Nuevo flamenco guitar
Beyond his prolific accomplishments as a beloved Nuevo Flamenco guitarist over the past 25 years, Jesse Cook has honed his skills as a composer, producer, arranger, performer and, more recently, filmmaker and content creator. By the numbers, Jesse Cook has ten platinum and gold studio albums with combined sales exceeding two million copies, 700 million streams online, five concert DVDs and live discs, five PBS specials, a library of over 300 YouTube videos, a JUNO Award win and 11 nominations, three Canadian Smooth Jazz Awards, a Gemini Award, and an Acoustic Guitar Magazine Player’s Choice Silver Award to his credit.
Jesse started down many of those diverse paths before he started school. Born in Paris to photographer John Cook and TV producer-director Heather Cook, young Jesse also lived in Barcelona, where he picked up an interest in flamenco as a toddler. At six, after his parents divorced and he moved to Toronto with his mother, the prodigy attended the prestigious Eli Kassner Guitar Academy. During summers with his father in Arles in France, he soaked up more flamenco from neighbour Nicolas Reyes, leader of the world-renowned Gipsy Kings.
After attending the Royal Conservatory, York University and Berklee College, a comfortable career as a composer seemed in the cards — until an Ontario cable TV company aired his music on the listings channel. “Their switchboard got flooded with calls,” he recalls. “People even got my number somehow and started phoning me at home and asking for a CD. And I was saying, ‘I don’t have a CD, I’m a background composer guy. I don’t make records.’ But he soon changed that tune.
Seeing opportunity, Cook self-produced Tempest at home using an eight-track recorder and one microphone. Then he delivered the initial run of 1,000 CDs from the plant to the distributor in his car. Those humble beginnings quickly sparked a mighty international career, including an extensive discography of 14albums, and another two on the way. “It turns out I did the thing I said I’d never do, and somehow it worked out. In the U.S., it was a breakthrough gig at the Catalina Jazz Festival, where his playing earned a 10-minute standing ovation, sparked mob scenes — “It was like being The Beatles,” he marvels — and prompted one store to order enough copies of Tempest to land it at No.14 in Billboard.
In Poland, his 2004 live album Montreal took the country by storm. In India, he gained fame after one of his songs was plagiarized for a major Bollywood movie. (“In India, that’s allowed,” he explains. “They call it cultural appropriation — it obviously doesn’t mean the same thing there.”) In Iraq, his instrumentals scored the nightly news. Elsewhere, they’ve accompanied gymnastics and skating routines at the Olympics. “In Nagano, the Japanese skater and the Russian skater both competed using the same song. One of them won. I think I should have got bronze,” he jokes. So no wonder Cook also quips that his music “has had a way more interesting life” than he’s had.
But lately, that international appeal — reflected in a compositional style that mixes flamenco with everything from classical and jazz to Zydeco, blues and Brazilian samba — has become something he takes more seriously. “I’ve just always made the music that I love. But if music can come from around the world and interconnect so beautifully to create this beautiful tapestry, maybe there’s something that music can teach us.”
You may also like the following events from The Ark - Ann Arbor:
Also check out other
Music events in Ann Arbor,
Entertainment events in Ann Arbor,
Concerts in Ann Arbor.
