Dimitri Grechi Espinoza

Bio

Dimitri Grechi Espinoza was born in Moscow in 1965 and was always interested in jazz music and in playing the saxophone. His music is contaminated with Eastern cultures, Italian and American jazz.

Espinoza attended the Moscow Jazz Institute and then Jazz Mobile in New York until he moved to Italy where he followed high professional training courses at Siena Jazz, with artists like Pietro Tonolo, Furio di Castri, Stefano Battaglia, and Paolo Fresu.

In 2000, Dimitri founded the group Dinamitri Jazz Folklore and following his need to experiment with music, collaborated with the Congolese company Yela wa. Their partnership wanted to be a research on Congolese healing musical tradition. In 2014, the musical formation positioned itself at second place as Best Italian Group according to Musica Jazz magazine.

Simultaneously, Dimitri carried on with his solo career and started his OREB project, thanks to which he was able to unite two of his greatest passions: the study of sacred science in traditional culture and the sound research in order to re-discover the sound and space in a holy place.

OREB was composed of three albums: the first was Angel’s Blows (2014), recorded in St. John’s Baptistery in Pisa and produced by Ponderosa Music&Arts. Espinoza wanted «to give back to music its original meaning of dialogue with “the Sacred”. It’s an album thanks to which we are able to overcome the religious differences and meet with us and others, in order to understand the Unity that connects the entire cosmic order».

The second album of the OREB project, published again by Ponderosa Music & Arts in 2016, was Recreatio, recorded in Cisternino di Pian Rota in Livorno, an incredible neoclassical architecture. Thanks to his ability with the sax, Grechi Espinoza is able to infuse life in the space where he plays, and his music fills every corner of it.

His third and last album of the OREB project was The Spiritual Way that was recorded in 2019 again in St. John’s Baptistery in Pisa. The album decides to «face the theme of spiritual virtues. Through my music, I tried to give credit to a traditional Chinese text which leads a journey of inner discovery and traces its key principles».

Following the publication of The Spiritual Way, Espinoza performed in Italy in May 2020 during JAZZMI at St. Ambrogio Church where his sax echoed and enchanted the audience.

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