The BAFMAs: Awards for Mallorcan achievement

Yes, it’s that time of the year. Time for the BAFMAs, the Blog Awards For Mallorcan Achievement. In no particular order, the following are variously well-known and less well-known or were well-publicised and less well-publicised …

Politician Of The Year (Shared): Miquel Ensenyat and Carme Garcia
Ensenyat, the PSM Mallorcan socialist mayor of Esporles, stood as candidate for the PSM at the national elections. There was little remarkable about this, except that Ensenyat is an openly gay politician in a land where the Church can issue warnings of the danger of voting for politicians who support gay marriage.

Garcia, the “turncoat” of Alcúdia, was also a PSM politician. “Was” being the operative word. She sided with the Partido Popular after the regional elections, despite the wide gulf in political ideology, leading to her being expelled from the party and to her suffering recriminations led by the previous coalition of PSOE and the Convergència. Though her ex-party and the opposition had a legitimate point and though Garcia secured for herself a role as second-in-command to the new lady mayor, her decision could also be seen as a blow for the chumminess of the previous male-dominated coalition which did not have the moral authority to expect her to support it in denying the PP, which had gained eight out of nine seats required for a majority, the right to govern Alcúdia.

Celebrity Of The Year: Tom Hanks
They sought him here, they sought him there. Through their long lenses, they sought Tom everywhere. There he was, at long distance, speaking into an iPhone, or rather there was the back of Tom’s head speaking into an iPhone. There he also was just hanging around and doing very little, assuming you could make out it was Tom behind the security and beneath his headgear.

Business Of The Year: Lidl
Disproving the notion that Mallorca is not open to foreign companies, Lidl, exploiting a relaxation in commercial developments, expanded across Mallorca, bringing jobs as well as competition to the supermarket sector.

Event Of The Year: The Inca bullfight
If campaigners sought more encouragement in banning bullfighting in Mallorca, they got it during the Inca bullfight. The promoter caused outrage by taking to the ring to kill the bull after the bull had effectively excluded itself from the fight when it broke a horn. Rules don’t apparently permit non-combatants to enter the ring. The gruesome video of the killing of the bull went viral and the video also highlighted and criticised the fact that minors had been allowed into the arena.

Beach Of The Year: Playa de Muro
The extension of Puerto Alcúdia’s beach (which was voted Mallorca’s best beach on “Trip Advisor”), the beach in Playa de Muro was the target of efforts by the town hall to improve it even further. These included instituting a fine for urinating on the beach, which drew a response from some who wanted to know where else they were supposed to go to the toilet, and a similar fine for a similar act in the sea. It wasn’t entirely clear how Muro town hall proposed policing the latter, but with concerns about rising sea levels, the consequence of climate change, a ban on using the sea was probably a wise precaution.

Website Of The Year: Mallorca Daily Photo Blog
Just going to show that wit, informativeness, striking photography and personal dedication count for far more than huge budgets chucked at websites in promoting Mallorca. It deserves an award very much more prestigious than a BAFMA.

Musician Of The Year: Arnau Reynés
While more celebrated musicians took to stages in Mallorca this year, Reynés, the professor of music from the Universitat de les Illes Balears, who has performed in some of Europe’s finest cathedrals, brought a tradition of music in Mallorca that is often overlooked to the small church in Playa de Muro and gave a summer recital, as did other leading Mallorcan organists.

Historian Of The Year: Gabriel Verd Martorell
Thirty-five years is a long time for any one historian to have sought to have proved a point, but Verd was still at it, striving, once and for all, to establish that Christopher Columbus was born in Felanitx. In a “solemn” declaration in the town, he claimed that Columbus was the illegitimate nephew of King Ferdinand and that to have had the title of governor general bestowed on him, which he did, he had to have had royal blood. You can’t blame a historian for persistence.

So, these are the BAFMAs. No science behind them, no text voting, purely my own choice. But if you have your own nominations or suggestions, please feel free … .

