Queues and packed to capacity to say goodbye to a jazz club. Who was going to say it. At the Milano Jazz Club in Ronda Universitat de Barcelona there was no room for a pin this Thursday night, a date set by a real estate contract to conclude three decades of live music in the center of the Catalan capital. Curious paradox: now that the room will cease to exist, a victim of high rents, the focus was maximum. The fans noticed with surprise the presence of cameras that had never set foot in the cocktail bar before. The news rules. The occasion was to cover “a New Orleans funeral,” as one of the local’s regulars lucidly baptized it.
And there was no requiem. Yakety Yak!, the band with saxophonist Dani Nel·lo as the best-known face, made sure that this was the case, thanks to an energetic rhythm
As chance would have it, it was this catchy and danceable style that closed the venue. The handover of the keys condemned some subsequent concerts, already scheduled. While Hugo Zambrana, bartender and head of the room, tried to manage the chaos – although pure anecdote, there was a moment of tension due to ovebooking – the band continued with its devilish rhythms and some farewell proclamations with a message. “It’s not elegant to insult the public, but if you have to close the place so you can fill it, you’re already being bastards!” crooner Agustí Burriel snapped in his loud voice. Cheers. Jarl also called for more support for live music: “Leave the screens!” More cheering. Let’s see if it’s true, some will think.
But the big applause of the night went, of course, to the Milano staff. The closure leaves about thirty people on the streets. Deserved tribute. At some point, Hugo was able to relax and buy shots to the diners at the bar. What I said: celebration despite everything. The party closed with the entire audience standing, euphoric: those who were already standing because they couldn’t sit down, and those who were more comfortable, as they were carried away by the frenetic rhythm. The encore was not in the Yaketi’s plans, but it rounded off the evening perfectly around midnight.
However, it would be misleading to limit the goodbye to a single day of fireworks. For weeks – the news broke in mid-August and the campaigns to save the premises made noise, but arrived late – hope of maintaining activity at the premises had been lost. Musicians and fans have been able to say goodbye to Milano these days with a mixture of sadness and resignation. The club, strategically located in the basement of a well-known cafeteria, has continued to be filled with the most faithful and, in each live show, the protagonist lamented, microphone in hand, that the stage he was now stepping on would soon be part of an impersonal chain of trattorias. . Work will begin sooner rather than later this fall.
One of them serves as a symbol of what happens when a traditional establishment dies: part of a life is gone. Literally. On Wednesday, Camil Arcarazo’s quartet performed, telling the audience that he first set foot in the Milano when he was a 10-year-old brat. There is no catch: the young guitarist has only two decades under his belt and is one of the great promises of jazz in Catalonia. Arcarazo, like so many young talents trained in the four modern music schools in Barcelona, ??is left with one less venue to play. And he loses a vital reference to his training. Because the musician, the good one at least, is not only trained in academies.
This is how a 16-year project ends. A project by brothers Sergi and Ramon Larrégola, which began as an elegant, spacious cocktail bar with a vintage-inspired English decoration that it has maintained to this day. Very soon it hosted live music on a stable basis – 365 days a year until the pandemic – to progressively climb in prestige and provide shelter to high-level musicians from both home and abroad. Chano Domínguez, Ben Sidran, Peter Berstein or Scott Hamilton have passed through here, names that may not sound like the majority, but they have placed Barcelona – following in the wake of the famous Jamboree in Plaza Reial, which today remains a little more alone — on the international jazz map. But, for example, a certain Rosalía has also played in her acoustic beginnings.
The covid dealt a first blow to the venue, which, however, had managed to recover in recent years, at least musically. And things went south when an offer arrived that was 30% higher than the current rental price in an already very tense area and ended all hope that the music would continue. Franchise spaghetti won.
And the future? Caution but hope. The local programmers Guim Cifré and Clara Conill, yesterday visibly excited but exhausted after weeks of a hustle and bustle to which they were not at all accustomed, celebrated that there are ideas and ways to recover the club in another location, be it under the name of Milano – there are some patron interested in not losing the brand—or settling in other rooms that were once a reference but are now closed. To this end, Cifré also hopes for a more concrete gesture from the City Council, which last week announced measures to help live music and avoid cases like Milano.
On the table there is also the possibility of the tandem participating in a public competition to manage a large municipal hall, but they are not yet convinced by the idea. Cifré is determined to maintain the spirit and cultural level that Milano has achieved in the last 3 years that he has been in charge of programming, because, he says, it is not about saving a venue, but rather a cultural ecosystem. “Sometimes you don’t understand what a jazz club is,” he stressed. And the wish: that yesterday’s goodbye, joyful in his own way, is more of a see-you-later.
