Hello to everyone,

I must start saying that i`m the accordion player of Banda Celtamericana. We`ve just arrived to the Uk yesterday after a long trip of more than 40 hours and 4 planes (we got one flight cancelled, phew). Fortunately, everything is OK now and we`re very happy of being here, with such beautiful landscapes (we`re staying at Sowerby Bridge), and we just played in the Worden Arts Centre (with Kimbers Man), and at least the people there liked our music very much!

I found this forum just by luck, but it has been REALLY good for us to read what you say about our music. I personally think that everyone may be right with some points, and I hope I can explain myself well so you can also get my humble opinion.

First of all, I must say that the band was born just as a "joke"... 5 years ago we had a "Tolkien Meeting" in our main city, Valparaiso, and people from all over Chile came to gather and celebrate JRR TOLKIEN`s work. There were a small group in the organisation who where music students (me included) and we decided to give them a surprise and we prepared some irish tunes to have a little more "ambience" on the party. Since there`s a lot of Tolkien fans in Chile and not very much irish-style bands there (well... about 10 now), we had a great success, since it was new music for most of the people (and still is) and things started to go better, we were invited to play in many places and we decided to go on with the band. After some time we recorded a CD (Puerto Celta) and did a tour around Chile, both with the support of the chilean government.

At that time we were called "Puerto Celta" too, and we played mostly irish music. Why? because we liked it! But at that point we already started to use latin american instruments on it: charango, cajon peruano, zamponia, percussions, quena, etc. and then we changed our name to Banda Celtamericana (it explains by itself), because we started to add more and more latin american elements to our music, because we felt so. It`s part of what we are, as a chilean people, and we didn`t want to stop played folk music but just decided to play it in our own very personal way.