Arriving in Italy for the first time Ondara, the Kenyan singer-songwriter who landed in the US to pursue his dream of a music career and was nominated for the Grammy Awards with its debut album Tales of America (Verve Forecast, 2019). The artist will be in our country on one occasion only, Friday 18 November 2022 at Santeria Toscana 31 in Milan. I tickets will be available from 10 a.m. on Thursday 30 June on circuits Ticketone e Ticketmaster; for each ticket sold, 1€ will be donated to charity to PLUS1 and will support the cause of World Central Kitchen, an association that provides meals in the aftermath of humanitarian, climate and community crises around the world.
Ondara found its hero just when it needed one: The Spanish Villager. The character is a figment of the singer-songwriter's imagination, but this mysterious man with his strong message has proved to be a versatile guy: he is the protagonist of a story that Ondara later turned into a graphic novel, and is also the title and inspiration for the Minneapolis-based musician's extraordinary third album, Spanish Villager No: 3. The character's name is derived from the word Ondara, which in addition to being a traditional name of the artist's Kenyan tribe is also a small village located in Spain.
"The Spanish Villager began to take shape during the most difficult period of my life, and when it came to life it gathered all the anxieties about my journey and the new world I had moved to,' he says Ondaraborn and raised in Kenya before moving to Minnesota in his early twenties.
If The Spanish Villager is a representation of the inner turmoil of Ondara during his 'American experiment', Spanish Villager No: 3 channels these feelings into eleven pieces that are both musically broad and emotionally intimate. Despite the new songs by Ondara offer an insightful look at America and the world, Spanish Villager No: 3 is not a protest album: 'I think of myself as an old-fashioned journalist, reporting in the form of art what is going on inside me and in the world around me, and leaving it to the audience to make their own deductions'. The album is dense with rich piano lines, layers of guitars, flashes of brass and vocal harmonies that sing mournful melodies. This is the third work by Ondara, which follows Folk N' Roll, Vol 1: Tales of Isolation (2020) and its debut album Tales of America.
ONDARA
Presents The Spanish Villager
Friday 18 November 2022
Milan, Santeria Toscana 31 - viale Toscana, 31
Concerts start at 21:00
Tickets available on Ticketone e Ticketmaster.
Standing room only: € 20.00 + prev.
