Dino Toledo
My Name is Dino. I’m a musician. I play Flamenco guitar. I started this musical journey in the early eighties. Originally I wanted to be an architect, but music seduce me when I was 17 and started playing Rock music, eventually I liked to play in Heavy Metal groups. I toured Canada playing with several Heavy Metal groups, including I Mother Earth, Jeff Healey, but being Latin American I always kept close to my roots, I am originally from Chile, I went back to Chile one summer and I fell in love with Folk music, Andean music, pan flute music, and I formed an Andean music here in Toronto and there I met some musicians with whom I play today like Oriana and from there because of my love for middle Eastern music I discovered Flamenco and that is how I became a Flamenco guitar player. Right now I’m playing in Carmen Romero’s company and I also have my own group which is called Santerias, which basically came from all fusions of music that I played in the past. Santerias is my main project right now and we do a fusion of Latin music, a little bit of Brazilian, Flamenco, Middle Eastern and now we are doing a little bit of Hip Hop too, mixing it up. That’s my main venture right now and we are playing in several places now, included going to Montreal in August. We’ll be recording a new CD in September. We have a new line up, new people like Oriana has been a constant player, she’s a bass player, Irene Torres, she’s a vocalist, Rino Manfreddi percussionist, Claudia Aguirre back up vocalist, she also dances, Armando Borg on drums, Oriana Barbato on bass and me on guitar.
We are recording our third CD. We are taking it to the next level. I consider myself a composer. What I do mostly is compose. I compose in many different styles: rock music, electronic music, ambiance, drum and bass, and the Latin American fusion with Santerias and Flamenco, but that’s my main thing. I like to compose music. A couple of years ago I received an Ontario Arts Council Grant for composition and all those compositions for the Grant ended up in the second Santerias CD. What we wanna do is to get another Grant for Recording and Touring. We have done contacts in Montreal and New York. We would like to play in Latin America: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile.
We want to start like a meeting of spirits with an East Indian group, they are called Indian Touch. We did a show with them called Shakty 3. It was mostly a benefit to help people in the Third World and we did it in the Misssissauga Living Arts Centre. And to my surprise we ended playing with Sajir Ali Khan, who is Nusrat Ali Khan’s (Famous Pakistani singer) nephew. And his nephew was trained by Nusrat. He ended up singing with us. For us it was an honor. His singing is totally awesome. We want to do more that.
Toronto is the kind of place to play with wonderful musicians, a melting pot of cultures. And my idea is to gather all these musicians and create this wonderful music for the world.