Romance comics created for high school girls were all the rage in Spain in the 1950s and Sixties. The Spanish true-love stories in comic form were in step with an international trend in the post World War II period, a time when Harlequin romances took off in parallel with fan magazines for the teenage demographic, a cultural and commercial phenomen that surged reciprocally with a new breed of pop music idols.

A couple of years ago in an antique shop in a small town in French Catalunya, I came across a pile of these compact 12-page comics that were put out by two different publishing houses in Barcelona, and have since found more online. I’m obsessed with them.

My favorites are from the Claro de Luna series, whose stories were based on hit songs of the day, like the one above, inspired by Paul Anka’s “Muchacho Solitario” - “Lonely Boy.” The comic clumsily incorporates the lyrics to tell the story of a solitary guitar-playing cowboy (who somehow maintains his perfect blond pompadour and popped shirt collar while riding the range) who finds love with an Elizabeth Taylor look alike.

The Spanish publishers took a cue from UK comics that promoted pop stars, and the boom of U.S. teen girl romance comics in the fifties.

But the Spanish comics not only amplified the romance of a song by turning it into an illustrated story. They included translations of the English-language songs that inspired the comics, and also printed the original version, so that girls could sing along to the songs and understand them.

The pages also included the translated lyrics of additional songs. In this case, Anka’s “Tu cabecita en mi hombro” (“Put Your Head on My Shoulder”), “Las chicas de Paris,” (Les filles de Paris”) and “No me abandones” (“Don’t Ever Leave Me.”)

I don’t know exactly what deal the comics publishers may have had with the record companies and music publishers, but of course this was a great promotional tool for them. According to the Spanish comic collectors web site Tebeosfera, Ibero Mundial de Ediciones published 620 issues of the Claro de Luna comics from 1950-1971.

The series offered romance stories based on songs that ranged from The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” - which the group recorded in a Spanish version - to Petula Clark’s “Alone,” as well as songs by Spanish pop groups and boleros from Latin America.

Readers could also write to the publisher to receive the translated lyrics of their favorite American or British song by mail.

Cupid Baila el “Twist”/Cupid Dances the “Twist”

Another popular Spanish “Feminine Juvenile Magazine,” as the publisher Ediciones Toray in Barcelona called it, was Serenata.

Comics like Cupido Baila el Twist (Cupid Dances the Twist) combined a true love story with a back-page feature that profiled a popular singer, and featured song lyrics translated into Spanish.

In this issue, a story about a teen who finds love while doing the twist at a party is accompanied by a bio of French singer Sylvie Vartan, whose songs included a popular French version of “Twist and Shout.” The protagonist of the comic’s story was, like Vartan, blonde and big-eyed.

Vartan also did a cover of the Connie Francis hit “Stupid Cupid.”

Vartan, who was married to French rock pioneer Johnny Hallyday in the 1960s, was also known for performing “The Locomotion” among other American hits in French.

There were 313 issues of the Serenata series. Most were illustrated by María Pascual, a groundbreaking female comics artist in Barcelona known for creating the image of modern Spanish girls in the time of the represssive Franco dictatorship.

The Cupido Baila el Twist comic also includes the translated lyrics to Francoise Hardy’s “Il est parti un jour.”

Lo Siento Mucho, Cariño/I’m So Sorry, Darling

The Rosas Blancas comics collection featured true love stories that, according to the publisher, are for a precise audience: 17 year olds.

This series also has a fan element, with photos and bios of film stars featured on the back cover. Lo Siento Mucho Cariño (I’m So Sorry Darling), dedicates that space to Gérard Barray, the hunky French actor who became best known for his roles in “cape and sword movies,” including the 1961 film version of The Three Musketeers, in which he played D’Artagnan. He was also a jazz pianist and singer. Here’s his chanson style cover of “Venus.”

Like other comics in the Rosas Blancas Collection, Lo Siento Mucho Cariño, from 1963, was illlustrated by Carmen Guerra, another pioneering and prolific female Spanish comics artist.

The plot here involves a journalist and his rich girlfriend, who pressures him to accept a respectable job working for her father’s company.

“You’ve chosen an inconvenient and poorly paid profession,” his rich girlfriend scoffs, demanding that he choose between her and his silly articles. In the end, love triumphs when she realizes she has to let him follow his bliss, no matter how little money he makes. Good thing she has her own Mercedes.

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Further reading and listening:

Read down to listen to my beloved Pablo Records playlist and to learn about Granz’s relationship with Picasso and the origin of the Pablo Records logo, which graces Norman Granz’s tombstone in Ordrup Cemetery in Denmark.

