The Sants group celebrated its five decades of adventures with a generous concert in which they shared their classics with guests such as Maria del Mar Bonet, Quimi Portet, Sopa de Cabra, The Tyets or Gemma Humet and which included displays of ‘timbalers’, ‘ diables’ and ‘grallers’
The Dharma Electric Company has always understood to a large extent the music as a form of collective agitation, in tune with the popular tradition of street performances. So to celebrate your 50th anniversarythis Saturday in the Palau Sant Jordi, It was time to set up a tremendous coven, and there were the battalions of ‘timbalers’, ‘grallers’ and ‘tabalers’, entering the scene to the sound of ‘Toc de matinades’ and giving way to the group’s fetish instrument, the tenor sax, triumphantly handled by Joan Fortuny.
La Dharma gave a show from minute one, with its pyrotechnic effects and its colorful props: the dances of the Diables de Sants, which accompanied the title track of their latest album, ‘Flamarades’ (2019). Deployment of troops for a concert with which the band wanted to establish complicity with a large group of guests from different generations and musical registers. With all this, he failed to fill the Sant Jordi, which stayed in just over half an inning.
tall voices
The Dharma has reached here as long-standing anomaly of our scene: a group of mostly instrumental music, bearer of a sound texture alien to pop canons. Few artists have a sound as identifiable as they are, a stamp that transforms everything it touches: there was that invigorating ‘Què volen aquesta gent?’, with an imperative Maria del Mar Bonet, first guest of the night. “Una veu que ens emociona”, was how Joan Fortuny introduced her, recalling that she was also there when the Dharma turned 20, in the same Palau Sant Jordi.
With guest parades there is a danger of blurring the artist’s identity, but the ‘Dharma seal’ is so resounding that it prevailed whoever his ‘partenaire’ was: the neo-urbans of The Tyets and Holy Greetings, the tandem Joan Reig-Bernat Sánchez or the purifying voice of Gemma Humet. There were stops at the different accents of his work, the more pop-new wave of ‘Esperant l’autobús’ (a song that he made his own quimi portet) to the trip to the desert of his alliance with Jawad Amazigh and Yohana.
the playground
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As a sweet backdrop, the memory of the fallen brothers, Esteve (1986) and Josep Fortuny (2013), to whom they dedicated the entire concert and, in particular, a section of songs culminating with ‘Si encara fossis aquí’, by from another voice with angel, Magali Sare. She reminded Joan that the setting was the “pati de jocs & rdquor; for Josep, and there they were, enjoying him as they always did. “The best way to pay homage to them is to keep the Dharma alive & rdquor ;, the eldest of the Fortunys made clear.
Celtas Cortos sang for the first time in Catalan adapting their ’21 de abril’, goat soup appealed to the pacifism of ‘Against the fusell, a somriure’ and Jordi Cuixart recited ‘Resisting is winning’ with references to Valtònyc and Pablo Hasél. And in the final firecracker there was no shortage of his martial adaptation of ‘La presó del Rei de França’, a popular tune of distant origins, turned into a pro-independence anthem (without lyrics), which the Companyia Elèctrica Dharma discovered one day through the version of Serrat on his album ‘Cançons tradicionales’. Unorthodox ‘hit’, with its distinctive timbre of tenor sax releasing dust and confetti of ‘Dharma sound’ on this Sant Jordi vigil.