Ana Crismán is the first and only person in the world who performs and composes flamenco music with the harp. She is considered exotic in the music world and unique in the realm of flamenco. Ana is credited with creating the flamenco harp, as José Mercé stated on TV, who was inspired by watching her play live and started singing.
Ana’s show “Arpa Jonda” premiered in January 2019 at the Repertorio Theater in Manhattan, New York, leaving a lasting source and reference to this art form for future generations.
When Ana plays the harp, it resonates with a distinctly flamenco sound.
Never before has a harp covered so many palos (styles) of this musical genre with a purely flamenco language: seguiriya, soleá, bulerías, alegrías, malagueñas, granaínas, guajiras, rondeña, tientos, tangos… are just some of the many flamenco palos that this Jerezana makes it sound on the harp. Both with her compositions and when she makes arrangements and interpretations, she leaves an exquisite mix to the delight of the listener: knowledge of the roots, childhood in the very flamenco Jerez, mastery of the beat and very skilled hands that capture the most difficult and beautiful instrument of flamenco. pure, giving rise to a very sophisticated beauty.
Ana is an artist who creates a highly refined expression of flamenco.
The harp, with the technical difficulty that it presents, surrenders to the mastery of this brilliant self-taught harpist. Ana’s musical studies, which she began at a very early age, and her enormous talent have led her to forge herself, creating a new language on the harp, which for the first time, sounds with a flamenco discourse, giving rise to the first source and reference flamenco harp in the history of music.
Since her childhood Ana has experienced flamenco from her native Jerez, flamenco territory par excellence. The music of La Plazuela and the San Miguel neighborhood (where Lola Flores herself was born) accompanied her throughout her childhood, impregnating her with this art from her birth. Cerrofuerte street (the street where Paquera de Jerez was born) witnessed the years of her youth and her love for flamenco. Flamenco club Los Cernícalos and the “La Bulería” club on Mariñíguez Street were two places where I frequently went to listen to flamenco, as the great lover of this music that I always have been and is, as well as the old flamenco Fridays at the Astoria cinema, the bulería festival in the bullring, the annual flamenco festival, the concerts in La Plaza de la Asunción, the cycles of the peñas, the fair, flamenco Christmas, the guitar and singing competitions… Jerez dates to which has never been lacking, not to mention the spontaneous flamenco that emerges in the streets of Jerez, making time stop…the parties behind closed doors, the singing so characteristic of Jerez that runs through, which is a continuous source of inspiration…
