José Almarcha

"The guitar is the mirror of the soul. Everyone plays as they are."

José Almarcha

José Almarcha was born in 1984 in Tomelloso, in the wine country of Ciudad Real, and picked up the flamenco guitar as a boy. He graduated from the Rafael Orozco Conservatoire in Córdoba in 2009, studying under Paco Serrano, Manolo Franco and Niño de Pura. He has taken prizes at the Niño Ricardo competition in Murcia and reached the semi-finals of both the Festival Internacional del Cante de las Minas and the Concurso Internacional de Jerez.

Since then he has played in more than thirty countries — the United States, Japan, China, India, Russia, Britain. He has accompanied Carmen Linares and Javier Ruibal, shared a stage with Jorge Pardo and Antonio Serrano, and composed and directed music for the dance companies of Marco Flores, Olga Pericet, Sara Calero and José Porcel.

His mother died in 2015. "When she died, everything changed", he has said — "my way of playing as well as my way of composing." A malagueña written for her grew into Alejandra, first an album and then an entire concert. His latest record, Un nuevo paseo (2024), pushes the guitar towards the intensity of rock and the groove of soul without ever letting go of the compás.

What the trio plays is flamenco held to its oldest logic — a music built where Roma, Moorish and Sephardic traditions met in southern Spain, and one that has always come out of hardship. No costumes, no floor show. Three musicians in a room.