A Smooth Style Of Syncopation

All that jazz. Lurking among the fiestas of summer is a wholly different series of events - the Sa Pobla Jazz festival, sorry the Sa Pobla International Jazz festival; the word "international" is important. Festival is perhaps a bit misleading. It implies a continuous weekend or some such, a la Glastonbury for example; Sa Pobla in fact offers a series of events during August, four main concerts plus workshops and film. But be this as it may.

This will be the fourteenth Sa Pobla festival. And it does attract some heavyweight acts. This year, John Zorn starts the series of concerts on 6 August. Past festivals have seen the likes of Billy Cobham coming to the potato town. For a place with little obvious tourism appeal, Sa Pobla has, by dint of a bit of thought, carved out a place in the summer schedule that bolsters its own local economy, granting its bars and restaurants a piece of summer action that would otherwise have been denied to them.

To link back to what I have been saying about promotion, one has to admire the efforts of Sa Pobla town hall. Go to the town hall's website (http://www.ajsapobla.net/) and the Mallorca Jazz Sa Pobla logo is clearly identified. Click on it and a PDF pops up. A PDF, moreover, that has information in English. It is an international event, and the town hall has internationalised its promotion. Hats off.

The "international" motif is significant. Mallorca does not do international, or only rarely. When it does, as with the golf classic in October, the government steps in and seeks to remove its support. International can be a misnomer. Try this one - as part of Alcúdia's Sant Jaume celebrations there is an evening of "international" folk dance and music (today as it happens). The international element is a group from Catalonia. National international, if you will.

The fiestas and traditions of Mallorca are essentially introspective. It is as though, as a response to the internationalisation of the island through tourism and immigration, there has been a retrenchment or at least a maintenance of those traditions as a buffer against the outside. In one sense, this is understandable and laudable; these are, after all, the island's traditions. However, there is also a sense in which the tradition is used as a form of mass psychology. It was once put to me that the Germans, who have their local events of a similar nature to Mallorca as well as their madcap traditions like Carnival, fell back on those traditions as a response to the shock of Nazism and the castigation of a nation for having failed to prevent it. The comparison is far-fetched admittedly, but there is something of a hankering for the past in Mallorca that is the response to the shock of the new of the past 40 years or so of tourism.

Accordingly, the fiestas and the rest, while having an appeal for the tourist because of their very traditional nature, have failed nevertheless to embrace an internationalisation that might broaden that appeal. I'll give you an example, and one that has taken the message on board - Palma's San Sebastian celebrations in January. The organisers have admitted that more needs to be done to promote San Sebastian internationally; it is the case that, with some of the acts that perform during San Sebastian, it has an international basis. One of the problems with the attempt to market Mallorca and its cultural traditions is that these do not necessarily resonate with an international market. Spread the veneer of internationalisation on top of the tradition and you have something of wider interest. The Pollensa Music Festival is an example, akin to the Sa Pobla Jazz, albeit an artificial cultural device of only nearly 50 years history.

One can of course argue that traditions should be left to themselves - as traditions - and that commercialism should play little part. But in the case of San Sebastian there has been a recognition that this part is far more important than it might once have been; this and the international aspect. It is for the latter reason, and the resultant commercial benefit that might be derived, that Sa Pobla Jazz is important.


And following-up on yesterday. I am grateful for the comments about the tourism foot patrol notion, one of these comments being left as a comment appended to yesterday's piece by "allanglens" who points out that something along these lines has been tried in Glasgow. Might I just say that I cannot respond personally to comments that are attached to the entries, this being one of the reasons why I prefer that they are sent to me by email. But thank you anyway.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - The Go-Betweens (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XDmasbARtE). Today's title - bit obscure admittedly but it is a line from a song by a huge American band of (mainly) the '70s which had a strong jazz influence and have appeared here before now.

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