“The older you get, the more you’re forgotten by record companies,” the irascible jazz world genius Norman Granz told writer Josh Mills for a NY Daily News article in 1976. It was a Sunday feature about his label Pablo Records, which Granz had started in 1973. That was after Verve, after Clef, Norgran and Down Home, and after a withdrawal from the whole damn record business.

“That’s what brought me back to Pablo,” Granz said. “The sorry state of recording in this country. The major companies have this theory that you constantly have to seek new talent. But it’s often not new talent for what they have to say, but newness for its own sake. That’s true with pop and its love affair with built-in obsolescence. But not with jazz…

…I’m not going for the short haul. I can’t make hits and I don’t want to. Jazz endures; it’s the longevity that counts.”

Pablo released records by Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson, who he managed, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughn and Milt Jackson, among others; a lot of it live, unedited material.

Departing from the illustrations that have made the Verve covers by David Stone Martin enduring artworks in themselves, the Pablo covers followed the Norgan pattern of featuring outstanding photographs of the artists. In this case, fabulously spotlighting the musicians in their later years in sublime photos that venerated their status as vital masters.

One of many label highlights was the Cleo Laine and Ray Charles’ Porgy and Bess album. Here’s a clip from a performance they did for Brazil’s Globo TV:

Granz named Pablo Records for his friend Pablo Picasso, who died the same year that he started the label.

The producer had come to know Picasso in the late sixties, and was an important collector of his works before then, in the time before Picasso was a household name. As with the music that he chose to promote and record, Granz collected art on instinct. Some of the Picassos in his collection were gifts from the artist. Granz visited Picasso at his home in the South of France, where Picasso, then in his eighties, would show his American friend his new paintings and invite him to tea. As told by Granz’s biographer Tad Hershorn, Granz called it “one of the most joyfuld periods of my life.”

The logo for Pablo Records came not from a painting or drawing, but from a lithograph, one of a set of 125 medievally-influenced illuminations. Picasso created them to illustrate a 1948 book of poems by the French Surrealist poet Pierre Reverdy, titled Le chant des morts (The Song of the Dead.)

In 2019, about a year-and-a-half before Granz died at the age of 83, his collection was sold at Christie’s at an auction titled “A Close Friendship: Picasso From The Collection of Norman and Grete Granz.” The sale was led by Picasso’s ink drawing Baigneuses et crabe, from 1938. That piece alone sold for $1.45 million.

Granz had selected one of the images that Picasso created for Le chant des morts to use as the Pablo Records logo.

The same symbol graces Granz’s tombstone.

Listen to my Pablo Records playlist on Qobuz:

On Spotify:

Thank you for reading and listening. Please ❤️ and share if you enjoyed this piece. It really helps others to find Cuba on Record. Gracias!

“Bucking a Global Trend, Spain Offers Undocumented Migrants a Legal Way to Stay” read a headline in the New York times on January 27. International press carried the news that had already started making the rounds in neighborhoods throughout Spain: the government announced if would grant residency and work permits to undocumented foreigners. The move affects about half a million people. Lines began to form. I hope celebration will follow.

Listen to the playlist on Qobuz:

Happy to read some good news, and to call Spain home myself, I’ll get it started today with a playlist of songs by artists representing the radical change in the population over the last 25 years. Immigrants to the country have driven its growth to a record 49.44 million people.

Listen on Spotify:

The change in population has impacted the sound of music. The artists on this list come from diverse countries and circumstances. Some are migrants, others are among a first generation of Spaniards born to foreign parents. Some came because they chose to. Others came because they had to. Some arrived as professional musicians, others came as children who grew up in Spain and turned to music as an expression of their identity and to say what they needed to say.

They include El Paisano, Morad and Munic HB, leaders of a wave of urban artists telling their own stories of growing up rough and incorporating the cadence of sounds from their families’ roots into their songs.

Rachid Bahri es de Asilah, a visual artist who live in Madrid and is known as Rachid B, put out his first album in 2025 at the age of 50. El Ghorba, on whose gorgeous tracks he sings in the Moroccon arabic darija, wound up in the top ten of the year-end lists of several publications in Spain.

Chenta Tsai Tseng is a Taiwanese musician and architect who put together the stage name Putochinomaricón (bumboy, Chinese, faggot) from insults shouted at him on the streets in Spain. I first heard them at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound Festival, where the program described them as “a Warhol guerilla who is here basically to annoy...a delegate against racism, against homophobia, against normalness, and against supposed good taste.”

