SPANISH guitarist and flamenco jazz fusion composer Eduardo Niebla is on the move after 13 years in North Yorkshire, but he is not travelling far by comparison with past changes in his life.

Born in Tangiers, he left Morocco for Girona in his Spanish family's homeland when he was five, later moving to Paris and settling in London in 1978 before he and his Yorkshire wife and manager Katherine headed north to Melmerby, near Ripon, in 2001 to be close her parents when their first child was due.

Since April, Eduardo and Katherine have been building a new home and recording studio at Sutton Howgrave, near Bedale, and they plan to move in by Christmas.

All the while he has been recording his as-yet-untitled new album, recording three of the compositions, In The Music, Tree and See and Feel (still a working title) with Polish musical director Ewa Salecka's York community choirs, Millegro and Prima Vocal Ensemble.

In turn, the massed choir will join Eduardo, guitarist Matthew Robinson and violinist Kate Chruscicka on October 31 and November 1 for 7.30pm concerts at St. Chad's Church, Campleshon Road, which should be a more commodious fit than for the somewhat improvised recording sessions.

"The choirs came to my home to do the recording but we couldn't fit them all in the studio, so what we did was borrow a marquee and put all the furniture from the sitting room and play room in there, and we then put the women in the sitting room and the men in the play room, and they sounded great," says Eduardo. "It was amazing."

The album is "still in the workshop". "At the same time that I was recording, we started building the new house, so I still need to record some of my guitar parts, as we've got involved physically in the building project, which has been very, very intense," Eduardo says.

He is designing and building his new studio specially for acoustic instruments. "It's going to be magnificent, as I've put all my knowledge into creating a studio with a live sound to it, " he says, keenly awaiting the chance to use the facilities.

Ewa Salecka, meanwhile, looks forward to the brace of concerts with Eduardo. "He is both a true virtuoso and a beautiful person who delights audiences by thinking outside the box with that winning formula of musical passion and complete technical mastery of his instrument," she says. "To have this opportunity to perform with him here in our very own city is an incredible honour and I know the audience will be simply blown away by his style and charisma.”

The York concerts come after a year when Eduardo's national tours have taken him to the outer Hebrides, the Shetland Islands, the Southbank Centre, London, St. George's, Bristol, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Sage, Gateshead and the Marlborough International Jazz Festival. He also has appeared this summer with Juno Reactor at the psy-trance Festival Boom in Portugal, part of Eduardo’s many explorations into different genres, including collaborations with sarod player Nishat Khan, the Dante String Quartet, oud player Adel Salameh, George Michael, Craig David and poets Michael Horovitz, the late Fran Landesman and Barnsley bard Ian McMillan.

He has come a long way since the day his brother bouught a guitar. "He told me never to touch it; I was only seven but I was so afraid of him. So what I did was, when this singer-songwriter friend of his came and played, I thought, 'this sounds beautiful', so I kept the chords in my head all through the night, and then kept trying to play them on my brother's guitar," recalls Eduardo.

"When he came home from work, he said, 'what are you doing with my guitar', but then he heard me play and he cheered up. 'How do you play that?', he asked."

And so the career of the self-taught Eduardo Niebla was born.

Eduardo Niebla Experience, St. Chad's Church, York, October 31 and November 1, 7.30pm. Tickets: £12 or £10 in advance at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk or on 01904 623568; £15 on the door, although early booking is advised.


Did you know?

Tom Newman, producer of Mike olfield's Tubular Bells, leant Eduardo Niebla his first recording equipment while he lived in a squat in Little Venice, London.