Xabier Díaz
More than three decades of music
The Star Parade in the A Coruña neighborhood of Eirís heard the first muñeiras performed by Xabier Díaz (A Coruña, 1969) with a bagpipe that his music-loving grandfather bought him at the beginning of the 80s. The instrument became a vehicle that facilitated Xabier’s arrival at Xacarandaina, Rumbadeira, and above all, the discovery of an unknown world, the music that the villages still preserved at that time, the discovery of traditional music. Today, Xabier’s is one of the most relevant names in Galician roots music.
He was part of the legendary and now extinct group Berrogüetto between 2008 and 2014. At the same time, he participated with Guadi Galego, Xosé Lois Romero and Guillerme Fernández in the aCadaCanto project, with which they published two albums.
An essential commitment was born to hand-held percussion instruments, in which he specialized and which are an unmistakable hallmark of his work, such as the tambourine, an instrument in which he obtained great recognition and prestige.
The awards followed one another and above all, the most important: the birth of a new group together with the Adufeiras de Salitre, whose joint work since 2014 is potrayed on four albums: The Tambourine Man (2015), Noró (2018), As Catedrais Silenciadas (2020) and Axúdame a sentir (2024). The band has performed close to 400 concerts, leaving its imprint in Buenos Aires, Oslo, Lisbon, Algiers, Glasgow, Madrid, Bariloche, Colonia, London, Gothenburg, Rotterdam, Brussels or Ghent, just to name a few…
The albums obtained recognition from specialized critics and the public, with outstanding sales success and impact in World Music. As Catedrais Silenciadas spent three months in the Top Ten of the WMCE and won the Martín Codax Award in the Traditional Music category in 2020. Always curious, Xabier continues looking for new ways to give a new life to those songs that hit the chest of that young man who left his Architecture studies to pursue his love for the “ferreñas”.