On this playlist, you’ll also hear artists from Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Ecuador and more who’ve made their home in Spain. Rap, salsa, jazz, cumbia, reggae, pop, tango and electronica.

Thank you for reading and listening, and for your support to keep me going here. Please ❤️ and share if you enjoyed this piece. It really helps others to find Cuba on Record.

Further Reading and Listening:

It has been 50 years since the death of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The country marked that milestone earlier this month with a lot of newspaper articles, book and film recommendations, performances and parties, and the publication of an audiovisual map of the sites of 6000 mass graves from the time of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco period. It seems like a good time to publish a story I’d been preparing honoring Pau Casals’ message of peace. Inspired by a visit to the famed cellist’s beach house.

“Music, this marvelous universal language understood by everyone everywhere ought to be a source of better communication among men.” Pau Casals

Pau Casals’ beach house on the strand in Sant Salvador is now a museum dedicated to the cellist’s career, his origins and his art collection. Casals called the house his “dream paradise:” a personal retreat, a gathering place for family and friends and an artistic salon, where he was known to greet visitors and practice the cello in his ankle-length bathrobe. It was “a house for musical excellence” where he resided between international tours, and which he abandoned forever in 1939 at the end of the Spanish Civil War, when the Franco dictatorship took power.

The famed soloist and composer, well known to international audiences as Pablo Casals (the Spanish translation of his Catalan name) went into exile, first giving concerts to raise money for Spanish refugees and impoverished children, and, at the end of the Second World War, refusing to play publicly to protest the Allied countries’ lack of action against the Franco regime. Casals lived outside of Spain for the rest of his life, first in France, then in Puerto Rico. He died at age 96 in 1973, two years before the death of Franco and Spain’s transition to democracy.

When once asked why he did not renounce his Spanish citizenship, Casals said, “Why should I give it up? Spain is my country. Let Franco give up his passport.”

Impeccably restored and open to the public with a nominal entrance fee, the Sant Salvador house stands as a monument to Casals’ lifelong message of peace through music.

To read more about Pau Casals’ life and music, and Sant Salvador; and to listen to music and watch video and a short film below, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber.

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On her sublime new song “Sa Madona,” Barcelona-based Mallorcan singer Júlia Colom is joined by the members of vocal duo Tarta Relena, who like Colom, embrace listeners with bygone songs of the Mediterranean that they make their own, releasing those butterflys from the jar.

Like much of her repertoire, Colom learned “Sa Madona” from an older singer of Mallorcan popular songs. As far as she knows, that singer, Biel Majoral, is the only person who still remembered it.

Scroll down below to read more about Júlia Colom, the oral tradition of Mallorquín work songs, and Alan Lomax’s visit to the island in 1952.

“Sa Madona,” Colom tells me, is about a country woman, a worker in charge of other workers on a farming estate. That rural “madonna” sings of the land she oversees, “seven times bigger than Mallorca,” name-checking the animals and bragging of the fields and even the towns she declares to be under her domain. Colom calls the song one of a surrealist genere of tall tales that are part of the oral tradition of Mallorca, where, Colom says, “singing runs deep.”

The song is from Colom’s second album Paradís, which charts the 28-year-old’s growth and experimentation as an artist reflecting a prism of past and present in her music, most of which she sings in her native Mallorcan. “Sa Madona” is the only traditional song on the album, to be released on October 31 by the Barcelona indie La Castanya. The rest of the tracks are original compositions.

Júlia Colom will perform on December 11 at L’Auditori theater in Barcelona. Tickets here

___

On assignment for the roots music journal No Depression, I took a trip to Mallorca in the Spring of 2023 together with Júlia; my partner David Navas brought a camera and sketchpad. The mission was to explore the origins of Júlia’s music and meet some of the surviving holders of the oral tradition of the island. They included Maria Capó, who was in her nineties. She shared with us traditional 20th Century Mallorcan work songs, since muted by the takeover of agricultural technology and tourism. One afternoon in a bucolic cafe, she sang a spontaneous duet about figs with Júlia.

Maria also told the story of when Alan Lomax, the famed musicologist who she refered to as “the American,” came to visit, circumventing the Franco-era government watchdogs to discover and record the authentic expression of Mallorca’s agricultural workers.

Below you can read more about Julia and Maria from the text of my resulting story published in the fall 2023 issue of No Depression, (which sadly has since ceased to publish its beautiful quarterly print issues).