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Free For All: Mallorca and the arts

If you caught Kenny Garrett and his quartet in Sa Pobla earlier this week or will be rocking up at Pollensa’s Sant Domingo cloister to get a bit of the Chamber Orchestra of the National Theatre of Prague tomorrow, then I hope you have made and will make the most of them. Both the Sa Pobla Jazz Festival and the Pollensa International Music Festival could become dodos of Mallorca’s arts world. Extinct.

The Pollensa festival very nearly didn’t happen this year. It did thanks to a sofa-thon at the tourism ministry. Carlos Delgado had his people scrambling around on the ministry settees, hunting for any loose euros that had fallen down the backs, and they came up with a couple of hundred thousand in the nick of time. The mountain of coins duly deposited in the Sant Domingo cloister, the sound of their jangling competed with an ominous bass, the noise of the ministry saying we’ve helped you out this time, but don’t expect us to in future.

The ministry will announce next week which events have passed a test that will guarantee funding from a reserve pot that isn’t exactly overflowing. 600 grand is up for grabs for various arts festivals, but not all might qualify. As important is what happens to them down the line. For some the end of the line may well have been reached, and this includes the Sa Pobla Jazz and Pollensa festivals.

Arts funding is often at the bottom of the public spending food chain, though in Mallorca it has seemed to occupy a rather higher level. In part, this has been because the arts are seen as a “good thing” rather than there being any real attempt to quantify benefits. But this is the nature of the beast. Arts contribute to a general welfare, a general quality of life; they shouldn’t always be the target of bean-counters. The attitude has not been wrong, far from it, but current circumstances have exposed the vulnerable sustainability of the arts, Mallorcan style.

Certain judgements do occasionally have to be made. In the case of the Sa Pobla Jazz Festival, it hasn’t simply been a case of putting on some free concerts. There are also the workshops that take place each year, so there is a music educational element to the festival as well. But to come to the free concerts, for whose benefit really are they?

The concerts attract a “nice” Jazz Club crowd (of the type satirised by John Thomson’s Louis Balfour character in “The Fast Show”), but they also attract the locals. Nothing wrong with this, the concerts are after all taking place in their town. However, a thing with jazz is that it is an acquired taste. Some of it can be a dreadful racket. Jazz is most certainly not Mallorcan folk music or the direness of the “orchestras” that get dragged onto the stages of Mallorca’s fiestas and churn out kitsch cabaret versions of sixties’ tunes; the sort of act that might once have been on the under card at Bournemouth’s Winter Gardens below Norman Vaughan, the Rockin’ Berries and Mrs. Mills. They’re rubbish, but the Mallorcan oldsters seem to like them.

Put a McCoy Tyner thumping a piano, a Kenny Garrett wailing on a sax in front of an old Sa Pobla farmer who has pitched up with his missus along with their picnic of potato fritters, trempó and vino, and what exactly does the old farmer make of them? Not a lot probably, but it’s free.

I might be doing old Sa Pobla farmers a disservice. Perhaps they are all avid jazz enthusiasts who have vast collections of Blue Note and ECM discs stashed in an outhouse, but I somewhat doubt it.

Free bring free, and free having been free for several years in Sa Pobla creates an expectation that free it will always be. Free is wonderful, and the provision of free entertainment in Mallorca has been laudable. It has enhanced the general quality of life. It would be sad for it to no longer be free, but the alternative has to be considered.

The problem is that charging probably wouldn’t cover costs. It doesn’t in Pollensa. You can fork out up to 45 euros for a concert during the music festival, but the festival still needs huge amounts of state funding. The Sant Domingo cloister is not exactly Wembley Stadium; it’s tiny in terms of what it can generate through ticket sales.

We are, I’m afraid, going to have to accept that some of the cherished and sometimes superb free arts in Mallorca are likely to disappear. Unless, that is, they sell their soul to the corporate shilling of sponsorship. Were it available.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Limited Appeal?: The Pollensa Music Festival

Better late than never. Used as one is to the tardiness with which fiesta and fair information is given out, the lateness with which that for this year’s Pollensa Music Festival was officially announced takes some beating.

