The Los Angeles International Flamenco Festival is proud to bring unique programming and world-class flamenco music to Los Angeles, presenting some of the world's most acclaimed and influential flamenco artists.

- Rocío Márquez featuring Miguel Ángel Cortés "Songs of Light" - March 25 at 8 p.m.
Singer-songwriter Rocío Márquez is a rising star and one of the best voices in today’s flamenco scene. Her curiosity and captivating style combine retro cool, modern elegance and an impressive passionate vocal delivery, twining tradition with avant-garde to reclaim the concept of free song as it was advocated by the dearly departed Enrique Morente.

Lauded by the press as "the voice of a new generation of cante jondo singers", Rocío Márquez (Huelva, 1985) has been carving out a solid artistic career for over a decade, ever since she won the Lámpara Minera Award at the Cante de las Minas Festival in 2008. Today, she is a leading light of the flamenco scene.

Her restless personality and enormous curiosity can be seen throughout her discography, which is marked by both a deep love of the flamenco tradition and an overriding need to expand its limits, exploring and experimenting with melodies, instrumentation, arrangements and lyrics. Starting with the fresh-sounding live recording “Aquí y Ahora” (2009), her albums are the chronicle of a soaring talent. “Claridad” (2012), “El Niño” (2014), "Firmamento" (2017) and “Visto en El Jueves” (2019) – as well as her collaboration with Fahmi Alqhai, “Diálogos de Viejos y Nuevos Sones” (2018) – reveal an artist who is constantly searching for herself through music.

Songs of light focuses on the most luminous and inspirational part of Flamenco in an open journey through the different Flamenco styles. Márquez will be accompanied by her longtime collaborator Miguel Ángel Cortés, one of the most respected and acclaimed guitarists in recent decades. Their music belongs equally to the past and the future, and that makes it a must see and listen in the present day: always deep, always challenging and accessible.

“Rocío Márquez has invented an alternative flamenco: frank, rule-breaking and erudite” LE MONDE

Born in Granada, Spain, Miguel Ángel Cortés is a gypsy guitarist who is comfortable playing traditional flamenco, as well as more modern nuevo flamenco. Cortés, like many flamenco guitarists, learned to play guitar from his gypsy relatives; he was born into a musical family that includes such flamenco artists as his father, Miguelón Cortés, and his brother Paco Cortés. The Granada native was only eight when his relatives starting teaching him flamenco guitar and by the time he was a teenager, Cortés was playing professionally. Cortés, who has accompanied such flamenco vocalists as Estrella Morente and José de la Tomasa, was 22 when he won the Paco de Lucía Guitar Award in 1994. The late '90s found Cortés touring with flamenco vocalist Carmen Linares and in 2000, his Patriarca album was released on Alula in the U.S.