Also read down to hear more of Júlia’s music and Lomax’s recordings of Maria and other people whose voices he captured in Mallorca, from the Lomax archive.

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Roberto Fonseca waved away an audience member’s requests to play a mambo.

“I’m Zen now, relaxed,” he said, shaking his head and sitting back down at the piano for the encore of his show in Barcelona last week. “I don’t have parties at home.”

The small stage at El Molino nightclub was set to suggest we were in Fonseca’s house, complete with sounds from his Havana neighborhood. Props included a vintage-style radio, and a small white-clothed table on which Fonseca lit an altar of candles while softly reciting an Afro-Cuban prayer. Behind the black Yamaha, a coat rack could be seen peeking out from backstage. At different points in the show, he grabbed his trademark pork pie and a jacket to complete his outfit, which was all in shades of blue, down to his Jordans.

When Fonseca first came out on stage, he didn’t speak to the crowd of a little over a hundred people sitting at tables and on banquettes. Instead, silent film style, he held up some poster board signs handwritten in Catalan. The first said “welcome to my house.” This device came off a little awkward, but succeeded in setting the tone for an evening that featured moments, that if not impromptu, were not totally planned.

Fonseca had last come to Barcelona with a jubilant and urbane Cuban big band, celebrating the release of his album La Gran Diversion in a festive performance at the La Paloma dancehall. Last Sunday’s sold-out show was billed as a solo piano concert, but that description suggests a certain formality. Maybe call it a one-man performance piece, whose sometimes clumsy staging contrasted charmingly with Fonseca’s masterly, fluid playing of a setlist that intentionally felt off the cuff and personal.

Speaking of Zen, Fonseca started the show by making hard paddles of his hands and moving them rapidly back and forth over the keys, creating waves of sound. I’ve never understood the phrase “be water” so well as when I was watching and listening to this mesmerizing repetitive practice, which went on for several minutes.

Fonseca is currently the artistic director of the Havana Jazz Plaza Festival, a mantle passed down from Chucho Valdés. He’s a veteran of the Buena Vista Social Club’s world tours, has played with Gilles Peterson’s Havana Cultura collective, and, as a solo musician, he’s recorded 10 albums.

He recently produced a new album by Omara Portuondo and collaborated with the Senegalese singer Lass, and earlier this year gave a Tiny Desk concert. (Videos and music links below.)

The pianist, composer and producer has described himself as a risk taker, and also as a self-appointed custodian of Cuban music’s past and its future. At the El Molino show, his playing embraced the classical and jazz sides of popular Cuban music, and nodded to the imprint that ’70s American funk and R&B has had on Cuban musicians.

During one high point on stage, Fonseca created a song by sampling and looping rhythms he made with a hand drum, then adding the sound of a chekere beaded gourd by rubbing his bracelets together. He mixed in more beats by thumping his palm over his heart, a moment not without emotion.

Then, “a neighbor” dropped over. Andrés Coayo, a storied percussionist who has played with everyone from Roberto Faz to Issac Delgado, and also, like Fonseca, passed through the ranks of the Buena Vista Social Club, pretended to appear at the “house’s front door” with his bongos. After some friendly banter in deep Havana dialect, Coayo turned to the audience to proclaim that Fonseca is the heir to Lili Martínez, the Cuban magnum pianist who played with Arsenio Rodríguez. Then Roberto “casually” suggested that they jam (I doubt that either musician is destined for an acting career, but their role-playing was fun.)

I think my favorite moment of the concert was when the two friends played “Acercaté Más,” with a bluesy Fonseca softly singing the Nat King Cole en Español classic.

Later, Fonseca, alone again, launched into a spare and soulful number, his restorative song “Lo que me hace vivir” (“What Gives Me Life”).

“Music is what makes me live,” he told us. But he didn’t have to say it. The piano had already spoken for him.

In November, Fonseca will tour Italy and France, and return to Spain for a concert at Madrid’s Cafe Berlin. More music and his tour dates, with different group configurations, is here:

https://www.montuno.com/es/management/roberto-fonseca

Watch Roberto Fonseca’s Tiny Desk concert from earlier this year:

Thank you for reading and listening. Please ❤️ and share if you enjoyed this piece. It really helps others to find Cuba on Record.

Further Reading and Listening:

Spain was all the rage in Paris as the 19th century turned to the 20th. While France was represented by the new Eiffel Tower, a symbol of progress, modernity, and industry, Parisians embraced with fervor - and also some condescension - the image of Spain as a country of flamenco and bullfighting.

