The Barnasants festival of original song raises the curtain today with a tribute to the fiesta mayor de la transición orchestras. Titled Orquestres per la Libertat, the evening of remembrance, awareness and enjoyment will take place at the Teatre Joventut de l'Hospitalet de Llobregat (8 p.m.).
In the presentation of this festival start, the director of the Pere Camps cycle stressed that "they are orchestras that made the anti-Franco youth dance, who were in favor of the anti-democratic break and who were fighting to try to change things".
Manel Joseph, Salvador Escribà, Miquel Mallafré and Quimet Carreras will lead a literally exceptional performance, as it will be the premiere of a line-up created for the occasion and made up of 13 musicians from such reference bands as Orquesta Plateria, La Salseta del Poble Sec and Huapachá Combo.
For this very special night, a repertoire has been prepared where there will be room for many of the most danceable pieces of the different combos, compositions that inevitably refer to those years of combative anti-Franco opposition.
Before the presentation of the concert last week at the Barcelona headquarters of the SGAE, the entire orchestra offered a general rehearsal of what can be heard.
Thus, they interpreted almost twenty titles, especially danceable ones "and that would take us back to that era of dance and also of vindication": from the indispensable Pedro Navaja, Rumba de Barcelona, See you later crocodile or I'm going to the town to closer courts such as Twist of the ecumenical pizza, Estic xocat, El company or De matinada, going through Ligia Elena, Waitress of my love, Girl, Chocolate per tutti or Ei, company!. They closed the prolific essay with the Senquiu very match included in that hilarious and memorable Golfus de joke album.
When assessing the project from each of the formations, Salvador Escribà, from La Salseta del Poble Sec, recalled that they managed to transfer those festival dances to an intergenerational audience. "We managed to get young people to participate in a moment of euphoria and recovery from the street and from the major festivals and it was brutal".
For his part, Quimet Carreras, from the Huapachá Combo, recalled the boom in musical proposals like theirs, to the point that "Sara Montiel wanted us on her show; we were the first to make parodies of television commercials." A phenomenon in keeping with a time that experienced a veritable explosion of creative freedom.
Manel Joseph, charismatic head of the Orquestra Plateria, traveled to the past and assured that they were positioned on the side of anti-Francoism and opposition to the authority of the time and "all this shit that we have on us."
The information he shared was significant when he said that for years they were touring a lot in Spain: "in Catalonia it is where we worked the least, if in Spain we did 80 gigs, here 12".
The three formations generally enjoyed great recognition in their heyday. The Orquestra Plateria was created in 1974 in the mythical Zeleste room in Barcelona, and they attracted the approval and loyalty of a large number of fans with their unloading of boleros, mambos and cha cha chás.
Some of its members at that time were Jaume Sisa, Jordi Batiste or Jordi Farràs, and it was not strange to see them perform in the first editions of the Canet Rock Festival, becoming the main Catalan dance orchestra together with La Salseta del Poble Sec.
This saw the light in the celebration of an act of the PSUC in Barcelona the last Friday of May of 1977, according to what was told in the act of presentation. At that time made up of Salvador Escribà, Miquel Àngel Tena, Josep Vercher and Manuel Montañés, one of its main achievements was that "since Catalonia is a land of orchestras but with a repertoire highly aimed at the elderly, we managed to get people to also enjoy she".
That year was also the birth of Huapachá Combo, a group from Terrassa led by vocalist Miquel Mallafré and multi-instrumentalist Quimet Carreras. They never hid the influence that the Argentines Les Luthiers had on them, which led to a proposal where parody, humor and dance music coexisted.
With this concert, Barnasants 2023 will be inaugurated, which according to Camps seeks to defend "culture, democratic memory and good music" with a lineup that will have some 150 concerts this edition in Catalan-speaking territories, 105 of them in Catalonia, and that will last until the month of May.