The music festival isn’t like the fiestas. It is an international event, supposedly. It attracts international artists at any rate. And booking international artists and arranging for their appearance doesn’t happen with the same minimal preparation as that required for, for example, fiesta “sardinadas” that occur every year, on the same day and with the same musical accompaniment.

The programme should have been released weeks ago. It finally emerged, on a scrappy PDF on Pollensa town hall’s website on 29 June, three days before the first concert. No fanfare. Nothing. Not even a poster, and the website link still the same as that for 2010. To describe the pre-publicity as rubbish would be an insult to garbage the world over. It is very poor.

A mystery with the lateness with which the programme has been published is that it was already known. On 14 June, the line-up was announced on the website of a Spanish newspaper. It bears no difference to that which now appears on the town hall’s website.

Yet, the day after the 29 June announcement, we learned that the programme had to be put together in a short period of three weeks. Given the previous press announcement, this doesn’t quite chime, but to be fair the lateness of the official announcement may have more to do with finalising contracts rather than finding performers.

There are mitigating circumstances for the delay and for the reduction in the number of concerts. In 2009 there were twelve, last year there were eleven. This year there will be eight. (A later concert in September by the National Orchestra of Spain might yet be added.)

The circumstances are financial and political. As far as the latter is concerned, the previous Pollensa town hall administration is being blamed for having not done anything. But the funding of the festival is shrouded in some confusion. One report suggests that the budget is only 30,000 euros lower than 2010; previous ones had suggested it would be just over a half and that the primary cause of the shortfall was the non-receipt of a grant of 180,000 euros from the tourism ministry.

Whatever the financial or political reasons, the fact is that this year’s festival, which did seem at one point to be in doubt, is the fiftieth. For such a celebration the organisation has, at best, been disappointing.

Despite the reduction in the number of concerts, quality, we are also told, has not been lost. While quality doesn’t mean that you might have heard of the performers (and as one who is hardly a classical music aficionado, I haven’t heard of most of them), there is none of previous years’ quirkiness, insofar as you can describe Supertramp’s Roger Hodgson or Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley as quirky. Of this year’s performers only the flamenco singer José Mercé registers with me.

Mercé and the Israeli singer Noa are identified as two acts with appeal to a wider public. Possibly so, but perhaps the fiftieth anniversary is a time to take stock and assess what the music festival should all be about. While the setting of the concerts in the cloister of Sant Domingo is unquestionably fine, the programme and the atmosphere of the festival are too elitist.

The festival is described as being the Balearics’ most prestigious. But prestige doesn’t necessarily mean appeal. What does it really do for Pollensa or for Mallorca? Does it, in itself, attract much tourism? No one has probably ever sought to find out. Carlos Delgado, the new tourism minister, has said the festival will continue to get support, but in Delgado we trust to take a good look at some sacred cows.

The festival would benefit from a broader programme, a sort of fringe if you like. There might also be sense in integrating it with what goes on in Sa Pobla at its jazz festival where genuinely international artists such as McCoy Tyner have appeared, and for free.

If the festival is so prestigious and if financing is such an issue, then why not find major sponsors? Thomas Cook can sponsor an Ironman triathlon in Alcúdia, so why not a sponsor of such size on board for the music festival? Despite the prestige, it isn’t perhaps that interesting an event for sponsors. And you come back to the whole issue of tourism with a cultural bent. Sports tourism yes, but some stuffy concerts for a small minority?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Future Sound Of Mallorca

Twenty years ago an astonishing noise was released. It was one of the defining tracks of acid house, trip-hop, ambient – all of these things. In the same year as London’s Ministry Of Sound opened, the club’s name was partially echoed by the name of a group whose music was central to what was now an established dance scene. In 1991, The Future Sound Of London issued “Papua New Guinea”. It signalled, along with the music of acts such as KLF and The Orb, the arrival of club dance and rave into the mainstream.

