Raül Refree says that he gets bored quickly, that he is very bad at repeating things and that is what pushes him to continually get involved in new projects, some ephemeral ones like the presentation he just gave at the Rennes opera house of The Space between, his latest solo album, or the one he will perform this Friday, December 15 (9 p.m.) in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Pi under the title of The Immortal Mysticism. Accompanied by the Malian Rokia Koné and Ana Rujas, one of the protagonists of the series La mesías, the producer – of Rosalía and C. Tangana among other names – will sit at the organ to provide the instrumental section of a show that revolves around immortality and how death is faced from European and African traditions.
Immortality is the axis along which this year’s Clàssics festival runs, a gauntlet that Refree picked up to make a journey from the traditional music of northern Mali to the verses of Sister Inés de la Cruz and Teresa de Jesús. “Africans have a spectacular repertoire from introspection,” he highlights over coffee in a bookstore in Barcelona. “It is a genre that they do not offer to the European public, for whom they reserve the most festive music.”
It was Rokia Koné, a star in her country although little known in Europe, who provided the starting point for the project at the Parisian festival Banlieues Bleues. She did it thanks to her voice and the songs of her family, songs that she heard from her parents and grandparents but that she had never sung. “They talk about those who are no longer here, the idea that when you disappear you become part of nature, of the spiritual and genetic baggage of our families, of life and death and, in the end, of immortality.” Such sensitive material for the Malian artist that “sometimes she couldn’t sing because she got emotional.”
In the Basilica del Pi the project is enriched by the presence of the actress Ana Rujas, whom Refree met while composing the soundtrack for the Javis series The Messiah. “This is how we link everything that Anna means right now, after having played Montserrat,” and she does so by putting texts by Inés de la Cruz, Hildegard of Bonvingen and Saint Teresa of Jesus in her mouth. “It can have a lot of meaning for those who have seen The Messiah,” Anna Rujas has a very strong meaning right now.”
The connection between both cultures takes place in an almost spectral setting, where Refree will sit at the organ, “the instrument with which so many classical composers composed before Mozart or Beethoven, our European musical genetics are based on this instrument.” The liturgical instrument par excellence, with the entire church as a resonance box, will draw the musical space where European tradition will mix with African songs, “they are different forms but at the same time very similar, if you study the texts there are not so many differences” .
Refree has been reflecting on death for many years, a theme that is found in many of his previous works, starting with Los Ángeles, the album he made with Rosalía. She is also in Éxtasis, the show she performs with Niño de Elche based on the ritual. A path that has led him to perform with Maria Mazzotta themes of the dead from the Italian region of Puglia, where the mourners sing a series of songs in which crying is part of the song itself. Or to become interested in the O’Abellon ceremony, which is still performed in some Galician towns.
“It’s a shame that there is much less singing now,” Refree reflects while remembering how his grandmother took him to mass on Sundays, where he received one of his greatest influences by listening to parishioners sing in community in the church. “You went every Sunday, she was more yours. In the past, birth, wedding, communion, the cycle of life were understood in the same place, but now we have separated death, cornered in funeral homes, architecturally beautiful but emotionally cold.
The opposite of this coldness is also ecclesial music, which is why “the requiems and oratorios are designed to involve the community, they have large choirs and very long notes so that the voices enter into this kind of necessary ecstasy. We have lost the idea of ??singing as a bodily sensation rather than to search for a melody,” highlights the musician, and he remembers that dancing and singing in community, whether for a funeral or a party, unites us a lot. “Individualism has been enhanced, we are increasingly a society that is less concerned with the community.”
The performance in Santa Maria del Pi is nothing more than the umpteenth experience of the tireless Refree, who this year has published two albums in addition to creating the soundtracks for the film Muyeres and the series La Mesías. It is a job that he shares with that of producer, which has led him to work alongside artists such as the aforementioned Rosalía or C. Tangana, but also Kiko Veneno, Ricky Martin, Lee Ranaldo, Sílvia Pérez Cruz or Rodrigo Cuevas, who wanted to highlight the producer’s work including his name on the cover of Manual de cortejo. “I have always believed that my work as a producer on records was not more important than that of the artist, but it was basic for it to sound a certain way,” he explains. “I understand production as a joint journey, it is not just moving some faders and packaging it, it is about thinking together and influencing each other”, a way of working that for a long time has not been taken into account in Spain, where the producer was only the technician who is in the studio.
The versatile musician embarked on this path not out of pleasure, but out of character. “Since I was little I have been unable to reproduce a score as it was, and on the other hand I was very capable of inventing something from a melody. At that time it was a suffering, the teachers did not understand it, but now it has become an asset.” Getting to this point required a complex path that required a lot of effort, which is why now he doesn’t work to be liked, “I defend my way of understanding music, and if you don’t understand it, bad luck.” A defense that this Friday will maintain until death, or until immortality.
