Oscar Peñas

Guitarist and composer Oscar Peñas accompanied by Sara Caswell on violin, Motohito Fukushima on electric bass, and Richie Barshay on drums will play his debut in Los Angeles at Sam First. Peñas, a New York-based and Barcelona-native, has released four jazz albums with Grammy winners Esperanza Spalding, Gil Goldstein, and Paquito D'Rivera. His latest recording is scheduled to be released in 2022, features legendary bassist Ron Carter.

Downbeat wrote, "Oscar Peñas is a poet," celebrating his "ability to bring together the strands of a broad cultural education—one encompassing classical studies as a teenager in Barcelona and jazz degrees at both Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory—in a seamless synthesis of musical idioms." Esperanza Spalding commented, "Oscar is a beautiful player with a totally unique sense of sound and color in his writing." And Gil Goldstein wrote, "Oscar Peñas has found a way to merge traditional Spanish music with jazz…