In the same year, the American music impresario, Bill Graham, was killed in a helicopter crash. Twenty years before his death, Graham had closed his Fillmore venues in New York and San Francisco. His final introduction at the Fillmore West went: “What better way to end it, than with the sounds of the streets – Santana”. What followed was another astonishing noise: a frenetic and soulful combination of “Incident At Neshabur” and Joe Zawinul and Miles Davis’s “In A Silent Way”.

Bill Graham was something of a mentor to Carlos Santana, encouraging a collision between rock, blues and Latin rhythms that helped to place those rhythms into a music environment of the time in a far more contemporary and dynamic fashion than artists such as Sergio Mendes had achieved.

There is a continuum from 1971 and Santana’s appearance as the act which closed Fillmore West, through The Future Sound Of London in 1991 and up to today. It is one that came to forge and still does forge the amalgamation of Latin rhythm with club dance. In Mallorca, Latin, be it salsa, flamenco or other genres, joins with techno, ambient and other forms, to make its own astonishing noise.

Yet, for all that Mallorca has a club scene, one which musically ranges from conventional dance and retro nights (of the 80s and 90s) to harder-core techno and the Latin-oriented fusion, the island has never meant music. Certainly not in the way that Ibiza has and still does.

Balearic house originated in Ibiza in the mid-1980s and was the one of the main forces, arguably the main force, behind the dance and rave scene that emerged in Britain. It was picked up by clubs like Manchester’s Haçienda and by the club’s co-owners, New Order, and its various derivatives were formed by the likes of Jimmy Cauty of The Orb, later the KLF, and The Future Sound Of London.

Ibiza has, ever since, been synonymous with clubbing. While it does of course have its regular family tourism, and while it has also taken measures to try and eradicate more extreme aspects of its club scene, it has an image of dance and clubbing; an altogether more youthful image than Mallorca has.

The islands have their different images, and it is only right that they should. Ibiza, though, is dabbling with some danger if it tries too hard to dilute its club scene. The drugs and crime that inevitably go along with it (and from which Mallorca is also not immune) are understandable reasons for it wishing to do so, but the island should appreciate the business that is brought in and which, from the 1980s, has fallen into the laps of tourism officialdom which hasn’t had to lift a finger because the club scene happened organically without its direct involvement.

While Ibiza has sought to distance itself from one of its core brand attributes, Mallorca has never sought to embrace the club scene or music in general. There is a reluctance, a suspicion, a lack of appreciation within tourism circles when it comes to music that isn’t stuffy or strictly traditional. Because it tends to imply a youthful market, it doesn’t quite chime with the mainstream conservatism of the “family” market. And for Mallorca, the youthful market tends to mean Magalluf and the periodic bad publicity it attracts, and one, therefore, that the island’s tourism officials would prefer didn’t exist.

Music, however, as much as the sun and the beach is symbolic of holidays. Who doesn’t have their memories of certain songs and certain holidays? And be the music the holiday-camp campness of “Agadoo”, the karaoke, the live act at a fiesta or the dance club, it is part of the whole holiday experience. Rather than suspicion of the club and youth market, the mindset should be one of placing music, in all its varieties, at the centre of tourism thinking. Were this to be the case, you would hope that an altogether more relaxed and proactive attitude would take hold, one in which different types of music could co-exist in a way that might attract new business, as witnessed by what Mallorca Rocks is attempting.

A genuine music festival, for example; letting the parties go back to the beaches, rather than locking them away in sports arenas, as now happens in Can Picafort; more concert seasons and more international acts. The future sounds of Mallorca and the future sound of music as part of holidays. Over to you, Mr. Delgado.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Love Over Gold: Captain Beefheart

For once, something not about Mallorca or Spain. A bit of an indulgence, but bear with me … .

