We were lucky to catch up with Miguel Fajardo recently and have shared our conversation below.

Miguel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I first learned music with other musicians from my community when I was 13, they used to play Mexican romantic music which is called Trios Románticos, they taught me the essentials of living as a musician, they were my first mentors about getting on stage, practicing, and getting good at playing by ear, to play with no need to have a score or sheet of music, just hearing and being able to harmonize and have an interplay with what is heard, something like improvising in a jazz band, only the terminology was much more coloquial and simple. I actually had my first job as a musician at 15 playing at a bar. Those skills were my foundation and all my career stands over those first experiences.

Later I studied classical violin in the conservatory, and played in the symphony orchestra for a few years, all that time, although I learned a lot, was kind of a creative block for me as an artist, I felt stale and unsatisfied, until I reconnected again with popular music, this time with Jazz, and this time it was for good, I left the Symphony Orchestra, and started to improvise, compose, arrange and eventually even produce my own albums.

Miguel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started playing with my band “Sangre de Coyote” back in 2012 in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and we experimented with some world folk music like Klezmer and Jazz Manouche or Gypsy Jazz combined with classical music, and it was very well received, by 2014 the band was really well known in the local scene, and then we were invited to other parts of Mexico to play, we did festivals and private events in Durango, Morelia, Guanajuato, CDMX, Colima, etc. Then we recorded a couple of albums, and all of this lead to me receiving an invitation to play at San Antonio, Texas, I accepted the invitation and started a season which lasted about a year of playing with the great pianist Martin Cossio who among his big achievements, he once went on tour playing piano with legendary Mexican Singer Jose Jose.

All of those years I kept performing and recording with different projects, but in 2018 I started something different. So I was in a rehearsal with a jazz band, and in the break the bassist showed me some YouTube videos of a musician called Jacob Collier, and I was amazed, and just couldn’t believe what this young guy (about 20 when I discovered his work) was able to accomplish, it was my dream musician, a master of the craft unlike any other person I’ve ever met or even imagined, it blew my mind. It was a big inspiration, it compeled me to reach way higher than I’ve ever tried. This experience marked a new stage of my career, inspired by this great musician I started to dare more, to compose my own music, to forget the rules I’ve learned and going for my own intuition, to record more, and specially to produce, I started learning the art of music production and building my own home studio. All of this unleashed my creativity.

This new era has brought a lot of surprises, a couple of them are quite remarkable, in 2020 I released my first single on Spotify, an arrangement of the song “Oblivion” by Astor Piazzolla, and this song went kind of viral, it was shocking for me that my first ever released song on Spotify had the success it had, it has been streamed over 109,000. I actually made some money which I thought was impossible for an independent artist with his first song upload to digital platforms. Then in 2021 I met the prestigious violinist Karen Bentley who took a liking to my music when she listened me playing in San Pancho, Nayarit, she suggested I compose a violin duet to play with her, and so I did, but with my new skills I actually went to her house, mounted a small studio and recorded her and I doing my violin duet I composed for her, it was called “Estrellitas de esperanza”, and then did the whole mixing and mastering of this track, which was of course also uploaded to all major platforms. That same year I met one of the most unique Mexican composers: Pedro Dabdoub, who is very famous for his songs “Un mundo de caramelo” performed by Danna Paola, and “Tu amor me hace tanto bien” performed by Alejandro Fernandez. So Pedro and I developed a friendship and started a routine of improvising on Piano and Violin format every night for a couple months, we recorded those improvisations and eventually formed what now is an album in which we are still working on the last touches, and will be released in early 2023, it is called “Crónicas de media noche¨, in English it would be “Midnight Chronicles”.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Music has always been my savior, I’ve always been kind of an introvert, and so being on stage has been hard for me, but the reaction of people throughout the years has been very positive, and that has been my point of connection with others. And not only as a social issue, but even deeper, as a way of expressing myself, to tell my story, to feel heard, to provoque reactions in people.

The places I’ve traveled, the people I’ve met, it’s always connected somehow to music. I don’t actually see music as a career, I see it as a way of life. And being able to work and make a living in something that expresses my soul has been definitively one of my greatest treasures.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Of course music is a very challenging career, and I’ve lived through many crisis, the biggest one being the pandemic.

I remember in March 2020 I was in a Gypsy Jazz music festival, we were in the middle of a great party with people from all over the world, celebrating music, and then I started receiving text messages of my clients cancelling events and gigs of the year, one by one, until my work schedule was empty, it was all so sudden, so abrupt, at least that’s the way I experienced it.

Initially I was very worried and stressed, not only because I was in a music festival with a lot of people and that was a health risk, but also my finances were at a very high risk, I was very afraid in that first stage.

The way I survived the pandemic was by squeezing all my artistic resources, I was experimenting with composing, arranging and producing music since 2018, but I mostly had incomplete projects and experiments. So I decided I needed to finish a project and upload it to Spotify, and so I did, and that’s how the song “Oblivion” came to life, also I won a small grant with a series of videos analyzing “The girl from Ipanema”, and my other big move was to rent my house, and then traveled to San Pancho Nayarit, a small town the Pacific Ocean side of Mexico, where there was a rumor they still had gigs going even in the middle of the pandemic, those rumors turned out to be mostly false, but the ocean was very therapeutic, and also there I met Karen Bentley and Pedro Dabdoub, two great artists whom would become very important collaborators.

I saw many friends changed careers when the pandemic started, I had the privilege but I have to say, also had the courage to stay with the music, and it saved my life once again.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miguelfajardomusic/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/miguelfajardomusic
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/miguelfajardovl
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MiguelFajardo

Image Credits
Ricardo Irak, Alis Gonzalez.