A celebrated virtuoso of the flamenco guitar who has been voted into the top three guitarists in the world by US magazine ‘Guitar Player’, Juan Martín is a native of Andalucía, where he still has a home in Málaga. Aged 17, he played in the Spanish film ‘Donde tu estes’ filmed in Marbella. He now spends much time touring as well as in London where he has formed his own international company for the promotion of high quality flamenco coming direct from Andalucía. He has recorded 18 albums, mostly as a composer and has several DVDs distributed by Faber Music and Mel Bay. His original method book ‘El Arte Flamenco de la Guitarra’ is in its eighth print and has opened the complex art of the flamenco guitar to the whole world and is assiduously studied from Moscow to Beijing to San Francisco and back to Spain. It is now considered to be the ‘bible’ of flamenco guitar.

He performs with a highly distinctive compositional style formed from his early years in Málaga and developed through wide experience in Madrid, including direct contact with Paco de Lucía. Further experience and polish came through recordings with the Royal Philharmonic and live performances with artists of the calibre of Miles Davis. The Spanish paper ‘El Mundo’ said of him ‘he has a terrifyingly good technique and an absolute dominance of the guitar, filling the concert hall with crystalline clarity.’

He has performed at major International Arts Festivals including Ludwigsburg, Montreux Jazz, The First World Guitar Congress in the USA, Cork Jazz Festival, Istanbul, Bosphorus, Bergen and Hong Kong as well as at leading halls worldwide. He has broadcast on BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Spanish RTE and German ZDF television and in the US for CNN and his music is frequently used on Spanish television programmes on flamenco (Flamencos con futuro), bullfighting and Spanish arts. He was the first flamenco artist to record with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and reviews of his solo compositions on ‘The Andalucian Suites’ and ‘Luna Negra’ have compared him to the great Spanish composers Tárrega and Turina and he was the first to tour the great flamenco dancer Eva La Yerbabuena outside Spain.

His interest in the Moorish roots of flamenco led him to record ‘Musica Alhambra’ in 1996 rediscovering Andalusí and Sephardic music from the 12th and 13th centuries that was then no longer performed in Spain: ‘Martín spans the centuries with a mixture of the dazzling and the profound’ commented The Observer. He followed this cd with ‘Arte Flamenco Puro’, ‘El Alquimista’ recorded in Andalucía, ‘Riquezas’, an album with flamenco singer Antonio Aparecida and a latin influenced album ‘Camino Latino’. In 2004 he put out a live recording of his flamenco group recorded at the Barbican Hall in London which has received wonderful reviews. In 2005 he was asked to write the foreword to ‘The Complete Guitar Handbook’ which features the greatest guitarists of all time. He is one of only 2 flamenco guitarists featuring in the list. His ‘Rumbas Originales’ album was put out at the end of 2006.

Recent tours have included solo tours in Australia, the Far East, Iran, the West Indies, Canada and the the USA. In Iran in the Summer of 2004 where his books and DVDs are widely studied, he played solo to 3000 a night in Tehran for 3 nights in a row.