I am not and never was an autograph-hunter. I have a few autographs, but too few to mention. Except for two. They are written on a compliments slip that came with the tickets for a concert at The Royal Albert Hall in London. The year was 1972. The autographs came with a sort of salutation, “love over gold”. The names were those of Don Van Vliet and his wife Jan Van Vliet. I’ve no idea if they might be worth anything, but if they are then chances are that they are now worth more. Don Van Vliet has died. Captain Beefheart has died. The Captain is dead, long live the Captain!

The concert at the Albert Hall started with first a ballet dancer and then a belly dancer coming onto the stage. Why it should have done was a mystery, except to the Captain. Maybe it was intended to allow for some word play – ballet, belly – or to represent different worlds. His words, his lyrics were as oddball and surreal as his music. As oddball and surreal as he was. One by one, members of his Magic Band came onto the stage and performed short solos. Rockette Morton exploded his bass as did Oréjon, Zoot Horn Rollo hit a “long, lunar note and let it float”, Winged Eel Fingerling slid his guitar, Ed Marimba drummed with a pair of pants on his head.

Beefheart’s music was almost beyond definition. At one time, in the mid-60s, A&M Records had wanted him and The Magic Band to become a kind of west-coast American Rolling Stones. The band had a bluesy feel, but this was about as close as they came to Jagger and his group. They were just too weird for a commercial market. Beefheart eschewed the trappings of pop and, as a consequence, spent much of his music career broke. He simply wouldn’t compromise and yet resented the commercial success and wealth that came the way of his old school friend Frank Zappa.

Beefheart (Van Vliet) lived near the desert in California, the Mojave. Away from the mainstream he conjured up a world of the non-mainstream. His music combined his own Howlin’ Wolf-style vocals replete with growls and yelps, the blues, avant-garde experimentalism and Ornette Coleman jazz influences. The music became a highly synchronised blend of discordance and peaked with the album “Trout Mask Replica” in 1969. The cover suggested the disconnection from reality that was to be found within, Beefheart wearing a stovepipe-reminiscent top hat and the face of a trout.

The album was either a work of genius or unlistenable to. It was unquestionably painful. John Peel once described Beefheart as the only “genius” in popular music history. The excruciating, having-teeth-pulled genius of “Trout Mask Replica” was two-fold. One was that it sounded improvised. Yet it had been rehearsed over and over again. Indeed Beefheart had more or less imprisoned The Magic Band for a period of eight months while he instructed them as to how to play the 28 “songs” and while he and they had all but starved in a process that involved band members being encouraged to fight with each other and being humiliated and assaulted by Beefheart.

The second was, and this is something that never seems to be mentioned, that it had the power to frighten. Music plays with many emotions, but to make you afraid is not normally one of them. The discordance, the surrealism were dark; they were of a different world. “Trout Mask Replica” was an aural version of the nightmare that David Lynch put onto film with “Eraserhead”.

Beefheart did mellow to an extent. Some of his later material was even recognisable as songs, quite sweet ones even. His relationship with Zappa, long difficult, did smooth sufficiently for them to come together on the album “Bongo Fury” in 1975. This is another of my Beefheart treasures. It was never released in the UK, but I have the import version. Amidst the more melodic music of The Mothers Of Invention, Beefheart was there, rambling on the likes of “Sam With The Showing Scalp Flat Top”.

The influence of Beefheart, despite his lack of real commercial success, has been cited down the years by other musicians. Arguably, along with The Velvet Underground, his influence on subsequent rock music was greater than anyone’s. His other influence, and maybe I am only now realising it, was that even if you didn’t like all his music, and I didn’t, he taught a lesson in how to see the world as it isn’t. If you want a Spanish connection, there might well be one; he was the Dali of the music world.

Here is the Captain at his musically most indecipherable:

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

On My Radio: Siglo 21 and RNE3

“Hola. ¿Qué pasa?”

