s all good vibes.”
Its magic can make music come out of a construction fence, a broom, a ladder, a wheel, a watering can or a brick. Being able to turn all these things into flutes. “I love the flutes of the world and I started playing them when no one was playing them,” he recently insisted on TV3. On his Instagram account he states that he “lives from the air”, because yes, his music springs from the air and any object that allows him to play with it and that ends up being just another wind instrument.
Lozano also holds a very special position because for two years he has directed the Real Banda de Cadeiras Encartables, a very curious musical group in which folding chairs not only play, but are the protagonists: “As I live in Galicia, I thought I had to do something special for here. In reality, the leg of the chair is like a normal flute with six holes,” he says. The artist has also brought his art through his participatory concert Dailywhere he plays wind instruments that he builds himself. He has been touring Catalonia for years and also through cities in other countries. In addition, he offers solo concerts and is part of a trio, Bufa&Sons.
Xavi Lozano’s classical and copla music training (he plays the sax, tible and bamboo flutes) led him to become passionate about wind instruments. In his more than 20 years of career, he has performed all types of music, from traditional to experimental, including classical and fusions of all kinds.
Amaia was not the first to dare with the chair. Fetén Fetén did the same thing years ago when he reviewed his Jota del Wasabi and he performed it with a camping chair, a work by Xavi Lozano that he himself gave them: “They are very dear to me, they always mention me, I have them as references.” This duo from Burgos formed by Diego Galaz and Jorge Arribas usually uses conventional instruments along with unusual instruments made with everyday and recycled objects and between the two of them they know how to play about 30 different ones.