Marco Mezquida Trio: Tāctil

Marco Mezquida (piano, compositions), Martin Meléndez (cello), Aleix Tobias (drums, percussion) Marco Mezquida is one of the most singular, brilliant and magnetic figures on the current music scene. A pianist and composer from Menorca, a cult musician on an international level, he has built a career marked by a free, intense and constantly moving artistic personality. Virtuoso and chameleon-like on the piano, versatile improviser and inspired composer, his music is situated in his own territory where jazz, free improvisation, classical music, folklore, pop and Mediterranean tradition coexist with absolute naturalness. Mezquida, a regular musician at the Jazzaldia, has recorded more than twenty albums as a leader and more than forty as a sideman or collaborator, and has taken his music to auditoriums and festivals all over the world: Tokyo, London, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Barcelona. He has worked with artists such as Silvia Pérez Cruz, Salvador Sobral, Andrea Motis, Noa, Lee Konitz, Dave Liebman, Billy Hart and Jorge Rossy, among many others, and has also developed a renowned work in the solo piano format, with five albums recorded live and in the studio that reflect his unique, physical and emotional relationship with the instrument. One of the fundamental axes of his creative universe is the trio he shares with Aleix Tobías and Martín Meléndez, a formation born with Los Sueños de Ravel (2017) and subsequently consolidated with Talismán (2020) and Letter to Milos (2022). With this group, Mezquida has shaped some of his most personal works, without labels or corsets, in which composition and improvisation merge in a song of absolute freedom. Influences ranging from Granados, Albéniz, Liszt, Chopin or Ravel to Keith Jarrett, Eliseo Parra or Coetus run through a luminous, vital and deeply human music, sustained by the rhythmic inventiveness of Aleix Tobías and the expressive imagination of Martín Meléndez's cello. In this edition of Jazzaldia, Marco Mezquida presents Tāctil, his new self-produced album, released in February 2026. After ten years of exceptionally intense artistic coexistence, the trio reaches full sonic maturity here, manifesting itself as a single entity, a single musical body with a common, deep and coherent voice. Tāctil is born from an essential desire: to recover the physical and sensorial dimension of music, reclaiming touch, skin, vibration and gesture as the origin of sound. The struck piano, the plucked or rubbed strings, the caressed or percussed membranes construct a music that is generated from presence, closeness and listening. The album is also a declaration of love for life, for sound and for people. A work that is born as much from the most luminous joy as from the deepest sadness. "I have never loved so much. I have never cried so much inside. I have never lived so intensely" writes Mezquida, leaving evidence of a creative process marked by shared emotion and brotherhood. TACTILE is no stranger to the world in which we live: in his notes, the musician confronts the injustices and atrocities of recent years, especially the violence against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza, to whose dignity and yearning for freedom he dedicates this work. In the face of pain, music here becomes a refuge, a driving force and a vital necessity. Marco Mezquida, Aleix Tobías and Martín Meléndez invite us to a musical experience that can not only be listened to, but also played, felt and left a mark.