At midday, six days a week, these are the words which greet you to a radio show. It’s called “Siglo Veintiuno”. Twenty-first century. The words are spoken by Tomás Fernando Flores. The show is on the national station RNE3. Flores, to use an overworked word, is something of a doyen of the Spanish music scene, both on radio and in the press.

His show, one that specializes in electronic, experimental and dance music, is extraordinary in the extent to which it is at the cutting-edge and extraordinary in that it should go out at the time that it does. But it is not so extraordinary when you consider just how unusual, how eclectic and avant-garde and how downright different RNE3 is. There is little to which it can be compared. The BBC’s 6 Music maybe, but that is on the margins of the BBC’s network; it isn’t mainstream. RNE3 is the main music channel on Spain’s national broadcast network, but its output is, for the most part, anything but in the mainstream.

On RNE3 you can hear just about any form of music you care to think of that conforms to “popular” music in its broadest sense. The big exception is classical; RNE has its own classical station. Otherwise the music ranges from rock to jazz to flamenco to world to hip-hop to folk to experimental and dance. And there is even some pop. Nothing that unusual in this coverage, but RNE3’s style is far from usual.

Flores is an institution. Fifty next year, he has been broadcasting with RNE3 since the early ’80s. His style, like others on the station, is reserved mixed with a certain authority. There is little that is flippant about his presenting. He’s deadly serious about his music, and it is the music that matters. One of the most peculiar aspects of his show is that it airs at midday. It is the sort of programme you might expect to occupy a late-evening slot on Radio 1. But this peculiarity tells you all you need to know about RNE3. It doesn’t compromise. Flores’ natural audience might not be listening at midday, mainly because it’s not awake, but it can of course catch up via internet playback.

I caught the RNE3 bug some years ago. One thing that did it was tuning in at eight in the morning and sitting captivated by a track that went on for a good ten minutes. It was electronic, ethereal with a children’s choir. The announcer said it was by Catherine Denby, but I have never managed to find any mention of her subsequently, just emphasizing how left-field RNE3 can be. I hadn’t misheard the name, though mishearing is not difficult. Spanish pronunciations can confuse. Who were “Ire” I once wondered, before realizing they were the French electronic dance duo Air. The former Stone Roses’ singer Ian Brown is no longer Ian on RNE3. He is Iron Brown.

But that ethereal track at the eight in the morning, soothing though it was, was not exactly the sort of thing you’d find Chris Moyles or Chris Evans playing. It is the very weirdness of RNE3 that says much about how it, as a national broadcaster, differs from the BBC. Ratings seem immaterial. If they were, then Flores would be shunted off to midnight, and midday would be packed with something altogether more frothy and lightweight. The station doesn’t seem to wish to compete with all the more “poppy” stations or overtly dance stations, such as Flaix, that are available. One wonders if there isn’t perhaps a lesson for the BBC in this, it being that the Spanish take their culture seriously to the point of being almost perverse.

Flores though is not some remote, professorial type. He has been a DJ for instance at the Benicàssim music festival that is staged annually north of Valencia. The other day he was doing his bit for next year’s festival in 2011, including having Bobby Gillespie, sounding as off his head as he looks on stage, reciting the “Siglo Veintiuno” slogan. Primal Scream will be headlining at Benicàssim along with the Arctic Monkeys and The Strokes this coming July. (A note here perhaps for Mallorca. Why is it that Benicàssim, a town of some 18,000 – the rough equivalent in population terms therefore of the likes of Alcúdia or Pollensa – can stage such a festival, given also that it is some 90 kilometres from the nearest airport?)

I don’t know if RNE3 or indeed Flores have ever won an international award. Looking down the list of gold, silver and bronze winners at the 2010 New York Festivals radio programme and promotion awards, there was no mention. But mentions would be deserved.

“Hola. ¿Qué pasa?” Listening to the radio. “Siglo 21”.