This idea of a constant party in a place where the sun was always shining contrasted with the reality of political turbulence and armed conflict on the Iberian Peninsula in the 19th-century. Nor did that typical impression of Spain as an entire country that was Andalusian in character represent the growing nationalist sentiment in Catalonia or the Basque Country in the early 20th. Although Spanish and French composers would find their inspiration in the folk traditions of different Iberian regions, their works inspired by the physical beauty and unique cultural fusion of the Spanish South would create a lasting musical metaphor for Spain.

Listen to an accompanying playlist for this story here:

Listen on Qobuz:

Listen on Spotify:

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Last week, The Guardian newspaper announced the start of the tourism season in Spain with a story headlined Thinking of a trip to Barcelona this summer? Beware – here’s what you’ll find. Writer Stephen Burgen lamented the state of a city “hollowed out by tourism,” where locals like him avoid the old city and the tourist-thronged urban beach.

As a local myself who too often has been in the midst of the selfie-ing masses, I can’t argue with what Burgen said. But his piece does not reflect the Barcelona that I know, only the one that most days I can succeed in ignoring.

Musically, Barcelona is most often associated with the mega festivals that happen this time of year: namely Sonar and Primavera Sound. There’s also Cruilla, in July. But I’m not writing about those this time.

In the name of civic pride, in support of local artists and for visitors to Barcelona looking for better memories than that of the packed tourist refreshment stand that the Boqueria market has become, here are six of my favorite small Barcelona music venues.

Subscribers and Substack readers: If you like this and find it useful, let me know, and I’ll continue the list with a Part Two.

El Molino

The new red velvet banquettes and low lighting of El Molino are a nod to the gloriously decadent past of the Barcelona landmark, which re-opened last fall with a program of jazz, indie rock and global music concerts. The Bad Plus, Catalan singer-songwriter Joana Serrat and Argentine accordion player Chango Spasiuk are among the artists upcoming on the almost nightly schedule of shows.

Elegant with a bohemian edge, El Molino’s intimate cabaret setting offers sight lines from every close-together table to both the performers on stage and to the other audience members. It makes me feel like dressing up.

El Molino was once billed as “Barcelona’s only music hall.” Located on the city’s Avinguda del Paral·lel, the entertainment strip that sprang up at the turn of the Twentieth Century and had its glory days in the 1920s and 1930s, it started out as a shack that housed a cantina with outdoor tables frequented by drunken sailors. After its frustrated owner sold it for about 50 cents, it became a a low-rent flamenco tablao. El Molino’s more glamorous times started in 1929, when it was dressed up with windmill sails in time for the World’s Fair in Barcelona and was called the Moulin Rouge. The name was changed to a similar Spanish one under the Franco regime (which didn’t approve of the fact that the name was in foreign French, or that it included the word rouge: red). Its glory days as a celebrated burlesque hall ended in the 60s, when the rest of the Paral·lel fell into decadance, and in the next decades, as Spain emerged into the light of modernity, it was abandoned for a time. In the 1990s, El Molino came back to life as a disco. [Thanks to the Barcelona Memory blog for these historic details.]

Now El Molino is owned by the city government and run by the team from the Cruilla Festival, who’ve gotten everything from the sound system to the dinner menu right.

El Molino: Carrer de Vila i Vilà 99/Tel: 932 05 51 11

https://www.elmolinobarcelona.com/es/agenda/

Librería Byron

It’s like a loft party in a bookstore. Librería Byron is a long shop with a back room where a piano presides and folding chairs are set up in tight rows, the front seats inches from where the artists are performing (there is no formal stage). To the side, there’s a makeshift bar selling wine and beer. The glass back wall looks out at a small patio, which helps it to seem bigger, but it’s the energy in the room that can make it feel expansive.

The Byron is a happy place for people who are into a particular style of music - tango or jazz, flamenco, folk, blues or classical; they all have a series running here curated by different people who’ve taken it upon themselves to keep it going and create a scene.

Despite the DIY atmosphere and low entry prices (usually 15-20 euros), this is no amateur hour.

The spring calendar is packed with events. They include a concert by Argentine pianist Emilio Solla, who used to live in Barcelona and now lives in New York. The six-time Grammy nominee and Latin Grammy winner drops in to play tango standards, and folklore from the Southern Cone on May 28.

Barcelona’s Pardellans Trio brings jazz to the house on June 7. And flamenco dancer Rafael Amargo and his company present his new show Light and Fire from June 19-29.

