American guitarist, singer and songwriter Leo Susana, of Dominican descent, arrived in Aragonese lands in 2006. He had previously come to visit to play with his band JLS, a metal standard bearer in the Caribbean. To this day, the group is made up of 18-time Latin Grammy Award winner Allan Leschhorn. (bass in the group, and sound engineer for Juan Luis Guerra) and the versatile drummer Luis Quezada, also involved with Leo in Crazy Peace of Mind. The group continues to meet irregularly to play on Dominican stages, and the next summer he wants to do it in Spain, with Zaragoza in the spotlight.
Susana, founder in Santo Domingo of the bands Toque Profundo and the so-called JLS, found new vital horizons in Aragón: in fact, her sons Liam and Allan were born here. After almost a decade and a half in Zaragoza, he settled with his family in Fiscal (Huesca) in 2020where he has become a lover of hiking and bathing in the wild Ara River.
The affair was love at first sight. “I discovered Fiscal in 2011thanks to José Carlos Ondiviela, Kike Maroto, Fede García and Enrique Coscolín. Cosco invited us to Sarvise; our son Liam was a baby, and once there it turned out that José Carlos and Kike were playing at Asador Vértigo de Fiscal. That visit changed our lives. I met Iván, the owner, and he started calling me to play there. In 2014 we began to spend the summer in Fiscal, and in the end, there we are; In addition, from the City Council they have behaved wonderfully with us”.
America on the calendar
Suzanne This month of March has passed on the other side of the pond: concert with JLS in Santo Domingo, and acoustic soloists in the capital itself and in Punta Cana. After a short flight north, the tour continued in Lawrence (Massachusetts, along with Toque Profundo vocalist Tony Almont), and his native New York , twice. In January, JLS was also the headliner in the same square, within the Mass Destruction festival.
Next summer, Juan Luis Guerra is coming to Spain on tour. He performs on July 1 at the Río Babel festival in Madrid, and three days later he will go to the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona. On July 6 he will go to Fuengirola (Málaga) and on July 8, to La Palma, in the Canary Islands.
Guerra travels with a large band and a large technical team, of which the aforementioned Leschhorn is a capital part. Once the dates with his employer and friend have concluded, Leschhorn wants to join forces with Susana and Quezada to play with JLS for a couple of Spanish nights. Madrid, where there are family and friends of the also guitarist and producer of German origin, is a clear objective and Zaragoza, the other.
Susana is excited about the musical horizon that she is drawing. “In the ups and downs of life I have rediscovered myself. I enjoy playing my own music and feeling creative again; This is how you remember that there were and are people who highly value that part of my career. I had abandoned the idea of resurrecting JLS, but Luinis convinced me that it had to be tried.”
The New Yorker explains that he has enjoyed delving into Spanish music. “Because of people like Coscolín I got deeper into Sabina’s work, which I love, and I have also studied Cuban trova. However, the physical part of rock had been abandoned; when touching metal, the pick only goes downwards, you have to walk strong in the wrist and forearm. If you stop playing that music, you lose speed; that’s how it was last summer. It didn’t come to the demand of my own recordings, so I put the batteries “.
The mental part, on the other hand, is key for the musician. “I had covid and one of the consequences in my case was a drop in mood. I began to revisit the past, the old recordings, and there it was clear to me that I had to try again. Luckily, in Prosecutor is Dani Escolano; he focuses me musically, he has an accurate gaze. When he played with Huecco, I toured all over Europe for several years, and that band discipline also required being very focused.”
At the moment, Susana had a triplet afternoon at the Asador de Fiscal this week. He will return to metal in the summer.
