David Mengual

Biography

Mengual is leaving a significant mark on the music scene, especially through his personal projects, which are true focal points of multi-personal artistic creativity where the creator presents himself above all as a catalyst of ideas, sensibilities and talent in the face of a long list of collaborators and accomplices.

Since his first – and award-winning – tribute project to Monk (Monkiana, 1997, Best Album of the Year in Cuadernos de Jazz magazine), Mengual has been tirelessly researching all kinds of formats and registers, something that is evident in recordings such as Des D’Aquí (1999), a duo with Albert Sanz (Best Spanish Album of the Year in the magazine Cuadernos de Jazz) or in the diptych Mosaic (simultaneous edition of 2 CDs with the same songs played freely in a trio, with Dani Peréz and Jon Robles, and in nonet format, with arrangements by Javier Feierstein).

The incessant search for new channels of expression for the conventional jazz sound, both as a performer (awarded several times by the AMJM), and as a composer and arranger, are the proof of the musician’s constant ambition to break with the patterns and build new expressive bridges between his personality and his collaborators. In this last sense, the Deriva project is standing out, based on a succession of creative derivations that start from some photographs by Carles Roche to join through some poems by David Castillo as a link between images and music.

Open to overflowing electric sounds (participation in the Llibert Fortuny Electric Quintet, winner of the AMJM’s prize for the best group of 2004), or enclosed in the most radical lyricism of the intimate quest (projects in duo with saxophonist Jon Robles, crystallised in the recordings Duets 95/05 or Discounts), Mengual has recently experimented with mutant formations that challenge forms or models to constantly reinvent themselves, as in the changing casts that have given shape to his project Maitia.

Recently, David Mengual presented his new Slow Quartet, where he is accompanied by some of the members who also participate in the Free Spirits Big Band, the most ambitious of his projects in terms of personnel, constancy and involvement.