Local flamenco guitarist nominated for award
For Calgary flamenco guitarist Holly Blazina, being nominated for the Canadian Folk Music Awards was like an early Christmas gift.
“It’s such an honour and it was actually kind of surprising to me that I received the nomination,” says Blazina, who was nominated for Instrumental Solo Artist of the Year for her debut album Transcendencia.
“I have a grant writer who applies for all of those things, and I had forgotten she had even applied for it. It was like Christmas when I found out.”
Though Transcendencia is her first album, Blazina has been playing flamenco music for more than 20 years. She was 10 years in before she started composing her own music.
“The flamenco art form is really, really vast,” she says. “I spent a long time really immersing myself in the art form and learning the traditional material. I’m still doing that, too.”
Flamenco has many forms, or substyles.
“Each one of those substyles has a whole history and a whole harmonic, rhythmic and melodic language behind it,” Blazina explains. “For each one of those forms, I went and studied the tradition, really worked with that stuff first.”
When she was finally ready to work on her debut album, she travelled to Spain to work with flamenco master Paco Fernandez. She had been listening to one of his albums for close to 10 years and approached him for a one-on-one stewardship as she completed the material for the album.
“I always really liked his music and liked his approach to the art form,” Blazina says.
“One of the things that is really cool in flamenco, I think, is there’s a lot of what we refer to as breaks, where a section might be closed with a rhythmic exclamation point. I really loved his breaks and the little touches that he would put into his music. He helped me gain some of that myself, too, while I was there.”
Also nominated for Canadian Folk Music Awards are Buffy Sainte-Marie, who’s up for five awards, including Traditional Album of the Year for Medicine Songs; Catherine MacLellan, for Contemporary Singer of the Year and Solo Artist of the Year; Bruce Cockburn, for English Songwriter of the Year and Solo Artist of the Year; and Jack Pine and the Fire, who will be performing at the award show, for New/Emerging Artist of the Year.
The winners are announced over two nights, Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, at The Gateway in SAIT’s Campus Centre. Tickets, available at folkawards.ca, are $35 for each night or $60 for a wristband for both nights.