Jazz aficionados are in luck: a new album by Tete Montoliu (1933-1997), Together again , will appear in the autumn on Swit Records, coinciding with the 90th anniversary of the musician’s birth. The news was revealed yesterday by the pianist Ignasi Terraza, owner of the label, to a small group of attendees (around a dozen) at a masterclass at the Andorra Jazz Festival, which is held in Escaldes-Engordany until next Thursday.
Technology has made it possible to clear away the impurities in the sound of recordings of concerts that Tete Montoliu performed in 1994 and 1995 together with the singer Laura Simó. “We had records of a set of three concerts but we have almost entirely used one of them, the one in Calella de la Costa, with the bonus track of a song from a performance in Galicia. Tete played standards, they are not original songs, and a blues with a trio that is how she always started the concerts ”. Terraza points out that “there was no record that included the voice of Laura Simó together with Tete playing with her trio, that is, with Horacio Fumero and Peer Wyboris”. This is one of the few recordings authorized by Montoliu’s widow, “other pirated things have come out,” says Terraza.
“One day I was performing at l’Hospitalet with Lucky Guri – recalls Laura Simó – and they introduced me to Tete. “You’re not doing badly, she told me, but you’ll never be a good singer if you don’t sing Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life.” Some time later I went to see him at the Jamboree and, when I left, I told him: ‘I’ve already learned the song’. We went to dinner with her team, she made me sing it and she answered me: ‘Tomorrow you start rehearsals with us’ ”. That theme is, precisely, the bonus from the Galician concert, which joins other compositions such as Watch what happens, Speak low or We’ll be together again. It is, emphasizes Simó, “an unpublished and live album”.
There was a time when the people of Barcelona flocked to Andorra not only for tobacco and electrical appliances, but also to listen to jazz. Miles Davis, B.B. King, Chick Corea, Fats Domino, Pat Metheny, Tito Puente or Diana Krall. The event was interrupted after twenty years, but since last summer it has gained new life, in an initiative of the Comú (city council) of Escaldes-Engordany with the collaboration of the promoter The Project, responsible for the Barcelona jazz festival.
Another collaborator of Tete, double bass player Horacio Fumero, explains that “in my case it was something similar to Laura’s, she called me on the phone, it was 1980, and she told me: ‘I want to give you a test today at my house, at five o’clock. pm’. There I went, he started to play the piano, a blues in F, and I began to accompany him, three or four choirs, a medium tempo and then he stopped so I could play alone. ‘I’ll file you’, he told me, he liked football slang, he was a good friend of Joaquim Maria Puyal and he would go to ‘watch’ the Barça games from his broadcast booth. I have learned a lot with him, musically, and because he was blind, he taught me to see the world in a different way. There were musicians who would ask him about scales and technical considerations and despite mastering all of this, he would get angry: ‘You play with your heart!’, he would tell them, he never spoke of music as mechanical”.
Likewise, coinciding with the appearance of the album, the journalist Pere Pons will publish the choral biography Round about Tete Montoliu (Kultrum), a walk through the life of the most famous Catalan jazzman in history based on the testimonies of all the people who dealt with him , both professionally and personally. Some concerts with the Girona Big Band will also honor Montoliu.
After the performances in previous days of the festival by Michel Portal or Al Di Meola, yesterday it was the turn of the duo made up of Andrea Motis (visibly pregnant) and Marco Mezquida, with sold out locations, while tonight the trio of the Brazilian Eliane will perform Elias presenting the album Quietude. Various street concerts in squares –and even in a vehicle that drives through the streets– take the festival to all corners of a city that wants to improve its cultural offerings for holidaymakers who attend the musical shows of the Empordà.
