Victor Jou He has died at the age of 84 at the Center Sociosanitari Bernat Jaume de Figueres, where he has been admitted for the last few months. On Friday at the Montjuïc cemetery he will be remembered in an act open to the public. Discreet and unfriendly to the spotlight, his mark on contemporary Catalan culture is indelible. It all started with what he himself once described as “divine inspiration”. In 1973, after several visits to London in which he soaked up what was happening in places like the Marquee, he launched the zeleste room in an old warehouse on Calle Platería -today Argenteria- in the Ribera neighborhood of Barcelona.
Jou wanted Zeleste to be a venue where concerts could be seen one meter from the musicians. And it was much more: it was a space open to everyone and the epicenter of Barcelona’s counterculture, the place where they conspired Jaume Sisa, Gato Pérez, Carles Flavià or La Voss del Trópico. The following year, Jou and his partner Rafael Moll closed a deal with the publishing house EDIGSA to launch own record label, which started with albums by the pianist Jordi Sabatés, the Mirasol Orchestra and the Companyia Elèctrica Dharma: jazz, rock, folk, fusion and roots with an eye on what was happening in England and the United States. Gato Pérez called that “ona laietana” and the shock wave reached all of Spain when Zeleste’s management office successfully organized concerts for his groups throughout the Peninsula. The modern was the Laietano and its architects were Víctor Jou and his companions. Zeleste was the forge of local heritage jewels such as “Qualsevol nit pot sortir el sol& rdquor; by Jaume Sisa and received international figures such as Stan Getz and Bill Evans.
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In 1975, and with the collaboration of Pebrots, the La Trinca company, they organized the canet rock festival. Despite the inevitable comparisons, Jou never saw Canet Rock as a Catalan replica of the mammoth festivals of Woodstock or Wight, but rather as a space open to creativity. Sharing and learning from each other was in the DNA of the Zeleste project, which opened one of the first modern music schools in the country.
In 1986 Jou and his partners doubled the bet and moved Zeleste to a much larger space on Almogàvers street in Poblenou. The new Zeleste hosted concerts by PJ Harvey, Ramones, Paul McCartney, Portishead… It worked until 2000when the debts with the Social Security and with the owners of the premises forced them to close and Zeleste changed hands and name to become Razzmatazz. Jou, who between 1989 and 1992 directed the Mercat de Música Viva de Vic, returned to his profession as a quantity surveyor, away from industry but in contact with culture. Until the arrival of the pandemic, he lived in Casa Fullà, the unique building designed by Òscar Tusquets in the Guinardó neighborhood of Barcelona that was also the home of Joan Fuster, Pepa Llopis and Marta Pessarrodona.