* RNE3 is on 92.3FM (south of the island) and 97.4FM (north). Also at http://www.rtve.es/radio/radio3/. For “Siglo 21”, click “Electrónica” for more information, to download or to play back.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

All Night Long: Bar noise and music

Various municipalities across Mallorca share a similar problem, a similar “dilemma”, that of balancing night-time bars and entertainment with the need for some peace and quiet. “The Diario” yesterday looked at the situation in places such as Manacor and Andratx. It could as easily have gone to other towns and resorts.

The dilemma has existed for as long as there have been night-time bars. It is not just the bars and clubs, it is also hotels, though in the case of the latter the issue is straightforward enough. Noise ceases by midnight and is often self-regulating, as it is in Playa de Muro where there are not the same impositions in terms of limiters as there are elsewhere; the hotels act with responsibility without being dictated to. Playa de Muro is also, when it comes to other forms of evening or late-night music, a rather different case to many other resorts; there just simply aren’t the establishments.

The noise issue is at its most extreme in Magaluf where residents have been complaining for years and where the complaints have been getting louder. Nearby, in Son Caliu, there is an almighty row regarding the Pacha disco in what is essentially a residential zone, where the club would be open to early morning. On the other hand, the Mallorca Rocks hotel venue, which kicked off last night, keeps to the midnight curfew; The Kooks were due to have finished by 11.30, giving half an hour for those leaving to hopefully disperse.

It is the noise of people leaving (or arriving at) bars that is generally the issue. In Puerto Alcúdia, in the main tourist centre, one hears little by way of complaint, except about the shouting and whatever at three, four in the morning or later from those making their way from the likes of Cheers or Bells. Otherwise, the noise inside the establishments is contained; the midnight closure of terraces and doors is complied with.

The problem is far greater in the towns. Resort Puerto Pollensa may be, as indeed the port area of Puerto Alcúdia is also a “resort”, but both are also towns. Complaints about noise are more likely to come from residents than from tourists; residents who live in the towns. But again, it is not the music from inside that creates the problem, which is why it is so difficult to understand Pollensa town hall’s absurd stance on live music in bars in Puerto Pollensa, especially if this finishes by midnight.

There is no real solution, short of prohibiting anything beyond midnight, which would be a mistake and would be contrary to a culture of tourism (for some) and to a local culture which treats midnight as a starting-point not an ending-point for a night’s entertainment. It is unfair, though, to say to people living by bars that they have to just lump it. Unfortunately, however, this is probably what they have to do.

Noise is a facet of holiday life and of Mallorcan life. The best thing is to go and live in the country. Or at least choose streets in towns where there are no bars. Problem is, someone has to live in the streets that do have them. Not easy.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Pianist – Miquel Capllonch

The square in Puerto Pollensa is referred to as the church or market square. In Spanish, it is called Plaza de la Iglesia or del Mercado. Rarely does anyone grant it its actual name – Plaça Miquel Capllonch (the proper Catalan title). In failing to use this name, the person honoured by the square’s moniker is ignored. Who is or was Miquel Capllonch?

Capllonch was a native of Pollensa. Born in 1861, on the 14th of this month it will be the 149th anniversary of his birth. One trusts that the town hall is planning a celebration to coincide with his 150th next year. Capllonch is one of Pollensa’s and Mallorca’s most important figures in the history of music. Pianist and composer, he studied and played in Madrid, Berlin and Barcelona. He was responsible, among other things, for the arrangement for the Alborada of the Patrona fiesta. Schooled initially in organ music in Pollensa, Capllonch went on to be a significant composer of choral and religious works and others. Among the titles of his works are tributes to saints venerated locally, Sant Pere and Sant Vicenç.

Though not necessarily enjoying great international renown, Capllonch was a representative of the arts tradition that emerged in Pollensa around the turn of the twentieth century and which spawned the painting “school” and poetry. This tradition is still very much alive today, and wander around the old town on a quiet summer’s day and you will often pass an open set of shutters and windows that allow the sound of piano music to drift into the street.

