(headline image: Perrate and ZA! – Photo by Alejandra Amere)
The album Jolifanto (Lovemonk / El Volcán, 2025) by Perrate y Za! is the winner of the 2025 MIN Award for Best Flamenco Album. Jolifanto is the debut collaborative album from experimental duo ZA! and flamenco singer Perrate. Bridging avant-garde electronics, free-form jazz, and flamenco tradition, the project explores genre fluidity through polyrhythms, improvisation, and cultural fusion.
Perrate, a veteran cantaor from Utrera in southern Spain, with deep Gitano (Spanish Gypsy) roots, has long pushed flamenco’s boundaries while maintaining its ancestral weight. His 2022 album Tres Golpes was named Flamenco Album of the Year by El País’s Babelia and featured on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction year-end list.
Barcelona-based ZA!, active since 2004, are known for genre-defying, high-energy performances. Self-managed and collaborative by nature, their recent projects include reviving ancient languages and reinterpreting Mediterranean sounds alongside collectives like MegaCobla and Tarta Relena.
The collaboration began after Perrate attended a ZA! performance and was struck by their radical approach. Later invited to contribute to Seville’s Música y Museos program, he reached out to the duo. They exchanged audio remotely before meeting in person a week prior to the concert. Rehearsals and early recordings took place at La Mina Studios, followed by full sessions at Happy Place Studio in Seville from March 6–9, 2023.
The album’s title references Karawane, Hugo Ball’s 1916 Dadaist sound poem. Echoing its spirit of linguistic abstraction and improvisational chaos, Jolifanto thrives on creative tension between structure and spontaneity.
Perrate shared about this project: “I don’t care what the most radical traditionalist minds may think of this or any other work I do. This is my time, and I intend to live it according to my way of feeling and living flamenco. My ancestors had a lot to do with the birth of this culture, and each of them created according to their feelings and their time. And I do the same.”
More about the awards: www.premiosmin.com.
Author: World Music Central News Room
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