Tulsa (Miren Iza) has won the 2024 National Prize for Current Music. The jury has decided by majority to award her the award for her album Amateur (2023) and its stage adaptation, “an outstanding album with lyrics of deep lyrical depth and a poetic sensitivity built from customs to vindicate and give voice to women less represented in society.”
The committee has highlighted that, with this project, the artist “culminates a career of enormous influence on Spanish music in recent years thanks to a unique and personal way of composing and singing.” The ruling also recognizes Tulsa’s role as a creator: “It has marked several generations of bands and artists, often working outside the media spotlight and creating from absolute independence.”
The award, granted annually by the Ministry of Culture and Sports through the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music (INAEM), is worth 30,000 euros. The singer takes over from Rodrigo Cuevas, honored last year.
The singer and songwriter Tulsa (Miren Iza) was born in San Sebastián in 1979 and began her career in music in the late 90s, singing in English with the female punk pop band Electrobikinis. After their separation in 2002, he began to write songs in Spanish and, in 2007, he presented the first of the seven albums he has released under the stage name Tulsa, Solo me has rozado. That same year she was nominated for the Latin Grammy for Best New Artist.
On their second album, Wait for the pale (2010), continued the folk rock spirit of his music and toured Spain, Argentina and New York for two years. In 2015 it arrived The dead calmwhich marked a turning point in his career by introducing synthesizers, which became a characteristic feature of his sound from that moment on. In 2017 he recorded and edited Centaurs and in 2021 That Ecstasy.
Tulsa has also signed film and theater collaborations. The artist made the short film together with filmmaker Raúl Santos Ignonaut and in 2016 he was in charge of the soundtrack for the film The Romantic Exiles by Jonás Trueba. In the field of performing arts, he has worked alongside María Velasco on the stage translation of her latest album Amateuran album that he has released under his own label, Matxitxako.
‘Amadora’, the award-winning album
Miren Iza (Tulsa) and the director and author María Velasco came together in 2023 to create a performance piece, Amateurwith which they paid tribute to their mothers, being at the same time a call to insurrection. The actresses Socorro Anadón, Celia Bermejo and Carmen Mayordomo starred in this show that premiered in November of last year at the Madrid Autumn Festival.
Through musical themes, monologues, sound spaces and actions in space, they focused on women trapped in the invisible, universally needy and ignored, who indirectly claimed, with pain, tension and anxiety, the respect that was given to them. has denied.
“This work is dedicated to the women who were going to leave us a cursed burden, disguised as instinct… The inheritance received. Women with whom there was an obligation to reconcile in order to be able to care, even love, without committing hara-kiri to each other two or three times a day,” those responsible explained in the presentation of the text.
Source: www.eldiario.es
