The singer from Valladolid Maru Gutiérrez celebrates a concert today at the Sculpture Museum

Hers is a deep, raspy and, in her own words, imperfect voice. The colour of her skin and her, they said, lack of femininity, marked her adolescence and youth outside the home, while at home they resisted accepting that her vocation was music and the performing arts. 38 years after her birth, Maru Gutiérrez returns to Valladolid, the city where she was born, showing off her origin, her culture and, yes, also her voice, in a concert that will be held this Friday 18th at the Museum of Sculpture.
«I remember that in class I was not very good at much, except music and singing in the school chapel», she remembers with a laugh about her time at Amor de Dios and IES José Zorrilla.
«The support in my family environment was non-existent, that I would dedicate myself to music was inconceivable, and among people my age I could not find my place or anyone who gave me space». Today she studies Mathematics, has lived in London, Switzerland and Granada, and has undertaken numerous melodic and cultural projects throughout Europe.

«It was in the theatre group at the University of Granada where my body and mind changed», she recalls. In works such as ‘Transporte de animales vivos’ she lost her fear of her own voice, something that gripped her governed by her own lack of self-esteem and fear of development: «The voice was a metaphor for my expression, the germ of an identity crisis annulled by a society that had destined me to exclusion», she details. Today she assumes the ‘imperfection’ of a deep, wild and ‘black’ female voice, which «breaks the formal beauty» but helps her to express herself «without losing purity and enjoying the journey more than the end».

«Now I find myself in a process of mixing sounds and exploring a lot of Afro and Afro-Cuban music.»

After the duo Coda Soul, which soon became a small band, Gutiérrez has continued to perfect her vocal and musical technique in projects such as Masdara, an urban band, and cultivating her influences in Spanish pop and rock, but also in church and classical music, jazz, reggae and icons such as Tracy Chapman, Boy George or Bob Dylan: “Now I find myself in a process of mixing sounds and exploring a lot of Afro and Afro-Cuban music,” says this young woman of Equatorial Guinean descent.

The concert on the 18th at the Museum of Sculpture promises to be a tribute to her mother, who passed away in the summer; but also to her grandmother, based on boleros, Brazilian music and bossa, with songs by María Teresa Vera or Djavan, and also her own, both unpublished and from her first work, ‘Raíz’. Gutiérrez will be joined by guitarist Pierre Huarniz, bassist Gastón Joya, pianist Miguel Ángel García “Wiwi” and drummer Cecilia Collaço: “I’m also looking for a racial perspective, with musicians with my own African origins.”
Gutiérrez looks to the future with projects like Ilé Wa (‘Our House’, in Yoruba), and the goal of bringing African music to the West. But with this concert, she also looks to her past: “Today, returning to Valladolid is a challenge for me because there are things that connect me deeply with dark parts of my being,” she confesses. “On the other hand, it’s a relief to be certain that neither I, nor the city, nor the people who live there are the same; so they no longer have as much influence on me as I do.”