Paradoxically, one of the distinctive signs of the Barcelona Jazz Festival is another festival, De Cajón!, which it welcomes into its bosom and which expands its heterogeneous lineup with top names.
In this edition the person in charge of opening it is the musician, guitarist and singer Raúl Rodríguez, who will premiere today in the Luz de Gas room (8:30 p.m.) at the head of the 3F Power Trio, with Juanfe Pérez on bass and Jimmy González on drums. La Vanguardia subscribers have a 15% discount on the price of tickets, as long as they buy them at Entradas de Vanguardia.
That trio format is one of the great novelties of this artist from Rodríguez. The other would be a back and forth flamenco sound with its well-known Caribbean and Latin ingredients, and on this occasion with many Africans, a product of his stay in Mali, Senegal, Madagascar and Equatorial Guinea.
Regarding his adventure colleagues, the now tres player defines them with conviction. “The two companions of the trio have a perfect mixture of knowledge and daring. I know Jimmy González very well because he has been playing with Kiko Veneno for a couple of decades and I, in turn, one with him. And Juan is a very interesting character; He has grown up in a very rural and traditional environment but being educated in very psychedelic music and with very advanced intentions”.
Also the son of Martirio and close musical accomplice of Kiko Veneno, Juan Perro or Jackson Browne, celebrates this season thirty years of musical career, which for eight years has been strictly solitary and marked by a search for sound that has led him to be considered for the festival “one of the most unique geniuses of music with Hispanic roots”.
In the concert with his “electrifying trio”, in his own definition, Rodríguez will give an account of material from his two published albums – Razón de son and La root electrica – and some preview of his next album-book La reason electric, scheduled for February 2023.
In yesterday’s presentation of his Barcelona concert after five years of absence from local stages, the artistic director of the Barcelona Jazz Festival, Joan Anton Cararach, stressed that he had been chosen “very expressly” to inaugurate De Cajón!, and reproduced A few words from Martirio about his son: “Fire that warms the soul is what characterizes his concerts”.
Rodríguez (Seville, 1974) explained what it means to work in a trio but not with the guitar, but from the tres, with all the possibilities that the flamenco tres opens up to take a trip to the past. “A trip, which I couldn’t do with the electric guitar, to the Caribbean and to all the American and African influences as well –this time especially the latter–, and the flamenco ones of course. That is to say, putting all that traditional language at the service of the most electrifying trio format, not necessarily electric but with that power of the language of the trio, where nothing is left over”.
The resulting sound product –including the first single from the next album, La vida es una Rueda although he plays it alone– “are compositions with a very basic structure and closely linked to many types of music that I like very much, such as jazz, rock , blues, but very little applied to flamenco in this format”.
And he warns about the power of his new music, even if it’s not electric: “I play with the flamenco tres, but if you put it through a peeler and put effects and wah-wahs on it, at any moment it can turn into a dragon of seven heads. It’s not just an acoustic instrument, but it allows me to go from the most acoustic, fine, to more street music, club music, dislocated festival music”.
As was said, what he is doing now can be seen both in his concerts in trio format and in the next album La Razon Electrica, where he composes, sings and plays all the instruments. That is to say, a music of difficult stylistic classification. That is, more or less what he has always done. “There is a very nice transition between cultured and popular music, between traditional and what we could call avant-garde, because there is a lot of music that we play that we don’t really know what genre it is. And I also think there is no need to put a name to what is playing”.
But there is no doubt that with this new conception of the format and with the miscegenation in the ancient history of Afro-Andalusian Caribbean popular music, Rodríguez has created -in fact, is creating- a special language that drinks from the memory to anticipate a future son, what he calls a “round-trip electric son”.
And all in a logical way, at least for him. “What I aspire to is to continue, and I understand that each format that one is doing has to be guided by an artistic truth. Art sends me, the artistic discourse and that the integrity of what you do is true”.
This does not come to him again, as he acknowledges, because “I have grown up in the wave of a very open Andalusian rock, surrounded by groups like Smash, Imán or Cai, bands that were using electricity without fear, and for that reason I can say that for me what I do now is very traditional. The feeling I get doing this is not one of fusion, but rather that I’m being a purist. For me it is a line of continuity; it is not so much a break with tradition as it is continuing with a creative tradition”.
The unreleased songs that he will perform live will form part of his third solo album, titled La Razon Electrica, which Altafonte will publish at the beginning of next year. A volume that, like the previous two, will have a disc-book format, where all the music, the music, whose lyrics and tunes are composed and interpreted by him, and where “direct experiences” will be reflected, those aforementioned trips to Mali, Senegal, Madagascar, Equatorial Guinea, Mexico or New York.
There will be collaborations, like those of Sirifo Kouyaté, Rajery or his friend, colleague and teacher-inspirer Jackson Browne. With him he will close a trilogy with the previous two, and one of whose premises has been his maxim that “music must be treated with respect because they are like living beings”.
And Rodríguez says that making the music that he does, like a whole series of colleagues with similar artistic concerns, reflects that “we have never been in the forefront, and it also shows that creatively we are not for sale. In this aspect I consider myself a spirit of the South insurgent”.