A mystery is quite why Capllonch remains so obscure to many, especially those not native themselves to Pollensa. Despite the best efforts locally in presenting exhibitions to historical figures, these too often fall into the category of the dull but worthy without an external focus that might attract a foreign or non-Catalan audience. The arts history of Pollensa is strong – Capllonch, Costa i Llobera (poetry), Anglada Camarasa (painting) – as are other aspects of local heritage, such as the philanthropy of Guillem Cifre. Yet it remains largely hidden. Only the art of Dionís Bennássar or the textiles of Martí Vicens, thanks to the eponymous gallery and museum, might be said to shout out the names of cultural and historical figures from the town. But this, so we keep being told, is – or should be – all part of a different type of tourism.

At least there has been, for five years now, an attempt to honour Capllonch, and that is the “Nit Capllonch”. Today, in the convent of Sant Domingo, there is a performance by the Spanish concert pianist David Gómez that will feature works by Capllonch as well as more familiar names such as Bach and Mozart. This annual event, organised by the Capllonch family and the town hall, is also worthy, while Gómez is not an insignificant name to be appearing in Pollensa. But where does it get publicised?

Poor old Capllonch. More people should say his name. More should know that when they’re sitting in Bony or Cultural that the square is not so much that of the church or the market, but that of a local pianist. But they won’t.

Chris And Yasmin

The history of the Jewish people in Spain has largely reflected their treatment in many other countries. Though the Jews were generally accommodated by the Muslims during the period of the caliphate, persecutions in the form of pogroms emerged from the eleventh century, and in the fifteenth century Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism, to go into exile or be subjected to the inquisition. Spanish history, from mediaeval times, has partly been one of persecution of two peoples – the Jews and the Catalans. All the more ironic, therefore, that a new book should suggest that the iconic figure of Christopher Columbus was not only Catalan but that he also spoke Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language of the Sephardic Jews of Spain. 

 

The Columbus angle I won’t go into here; it is likely to be covered elsewhere – in “Talk Of The North”. But if the book, by a Professor Irizarry of the University of Georgetown, has indeed resolved the mystery surrounding Columbus’s origins, it will shatter a number of illusions. 

 

While Catalan persecution was essentially one of proscription, and not just by Franco – Philip V banned Catalan under the “Nueva Planta” decrees of the early eighteenth century (this was in fact dramatised as part of Alcúdia’s “Via Fora” programme during the summer) – Jewish persecution was more extreme. By the later nineteenth century, though there were few Jews left in Spain, they were still singled out as being responsible for the ruin of Spain during a period of newly assertive arch-Catholicism that was to endure and to find expression in Franco’s nationalism. It is another irony, though, that Franco did not share Hitler’s hatred of the Jews. Indeed Spain was something of a safe haven for Jews, which was just one of the reasons why Hitler mistrusted Franco. 

 

Just as Catalan culture has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance, so also has the Sephardic Jewish tradition and its culture begun to flourish under a liberal democracy. It was perhaps no coincidence that during the summer the Sephardic music group Yardem performed in Pollensa, a town which bears its Catalan cultural credentials more strongly than most others in Mallorca. Within the new Catalan tradition, there is arguably more support of other cultures that had been threatened with extinction or had been banished.

 

Ladino and Sephardism have now also shot to prominence through the work of Yasmin Levy. The daughter of Isaac Levy, himself a hugely significant figure in Ladino culture, has released an astonishing album – “Sentir” – which takes Ladino and has combined it, to the annoyance of some purists, with elements of flamenco; it is produced by the influential Spanish flamenco artist and producer, Javier Limón.

 

It is a coincidence that, just as Levy is bringing back the music of a culture that was effectively kicked out of Spain in the late fifteenth century, so also is that culture being given additional exposure through, of all people, Christopher Columbus, whose discovery of the Americas on 12 October 1492 is celebrated annually as part of the “Día de la Hispanidad” (Spanish day) celebrations. How very, very ironic.

 

 

LINK

Here is a documentary thing about Yasmin Levy. There are further links from this to songs from her album: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_HN5R6f5Uk.