Here is the calendar: https://llibreriabyron.com/calendari/

Librería Byron: Carrer de Casanova, 32/Tel. 649 38 11 13

Museu de la Música

Barcelona’s Museu de la Música is worth a visit for its guitar collection alone. But there is an immense amount of history told by the many instruments from Europe and beyond in this evocative space, where on a weekday morning you might be the only one exploring the galleries.

Which is not to say there isn’t a lot going on at the Music Museum, where exhibitions are accompanied by afternoon and weekend workshops, concerts and conferences, and artists come in to play their sonic installations.

For example, this Saturday, May 31, the percussionist and composer Núria Andorrrà will give a tour of her installation Esquellòrium, comprised of a thousand bells that have hung around the necks of sheep in the fields of Catalunya, and she’ll demonstrate the evocative sounds made by the piece. On June 13, she’ll present an extensive performance of the work together with the artist Olga Blanco, inviting the audience to reflect on humans’ place in nature.

On September 18, curator Ester Llop and musician Heura Gaya will give participants of another workshop a chance to learn to play the tambourine-like Catalan square pandero, and to hear the songs of a lost oral tradition that is the focus of the exhibition Ara canto per a mi (Now I Sing for Me.)

See all of the upcoming activities at the Museu de la Música here: https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/museumusica/es/actividades

Museu de la Música: Carrer de Lepant, 150 (Next to the L'Auditori concert hall)/Tel.932 56 36 50

Centres Civics/Civic Centers

Barcelona’s many Centres Civics are the places to partake in the civic-minded culture promoted and prized by city officials and lived by its citizens. These culture houses found in every corner of the city are where its residents, to use a frequent Catalan term, fem barrio, basically “make neighborhood.”

Music is always a part of the programs at the Centers, which in most cases have a café open all day, or a bar set up for events.

Free concerts are scheduled all year round, most enticingly in the spring through the fall (not counting August, when everyone’s on vacation), when family-friendly shows at mid-day are often held outside. The centers also offer everything from DJ parties for teens to folk music and dancing for the older population, with the program and overall vibe depending on the specific neighborhood. It varies.

In June, the Casinet d’Hostafrancs in the Sants neighborhood features Vermut Jazz, a series of concerts on the patio on Sundays, during the drinking, snacking and socializing warm-up hour before lunch. This Sunday, June 1, violinist Èlia Bastida will perform with her quartet, which includes bassist Joan Chamorro, the local hero of a jazz education program that has spawned some of the city’s most acclaimed young players, incuding Bastida herself.

On June 5, Olga Zoet will present her new EP Entre la Bellesa i el Caos (Between Beauty and Chao), a fusion of “folk, pop and electronica” at the Sagrada Familia Centre Civic with musicians Pau Brugada i Oriol Pujolràs. https://www.ccsagradafamilia.net/activitats/concert-olga-zoet/

At the Centre Civic Vazquez Montalban, in the mountain neighborhood where we live, bassist Héctor Tejedo and singer Ara Martí perform a free concert at 7 pm on June 20. ccvazquezmontalban.inscripcionscc.com.

For a list of the concerts, exhibitions and other activities happening at the Centres Civics all around town, consult the web here:

https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/centrescivics/ca/programacio-cultural

Or if you’re visiting the city, just ask where the location of the nearest Center is in the neighborhood you’re staying in, and stop by to Fem Barrio and experience the real Barcelona.

Conservatori del Liceo

The 400-seat Auditorium at the Conservatori del Liceu (not to be confused with the nearby Liceu concert hall) is taken over in the fall by the Barcelona Jazz Festival. What makes that exceptional are the master classes offered by the musicians on the program. Always well attended by the conservatory students, those lecture-demonstrations are also open to the public and even included in the price of the ticket for the respective artists’ shows. They present unique opportunities to hear renowned artists from different points on the jazz spectrum deliver a personal show-and-tell of their music and technique. Always a treat.

Then there are the lesser-known concerts, offered during the school year by the Conservatory students themselves in the Live Room, a more informal space that during the day serves as the school’s cafeteria. These include jam sessions and thematic classical concerts, and first-run appearances for the groups formed by the young musicians, whose own excitement about their art is contagious. Concerts are free or have a minimal entry fee.

The final concert of the year for the Conservatory’s Jazz and Modern Music students happens on June 3 at 8 pm. The Liceu Big Band and Vocal Big Band take the stage on June 4 at the same time. Admission is 5 euros.

