Lead singer with the Spanish band Radio Tarifa
Benjamín Escoriza, who has died aged 58 after a lengthy illness, was the lead singer of Radio Tarifa. The group gained international success in the 1990s with adventurous compositions that mixed Spanish, North African and medieval styles. As their frontman, Escoriza, who sported dark glasses on stage, became celebrated for his musical experimentation, his skills as a lyricist – often writing about love and passion – and his rough, smoky and emotional voice, influenced by flamenco and rumba.
One of four children, he was born in Colomera, a village in the mountains north of Granada, Spain. He began singing at the age of five at fiestas organised by his grandfather, who owned a bar. His family moved to Granada when he was eight, and he trained for four years to be a chef, also gaining diplomas in the hotel and tourist industries. He relocated to Madrid in 1989 to pursue a musical career.
While working in TV in the Spanish capital, he joined up with the percussionist Fain Sánchez Dueñas, whom he had known in Granada and who was then playing renaissance music with the wind and keyboard player Vincent Molino. The trio took the name Radio Tarifa from a town in the south of Spain. They imagined what the playlist might sound like for an imaginary radio station in such a location, situated just across the water from North Africa – and then created that music themselves, mixing Spanish guitars with the Middle Eastern oud, Arabic drums or Galician bagpipes in compositions that included anything from flamenco to Sephardic and Arab-Andalusian styles, along with echoes of medieval and even Caribbean influences.
They made their first recordings in Dueñas's bedroom in 1992, and these eventually formed the basis for their album Rumba Argelina, released the following year by a Spanish independent label and licensed in the UK by World Circuit in 1996. The album shook up the Spanish music scene and brought the band an international following. In 2007 it featured in the Guardian's list of 1,000 albums to hear before you die.
For their recordings and tours, Radio Tarifa were often joined by up to five other musicians, along with a flamenco dancer, Joaquin Ruiz Gómez. Thanks in part to Escoriza's powerful vocals and stage presence, they established a reputation as a great live band.
Rumba Argelina was followed by three albums over five years, Temporal, Cruzando el Rio and Fiebre. The last of these was their first live album, a celebration of their 10th anniversary. It was largely recorded in Toronto, on a night when the band had just finished a difficult tour of the US. According to Dueñas: "Wherever we went, the fact that we played Arabic-sounding music brought us a lot of unwarranted hassle, and our oud player, Amir Haddad, is half-Palestinian and had a terrible time in airports and anywhere passports got checked."
Radio Tarifa stopped working together in 2006, and the following year Escoriza launched a solo career with his album Alevanta! (Get Up!), licensed in the UK by the Riverboat label, in which he concentrated for the first time on his own songs. The album was recorded at his home, with Escoriza playing guitar and keyboards and Molino adding wind instruments on some tracks, with further help from the flamenco guitarist Fernando Mejías.
The flamenco styles that he had heard in his youth in Granada now dominated much of his work, with Escoriza's hoarse, gravelly voice driven on by guitars and hand-claps. But his influences remained diverse, as heard on the funky Rap De Marrakech and Carambola, which he described as his favourite song, inspired by a walk through Granada's streets at Christmas. It was followed by a second solo album, Mirando p'l Este (2010), which featured less flamenco and more of the global fusions of Radio Tarifa.
Escoriza is survived by his wife, Paloma, and his children, Benjamín and Alejandro.
• Benjamín Escoriza, singer, born 20 December 1953; died 9 March 2012