Associated by habit and legends with dark places and ungodly hours, jazz took a massive bath this Sunday during the celebration of International Jazz Day in Barcelona, an event that brought together thousands of people on Paseo de Gracia inside of a festivity that comes with the intention of consolidating itself on the calendar despite the fact that this Sunday had an abrupt end due to the rain.
The desire to listen to music was not lacking among those gathered in front of the Paseo de Gràcia stage at the confluence with Casp street. In an unstable weather weekend dominated by the media for the two Bruce Springsteen concerts, jazz found ample space to pay tribute to the day established by Unesco in 2011, which promotes thousands of concerts and actions each year related to the gender in cities around the world.
Missing from this list was the city of Barcelona, with a more than recognized jazz tradition, the gateway for this genre to the Peninsula and owner of a circuit of venues, schools and an underground scene endorsed by the Jazz Festival, which has been held since 1966. .
At one in the afternoon, hundreds of people gathered before the bars of the Sant Andreu Dixie Band, a youth group that drew applause from an audience made up largely of Barcelona residents who had refused to leave the city on this Primero bridge of May. Beside him, a considerable number of tourists who stopped to follow the concert, either through the stage or from the giant screen installed meters behind in the direction of Plaza Catalunya. Some began to dance while the majority clapped their hands to the swing bars with which they began what should have been ten uninterrupted hours of music, promoted by the City Council, the Voll-Damm Festival Jazz Barcelona and the Passeig de Gràcia Business Association. within the celebrations for the bicentennial of this central artery of the city.
Throughout the day it was possible to taste "the universality of jazz", as Joan Anton Cararach, artistic director of the Voll-Damm Festival Jazz Barcelona, defined the musical selection that was to play this Sunday on Passeig de Gràcia, a reflection of jazz as “common language spoken by many accents”. The bill combined the local talent of Joan Mar Sauqué or Las de Barcelona with international duets of the height of Michael League and Bill Laurance, the group that was performing when, around six in the afternoon, a rain appeared that advised the suspension of the concert , which by then had already achieved its goal of placing Barcelona on the jazz map on the day of its main festival. Looking to the future, the will for the city to be the outstanding city on a global scale in future editions of International Jazz Day.
