“Rumbo Oaxaca Festival, space for listening, dialogue and creative exchange”

A new festival appears on the Mexican musical horizon: Rumbo Oaxaca, inaugurated last Thursday night with the aim of building bridges between cultures, generations and local and international communities.

Conceived by Routes to Roots, a multicultural music organization based in Scotland, the meeting has the purpose of creating meaningful spaces, led by artists, for intercultural collaboration through sound art, says the founder and artistic director of that event, the Scottish composer and violinist Catriona Price.

At its core, the festival revolves around connection: between artists from different cultural contexts, between musical traditions and between communities, the singer also highlights in an interview with The Day.

“We are not interested in just presenting artists side by side, but rather in creating the conditions for genuine collaboration, shared learning and the creation of new artistic works. The purpose is to develop new music together, exchange ideas and knowledge, and build long-term relationships that transcend the festival itself,” he explains.

“In a broader sense, Rumbo Oaxaca responds to the current moment. In an increasingly fragmented world, the festival offers time and space for listening, dialogue and intercultural creative exchange. Music has a unique power to remind us of what we share, beyond what divides us, and we hope that this initiative leaves both artists and audiences inspired, connected and curious to continue exploring.”

This first edition of the meeting, which will end tomorrow, represents for Price the materialization of an idea that has been growing over more than 15 years in his artistic practice.

The openness of genres and styles is one of the distinctive features of the project, being open to concert and traditional music as well as jazz, funk, folk, rock, blues and R&B. Another substantive characteristic is the artistic residencies.

“What makes it unique is the way in which the residencies and the festival are fully integrated. International musicians begin to compose new collaborative works before the festival, and the main concert is the world premiere of that new music. In this way, the creative process, and not just the presentation, is placed at the center of the meeting,” says the artistic director.

“Through the residencies, we seek to foster confidence, experimentation and artistic risk-taking. The process allows musicians to learn from each other’s traditions, techniques and creative approaches, and reflect on how to carry out cross-cultural collaboration in an ethical and sustainable way.”

Strong community networks

Funded by the Scottish government – ​​through Creative Scotland –, Unesco Cities of Music, British Council, Celtic Connections, the Benito Juárez Autonomous University of Oaxaca and the Alfredo Harp Helú Foundation, among other organizations, the choice of Oaxaca to start this project responds “to its extraordinary cultural wealth, its solid community networks and its openness to dialogue,” says Priece.

This is the first step within a broader vision, he says, which involves future editions also in other places, including Scotland, always developed in collaboration with local communities.

In his opinion, Rumbo Oaxaca has a strong social vocation based on exchange, respect and mutual learning. “Our goal is to work with Oaxaca not as visitors extracting cultural value, but as collaborators engaging in genuine dialogue with artists, students and local audiences.

“Through alliances with institutions and musicians in the region, the meeting generates opportunities for the exchange of knowledge, visibility and professional development for Oaxacan artists and young people.”

A central part of that mission is the collaboration with the Oaxaca School of Rock. During the festival, international artists will give workshops to three groups of students. Together, they will compose pieces throughout the residency which will be performed at the main gala at the Macedonio Alcalá theater on Saturday night.

The program for this first version consists of seven live presentations – all free, except for one – and talks. The list of participants includes, on the international side, El Guapo, a duo made up of Joni Strugo and Juan Grabina, which fuses Latin rhythms with rock and funk; the Scottish harpist and singer Esther Swift; Australian multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Rob Edwards, who combines jazz, blues and R&B with cultural narratives and indigenous identity, as well as Catriona Price herself.

Meanwhile, the national segment is represented by the singer-songwriter Gabriela Bernal Jade, with her mix of folk, jazz, pop and Mexican musical traditions; the bassist and multi-instrumentalist Luigi Marin, and the Oaxacan musicians La Región Azul, Jazz Matías, Colectivo Canto Serrano and Markos Medina.

More details and programming on the site https://routestorootsmusic.org, and on the Instagram and Facebook accounts: @routestorootsmusic.