For more concerts, check https://www.conservatoriliceu.es/en/agenda/

Conservatori del Liceo: Carrer Nou de la Rambla, 82-88/Tel. 933 27 12 00

El Reial Monestir de Santa Maria de Pedralbes

The Royal Monastery of St Mary of Pedralbes, in the uptown Pedralbes neighborhood, was founded in 1327; it housed Franciscan nuns until 1983. The gothic cloister - one of the largest in the world - offers select visits and events for the public.

Once a month, solo sopranos and tenors offer a concert for a small audience that’s intended to highlight “the confluence of lyrical singing and the architecture of the space.”

Here is the schedule. The concerts are free, but reservations are required. https://surtdecasa.cat/barcelona/agenda/2025/cicle-liric-les-veus-del-monestir/244496

If you prefer to be alone with the music in your mind, the monastery’s patio, gardens, covered walkways and chapel are open to the public summer evenings from 6-9 pm on Tuesdays and Fridays (June 3-September 19), offering locals and in-the-know visitors an opportunity to enjoy the Magic Hour away from the din of the city.

El Reial Monestir de Santa Maria de Pedralbes: Baixada del monestir, 9 /Tel. 93 256 34 34

https://www.monestirpedralbes.barcelona/en/visit

Flamenco guitarist Jerónimo Villarino was described as “the man of the hour in Hollywood” in the spring of 1948, when he gave an interview to entertainment journalist Elena de la Torre from the Cine-Mundial, the Spanish language edition of Moving Picture World. That was when Villarino could be seen accompanying Rita Hayworth as she danced and sang in Spanish in flamenco scenes in the film The Loves of Carmen (known in Latin America and Spain as Los amores de Carmen), directed by Charles Vidor for Columbia Pictures.

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Flamenco is by nature an enigma. Its origin is impossible to pinpoint, its attraction visceral. "Flamenco defies logic,” says the singer Niño de Elche, who approaches flamenco with a deliberately surrealist flair, as seen in the 2022 film Canto Cósmico, a collage of moments from his art and life.

“The problem with flamenco is that people try to make sense of it. And precisely one of flamenco’s values is that it is a delirious art form.”

Taking a cue from el Niño (a.k.a Francisco Contreras), I’m not going to try and “explain” flamenco here. But whether you are a flamenco lover or have never really gotten what the hype is about, I recommend these films about flamenco music, dance and its indomitable culture.

Camarón: Flamenco y Revolución

Camarón de la Isla is universally acknowledged as the greatest flamenco singer of all time. This deep documentary about flamenco’s rock star is on Netflix.

Watch on Netflix

Blood Wedding, Carmen, El Amor Brujo

Filmmaker Carlos Saura’s brilliant trilogy of feature films include “Bodas de Sangre” (“Blood Wedding”) (1981), based on the play by Federico Garcia Lorca. This movie, Saura’s must-see sexy version of Carmen (1983), and his El amor brujo (1986) are classics of flamenco on film. When. I first saw Carmen, I was fascinated by its portrayal of a company of tough women, fast guitars and chain smoking. The artistry and sensuality of the actors/dancers ignited a lifelong love of flamenco in me, as well as a big crush on the film’s male lead, the great Antonio Gades.

Watch on Amazon Video

Carmen has also been danced internationally by the company founded by Gades: This month (May 8-18) a revival will be staged in Madrid.

A film of a past theatrical performance is also available on Amazon.

Move: Israel Galván

The avant-garde flamenco dancer Israel Galván upends the notion of “pure” flamenco.

“First I deconstruct and then I rebuild it, yet, it is still flamenco,” he says.

This episode of the Netflix series “Move” reveals the personal story that motivates Galván’s work, following him in the studio and onstage. (I am a fan of this whole series.)

Watch on Netflix

Los Tarantos

The gritty 1963 documentary Los Tarantos was filmed in the beachside gypsy neighborhoods of Barcelona, which were later razed to make room for tourist traffic. The film, which was nominated for an Academy Award, reveals the music and dance that sprung from that marginal and maligned urban environment. The footage of the great Carmen Amaya dancing in sand-covered shoes to the beat of knuckle tapping on a wooden table tells it all.

Paco de Lucia La Busqueda

A personal look at the iconoclastic flamenco guitar master Paco de Lucia, who revolutionized the flamenco sound. Together with Camarón de la Isla, he boldly modernized the music, leading the way to flamenco rock and other open-ended experiments. After hearing a Peruvian cajón while on tour in Lima, he incorporated that wooden percussion box into the flamenco line-up as an instrument that could thereafter play the rhythm that had previously been marked only by handclaps and foot stomps.

