HOLLY'S BLOG

One of my good friends maintains that a musician’s relationship to their art is very much like any other relationship; it takes time, care and attention, it has its own dynamic and needs nourishment. I agree! Like any other encounter with a friend or lover, every time...

I will always remember my first weekend in Seville, Spain, back in 2006. A friend wanted to show me around, so she took me to a little concert at the Peña de Pies Plomo, or the 'Pummelled Feet Peña.’ Peñas are small performance venues seen in many of the Andalusian...

Racism has been a big topic in the news lately, as always. The gypsies are arguably one of the most marginalized groups around, and I’m reminded of my time studying in Seville with Señior Paco Fernandez. In Spain, study is often accompanied by a rich sharing...

4. In our reserved Canadian culture, it seems to be less socially acceptable to express our passion openly. Do you think flamenco gives people permission to express passion in a way that we normally wouldn’t feel comfortable? It’s more than that. Art in...

What is passion? In preparing for this interview, I asked this question until the word ‘passion’ became completely meaningless for me. In an effort to reach clarity, I looked it up in the dictionary. Passion is described as, “strong and barely controllable emotion.”...

If you’ve ever been to a flamenco show with Spaniards, you’d have noticed that the audience has an easy, almost overly personal relationship with the performers. The show was likely peppered with shouts of ‘olé!’ ‘toma!!’ or ‘bien!’ Sometimes there are longer phrases,...

During my trip to Seville, Spain, last winter, I found myself in a recording studio. The engineer, Isidro, is a successful musician and works as a sideman for a big-name singer. Experimenting in the recording studio is play for him, and does an amazing job of it. He...