Tradición Viva Living Tradition

Ensemble Ibérica – Book & CD Release, December 15, 2025

With Tradición Viva / Living Tradition, Ensemble Ibérica celebrates twelve years of artistic exchange, cultural exploration, and musical innovation. This book-and-CD set captures the ensemble’s journey across continents and traditions, weaving together photography, essays, and music into a vibrant portrait of a collective dedicated to dissolving borders through sound.

The accompanying book features luminous photography by Dan White, whose portraits of the ensemble and its collaborators provide a visual chronicle as rich and intimate as the music itself. It also includes personal essays by founder Beau Bledsoe and a foreword by longtime journalist and author Steve Paul, who situates Ensemble Ibérica in a broader cultural landscape of discovery, wonder, and connection. Together, these texts frame the project with reflections that illuminate the ensemble’s vision and impact.

Recorded at Greenwood Social Hall in Kansas City in 2024, as well as from live concert performances across the city, the album brings together core collaborators—Nilko Andreas, Ezgi Karakus, Coleen Dieker, John Currey, and Beau Bledsoe—alongside international guest artists Ara Dinkjian, Max and Josh Baca, Mike Block, and Alejandro Brittes, capturing Ensemble Ibérica’s signature blend of chamber precision and folkloric fire. Each track embodies the group’s ethos: music as a living tradition, both preserved and renewed through collaboration.

Ensemble Ibérica’s story is inseparable from its global travels—concerts in Andalusia, Ireland, and even Carnegie Hall—yet it is always grounded in Kansas City, where audiences have witnessed the ensemble’s evolution into a cultural nerve center. This release distills that history into a single, immersive experience: a road map of traditions reimagined, friendships forged, and borders transcended.

Tradición Viva / Living Tradition is more than an album or a book—it is a testament to the power of art to connect, to remember, and to reinvent. Available December 15, 2025. Ships in time for Christmas.

A beautifully designed 6.5″ × 6.5″, 100-page book, featuring an inserted CD and digital download code—two ways to experience the music.

Also available in a limited edition of 100 copies, signed by the artists and stamped with an embossed seal (see below).