The Very Best Of The North Of Mallorca

The coming week demonstrates just how vibrant popular culture is in the north of the island. It is a week marked by two festivals and one of the grandest of fiesta occasions not only in the north but on the whole island. The Sa Pobla Jazz Festival starts today, the first concert for the Pollensa Music Festival is next Saturday, and on Wednesday - and really needing no introduction - it is the Moors and Christians battle in Pollensa. It is a week during which the north shows itself off to Mallorca and beyond.

The Sa Pobla Jazz Festival celebrates its twenty-third staging. The festival, rather like Pollensa's, ran into some problems during the years of economic crisis. They were financial. The festival has long prided itself on attracting international artists and on presenting them for free. Such a principle was almost inevitably going to run into obstacles at some point, which is what happened. The cost of the artists, of their travel and their accommodation was just one of the financial concerns. So much so that the festival was threatened. Until, that is, sponsorship and collaborative arrangements were put in place. A brief dalliance with charging (a meagre three euros) no longer applies. The concerts are once more free.

This year's festival shows how it constantly evolves. There is a return to spacing out the main concerts rather than their being concertinaed into successive days, but there is also a whole series of "off festival" concerts, which means that the whole season lasts much longer than previously. From today until Sunday, 27 August there will be a concert every evening in the Plaça Major.

Starting things off is veteran saxophonist Ernie Watts. His remarkable CV owes much to legendary drummer Buddy Rich. Watts was the lead sax player in the Rich orchestra. Over the years he has played with various other jazz legends - Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Pat Metheny - and on a broader level with Marvin Gaye, Frank Zappa and The Rolling Stones. With his quartet he has more than twenty albums under his belt.

The second main concert is on Wednesday, 9 August. Richard Bona - bassist and vocalist - explores the crossover between African music and American/European jazz in a mix called Mandekan Cubano. He himself is from Cameroon rather than Cuba. Guilia Valle is Italian but lives in Barcelona. She is one of the most creative bassists on the whole international jazz scene. Her trio, which performs on 16 August, includes the top-rated Menorcan pianist Marco Mezquida.

A few years ago, the Pollensa Music Festival looked doomed. Founded in 1962 by British violinist Philip Newman with the help of key figures at the Club Pollença and town hall, the festival lost funding from the regional tourism ministry. The government was cutting back because of crisis, and cultural events took a hit.

A great deal of credit for the festival's survival has to go to its former director Joan Valent. World renowned for his film scores, Valent was brought in as its saviour. He called in favours from his many contacts, who included the British pianist and composer Michael Nyman. The festival's future was secured.

But not everyone was happy with how the festival was developing. Valent broadened its scope, even including gastronomy. It was a Mexican theme one year that attracted certain criticism, not least because Valent spends much of his time in Mexico. The criticisms, however, were very unfair. The festival owes a great debt to him, including the fact that he dipped into his own pocket.

No longer the director, the organisation of the festival is now a collaborative exercise, and its focus has returned solely to the concerts. The first, on Saturday, 5 August, features the Gabrieli Consort, a choir and period instrument orchestra founded and led by its artistic director Paul McCreesh. The Gabrieli mission is "to challenge common and accepted perceptions of classical music, and to re-invigorate and innovate in order to sustain the relevance of these great pieces of art in the twenty-first century".

Amidst all this music, we have the climax to Pollensa's La Patrona. The Moors and Christians will battle it out as they do every year from seven in the evening on 2 August. There is total continuity with the final day of the fiestas - it's the same each year - from the Alborada at five in the morning to the Thanksgiving following the battle and to the fireworks. One of the great days of summer, if not the greatest.

Jazz In The Blues: Sa Pobla's festival

No great surprise then. All that jazz in Sa Pobla since 1995 may be no more jazz. Sa Pobla has been the venue for John Scofield, Charlie Haden, Dave Holland, Billy Cobham, Joe Lovano, McCoy Tyner, Kenny Garrett and many others. If you put them all on the one bill, then you would send jazz lovers into jazz-lover heaven.

These names may not mean anything to you, which is understandable. Jazz, like other genres, is its own world. Not everyone likes it, just as not everyone likes classical music, country music, rap or whatever. But jazz, in a Sa Pobla setting, has become a feature of Mallorca's summer circuit, a cultural oasis in a town that benefits only marginally from tourism, a means of generating interest and business and of bringing jazz, and not insubstantial names from the world of jazz, to an audience that would probably never be exposed to them.

This year's festival looks to be all but doomed. Funding from the regional government and from the Council of Mallorca has disappeared, as it has disappeared from other arts events. Sa Pobla town hall can't afford to pick up the tab, as it is bust, just like other town halls.

The town hall has had to introduce small charges for more traditional occasions that previously were free, such as for the post-Easter pilgrimage of the "poblers" to Crestatx. In January, the DJs and other music at the Sant Antoni celebrations, the grandest on the island, required financing from local businesses. The town hall knows that events like the jazz festival are beneficial, but even this knowledge does not allow it to stretch to the forty grand that it typically costs to stage the festival.

Forty grand, on the face of it, doesn't sound like a lot of money. But when, as a town hall, you are millions in the red, it is. Financing to rescue the jazz festival is going to have to come from the private sector, and the first port of private call is on those same local businesses - bars, restaurants, etc. - that came to the aid of the Sant Antoni party. Is it too much to ask these businesses to fund a second event? It may be.

The jazz festival has always been something of an oddity in that it has brought international names to a small town in northern Mallorca and not charged anyone for the privilege of watching them. An obvious solution, you would think, would be to charge. Obvious, but whether it would work is another matter. Were the public willing to pay, whether similar numbers of people who have typically packed themselves into Sa Pobla's Plaça Major would come would probably be doubtful. And it would also be doubtful if a suitable venue could be found; you couldn't charge for people to go into the Plaça Major.

The concerts having been free has always been with a view to create business, so maybe the local restaurants should dip into their pockets. As ever, it would be interesting to know just how beneficial the benefits have amounted to in the past. Would they justify a demand being made on local businesses to foot the bill?

If the festival fails to go ahead, it would be another nail in the coffin for Mallorca's general cultural scene. Putting a value on this culture is difficult, as the "good thing" of culture shouldn't require a price tag. Unfortunately, however, culture can only be provided, or seems to only be capable of being provided, when there is plenty of money knocking around. There has, therefore, to be a price tag, one that has been absent for years in Mallorca.

As with other aspects of the island's arts culture, such as the orchestra or the Pollensa Music Festival, claims of direct benefits in terms of tourism are virtually impossible to identify. The jazz festival has typically occurred over a three to four-week period with one concert per week. People don't come for the festival, or if they do, their numbers must surely be very small. It's the same with the orchestra and the Pollensa festival; they are added attractions rather than being central to tourism.

Nevertheless, it is the critical mass that in combination they represent that is important. It is important in presenting a civility and a diversity. None of these cultural manifestations are truly representative of an alternative to sun-and-beach tourism, but it is irrelevant whether they are or not. Culture is an intangible of societal well-being. You don't want to lose it, but once you do lose it, it's hard to get it back, especially if governments question its economic benefits.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Sa Pobla jazz festival threatened

Grants from the regional government and the Council of Mallorca having been lost, Sa Pobla town hall is looking to private finance to help stage the jazz festival, which has been a feature of the summer in the town since 1995. If the finance cannot be found, the festival may well not take place.

See more: Diario de Mallorca