The Gipsy Kings

The Gipsy Kings featuring Nicolas Reyes & Tonino Baliardo are set to perform in Montreal taking audiences back to the south of France with flamenco guitars and booming Spanish vocals. The band will be performing longtime favorites as well as new songs from their upcoming project Evidence.

Melding deep-heated flamenco, rumba, salsa and pop to the tune of 20 million albums sold, the Grammy Award-winning hit-makers behind ‘Bamboléo’ continue to celebrate in their very own, blistering tradition.

It has been twenty-five years since the Gipsy Kings captured the world’s imagination with their self-titled debut album—a record that became a genuine phenomenon, certified gold and platinum around the globe, introducing millions of listeners to a unique, irresistible blend of traditional flamenco styles with Western pop and Latin rhythms. Since then, the band has toured virtually non-stop, to the farthest-flung corners of the planet, and sold almost twenty million albums, all the while retaining the same line-up of virtuoso musicians.

“Music has always been a passion,” says lead guitarist Tonino Baliardo. “Even after all this time, after all these years of touring and working. It has given us so much. We have matured, we have developed in music, and it has been so good for us.”

Twenty-five years is an eternity in pop music, but the story of the Gipsy Kings reaches back much farther. Theirs is a music that extends through generations, to the sounds of their ancestors, and reflects the eclectic and peripatetic history of the gitanos, Spanish Romani people who fled the Catalonia region during the Spanish Civil War.

“World Music” is often a meaningless catch-all phrase, a marketing shortcut, but as one of the acts that first helped define the phrase, the Gipsy Kings create music that really does cross all borders. From the beginning all the way through SAVOR FLAMENCO, their sound has reflected the constant travel and diverse influences of the gypsy heritage. Their 1987 debut album, which spent forty weeks on the US album charts, introduced the world to “Rumba Gitano”—South America’s rumba rhythm married to the fleet attack of flamenco guitars. That record’s “Bamboleo” became a huge, break-out worldwide hit (more than twenty years later, it even turned up on an episode of the TV series Glee).

For information and tickets: www.placedesarts.com  514-842-2112 or 1-866-842-2112