De Lucia also pioneered flamenco’s 20th-century crossover to jazz via his historic collaborations with Al Di Meola and John McLaughlin. De Lucia remains the best-known flamenco musician worldwide.

Here, his son, Curro Sanchez, intimately tells the story of his life and career. through interviews with his father filmed shortly before his death in 2014.

Watch it on Apple TV.

Flamenco, Flamenco

Director Carlos Saura’s most recent dive into the music and dance profiles flamenco dancer /choreographer Sara Baras and other contemporary stars.

Watch on Amazon Video

Not a feature film, but a delirious mash up that’s one of my favorite expressions of flamenco spirit: C. Tangana’s communal outdoor gathering for NPR’s Tiny Desk, featuring Antonio Carmona, Kiko Veneno and Niño de Elche. It’s summer every time I watch it.

On a rainy INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY here in Barcelona, I’m posting something a little different that’s close to me as a resident of Catalunya, a land of exceptionally strong and talented women.

Here, on the “Dia de la Dona,” is a proud Women’s Day playlist of Catalan artists, this time curated not by me, but by Catalan Arts, a publicly-funded agency that promotes Catalan music internationally.

There are fifty songs in this list, most sung in Catalan, but also Spanish and English, and styles ranging from folk music to trap. A lot to discover.

The set starts off with a track by Tarta Relena, who you might know from their Tiny Desk concert (see below). Enjoy!

“Songs don't change things. But songs accompany people who change things. They keep them company and take them by the hand. Or they stimulate their rebellion, they help people to open their eyes and to become aware.” Joan Manuel Serrat

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The first story and playlist in a new series here on Cuba on Record about the music that artists and writers listen to while they work. Read through below to listen to Miró’s playlsit.

In 1966, the pioneering American jazz producer Norman Granz brought Duke Ellington, together with bassist John Lamb and drummer Sam Woodyard, to play in the sculpture garden at the Maeght Foundation for art on the French Riviera. Granz was producing a jazz documentary called Improvisation, and this was a perfect opportunity for a scene that captured the freedom of both music and visual art by two 20^th Century giants. Miró’s sculpture can be seen dancing in the background while Ellington sits at a piano in the open air on a sunny day. Miró himself was captured standing behind the band as he enjoys the private show.

The artist’s taste knew no borders, and his obsessions ranged from roots music to the most cutting edge sounds. The music he embraced was both spiritual and experimental, and always inspirational.

Miró’s constant connection with music can be felt throughout his work. One painting that now hangs in Barcelona’s Joan Miró Foundation is titled Chanson sur fond blanc – Song on a White Background. Miró painted it the same year as that brief encounter with Ellington. The modern master’s abstract paintings vibrate with colors and shapes. Among his early works are paintings of flamenco dancers.

Music was a constant companion for the artist, as chronicled in Miró & Music, a revealing book written by the artist’s grandson, Joan Punyet Miró.

In his studios in Barcelona, Paris and Palma de Mallorca, Miró was always listening to records, and his circle of friends in the avant-garde always included musicians as well as poets and painters, with a special link to others for whom music was an important inspiration, like Alexander Calder and Wassily Kandinsky. Living in Paris in the 1930s, Miró hung out with a group that included Joseph Reinhardt, brother of iconic jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.

In the book, Punyet notes that in a letter to a friend written in 1926, his grandfather, who loved flamenco as well as swing music, described a night searching for a flamenco show in downtown Barcelona, and disappointedly, only finding a venue where people were dancing the Charlston, then the current international craze.

It’s well known that Miró, like his contemporaries Picasso and Dalí, created backdrops for ballet and theater. But the works of Miró also grace the covers of record albums, including Dave Brubeck’s Time Further Out (Miro Reflections). He often created covers for musicians he befriended and admired, particularly the composers of the experimental instrumental music that intrigued him. And those feelings were mutual.

In the 1950s, Miró went to New York for the first time. As Punyet recounts in the book, legend has it that the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson invited him to hear a gospel concert in a Harlem Church, igniting his interest in the great singer Mahalia Jackson and other black American artists.

When Miró died in 1989, at the age of 90, he left behind an extensive and eclectic record collection as well as his famous body of work.

As this playlist attests, his taste knew no borders, and his obsessions ranged from roots music to the most cutting edge sounds. The music he embraced was both spiritual and experimental, and always inspirational.

Click image to listen to the playlist on Qobuz:

Listen on Spotify: