Xavi Maldonado Quintet — 7 November 2026, Conservatori Liceu (Barcelona)

Jazz

The Liceu’s latest Premi Extraordinari brings to the festival a quintet made up almost entirely of Fundació Ferrer scholarship holders

The Xavi Maldonado Quintet play the Conservatori Liceu auditorium, on Carrer Nou de la Rambla, on Saturday 7 November at half past eight in the evening, as part of the 58th Barcelona Jazz Festival. The listing does not publish a general price; Amics del Jazz get in for €4.50, booking fee included.

Maldonado plays tenor saxophone and is the Conservatori del Liceu’s latest Premi Extraordinari. The quintet is completed by Camil Arcarazo on guitar, David Cid on piano, Ot Granados on double bass and Enric Fuster on drums: almost all of them have been Fundació Ferrer scholarship holders.

The festival’s write-up is signed by Sergi Vergés, head of the Liceu’s Jazz and Modern Music department, and reaches back forty years for a comparison. Vergés recalls seeing, in a fashionable venue on Carrer Mitre in the mid-eighties, the short-lived duo put together by Perico Sambeat and Jordi Rossy, both of them barely into their twenties: “They played in a corner and none of the posh crowd drinking there paid them the slightest attention. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Forty years on, I think there is the same consensus among young musicians — and the not-so-young still living in the trenches — about Xavi Maldonado,” he writes. “From his entrance exam at the Conservatori del Liceu, through the big band and on to the Premi Extraordinari concert, I would have to think hard to find a case of such raw, ferocious talent and such overwhelming unanimity among colleagues and teachers.”

Maldonado comes out of Sedajazz, the Valencian talent factory. He has no album released under his own name.

Text by Aina Torrents