The Re-Birth Of Mallorcan Swing

This coming Friday, there is to be a musical "night" in the small town of Porreres prior to the weekend's fair. It will be a night of swing, and it will come as part of what has seemed like a whole year of swing. Wherever there has been a fiesta or fair of whatever description, there has been a swing band of some description.

When consideration is given to matters of a musical nature in Mallorca, it generally turns to the traditional - the folk music - or to the classical, and so the festivals of summer and the symphony orchestra. Other forms of music tend to be sidelined, in official circles at any rate. There is a vibrant club scene, in Magalluf in particular, but this isn't on the official agenda. Nor is rock or pop.

Jazz, in its various guises, does have greater official recognition, and a reason why may lie with the fact that it, through swing music, does have a place in the Majorcan music tradition. It is clearly not as old a one as the folk music, but its roots in local culture go back to the twenties and thirties.

Through this year, there have been exhibitions and celebrations devoted to Mallorca's Duke of Swing, Bonet de San Pedro, about whom I wrote in May when a two-month exhibition at Palma's La Misericordia was opening. He, unquestionably, was one of the most influential of the island's swing musicians, and one of the bands with which he was involved was once described as being one of Spain's greatest jazz orchestras. They were Los Trashumantes, whose work is now included in Spain's national music library. One of the recordings, from 1942, is a strange foxtrot, but then some of the music from that era - prior to and into the war years - is a bit strange.

Predominantly, it was a mix that drew on foxtrot, rumba, tango and bolero, mostly all of it imported from southern America and then given local treatment and more up-to-date modification as the island's musicians were exposed to the likes of Django Reinhardt, Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong, to say nothing of, a while later, Frank Sinatra.

Bonet was one of a handful of musicians who were key to the developments of the thirties and forties. Others were Miquel Vicens, Ernest Felani and Juanito Coll, all of whom were part of Los Trashumantes. At times of war, in Mallorca's case the Civil War, music can lift the spirits, and it was Los Trashumantes who did this. As has been written of them and of Bonet, while there was the horror that was the war, on stages would be the smiling faces of this swing band under glittery lights.

Following the war, there was a chance for greater fame, and so the mainland - Barcelona in particular - beckoned. Bonet was to go on to become one of Spain's most popular performers, and while he appeared in some frankly dreadful kitsch and camp television variety shows, he never totally abandoned his Mallorcan swing roots. In 1971, for example, there was an event that has gone down in the annals of the island's music history. It was the reunion of Los Trashumantes, who appeared with other groups - of different styles - but no less famous in Mallorca's popular music past: Los Javaloyas and Los Valldemossa.

Bonet also came back to the island to form his final combo - the Swing Group Balear - in the 1980s. The lineage of swing music was, therefore, retained, but when Bonet died in 2002, it seemed as though it was firmly something of the past. However, any music tradition is capable of being revived, and this is what seems to have occurred in the past couple of years. It has been a revival apparently separate to this year's exhibitions and memories of Bonet (there are likely to be more in 2017 to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth), and as to the precise reasons for this revival, they're difficult to identify.

Whatever they were, they have spawned a vast and new popularisation of swing music and have produced bands whose names are readily recognisable with the music. The Porreres Night of Swing will feature Swing and Shout and Long Time No Swing. There are others, such as Monkey Doo, whose names do not make their style of music so instantly obvious. But what they share is a legacy that goes back to the 1920s and to the days when swing first started to emerge and to be turned, eventually, into a Mallorcan musical tradition.

The Duke Of Swing

Fred Astaire, Benny Goodman, Django Reinhardt. Three names which evoke memories of dance and jazz from times which, while distant, can still seem modern, and this is because each was an innovator as well as an icon of popular entertainment. They were to attain global fame between the two world wars and each had a profound influence on a waiter in the San Pedro (Puig de Sant Pere) area of Palma. His name was Pedro (or Pere) Bonet.

He was born in 1917 and at the start of the 1930s he began to be exposed to this music and entertainment. There were the films of Fred Astaire, the unusual guitar style of Django Reinhardt, which, some twenty or so years later, he was to hear live when Tito's night club opened in Palma and, above all, the jazz of Benny Goodman, the "King of Swing". Bonet de San Pedro was to eventually join this unofficial royalty: he became the "Duke of Swing".

Though his musical affinity was strongest with Goodman, there was a certain similarity in his background to that of Django Reinhardt. The Belgian guitarist's family wasn't necessarily poor but it was not one which enabled him to gain much by way of education. Though he understood music, he was illiterate when he seriously started performing in his twenties. Bonet's early years were more difficult. At the age of seven, his father, who he barely ever saw, was drowned at sea off the north African coast: he had been a ship's captain, and the ship (or boat) was struck by a fierce storm. With his father dead, he was sent to work. Like Reinhardt, his education was to be found in music, not in books.

In his teens he became a waiter at the Bar Español in the San Pedro neighbourhood. When the owner sought to drum up some more business, he asked Bonet if he would sing. He did and very quickly he gained a reputation. People would come especially to hear Bonet de San Pedro, and using the rudimentary English that he learned from the likes of Fred Astaire, he would sometimes sing in English: something that was to stand him in good stead.

With other musical styles influencing him, notably flamenco, he formed a group: Los Trashumantes. He had no musical training, couldn't write or read a note, but he had "swing" and when an orchestra from Barcelona came to Palma, he was signed up, partly because of the English, which was to prove even more valuable. It is said that the first song ever recorded in Spain in English was his. It was in Barcelona that he was to form another group, his first proper orchestra. Its name was Bonet de San Pedro y los 7 de Palma. I am not aware of an association and it may be a pure coincidence, but both the style and the title of a Madness song seem not a million miles away: "The Return of the Los Palmas 7".

Fame and success were to follow. One of his best-known songs was "Raska-yú", which despite being banned by the Franco regime (it came out in 1943) was a success. The regime thought there were references to El Caudillo in a song the origins of which have been debated. Was it really so original or had it been copied from Louis Armstrong in a Betty Boop cartoon film? Well, even if it had been, this isn't terribly important now. Other songs came out. "Bajo el Cielo de Palma": "Mallorca has beautiful scenes and beautiful beaches to listen, to the sounds of my guitar, songs worthy of remembering, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay". "Canción a Mallorca": "In the bay of Palma, the first thing you see, the Cathedral, La Lonja and Bellver Castle, the first thing you see, arriving in Mallorca". 

In later years, Bonet de San Pedro became linked to a camp and kitsch music of a Eurovision style, but he still clung to his jazz and swing roots, forming the Swing Group Balear. He was a regular on national television, a genuine star of Spanish music. He was honoured at tribute concerts in Palma where he performed with the likes of Tete Montoliu, the great Barcelona-born jazz pianist whose association with Mallorca was strong. He died on 18 May 2002. And in celebrating the anniversary of his death and his contribution to Mallorca and Spain's popular music, an exhibition dedicated to him opened on Friday at La Misericordia in Palma which will run until 10 July. Its title: "Bonet de Sant Pere, el Duc del Swing".