La Cova del Drac (The Dragon’s Cave) first opened its doors to jazz artists and their patrons in Barcelona back in the 1920s. It was a time when transplanted Americans and Europeans brought a special kind of energy to the Catalan capital. Today they’d be just as likely to make the two-hour drive up to the French hypermarchés, for some bargain shopping just across the border. But back then, they brought a new wave of music to town.
By the end of the decade, the Parlophon label had recorded some of the new artists. Philippe Brun, the first major jazz trumpeter from France, was beginning to transport a quality sound southward across the Pyrenees. Jack Hylton’s orchestra had crossed the English Channel to entertain the crowd at the World’s Fair with its own commercial brand of pop-jazz. Sam Wooding had brought his band over from New York, passing up a chance to open at the Cotton Club in favor of a European tour.
The Harlem Renaissance is a tough act to follow, even when you’re walking on-stage over half a century later. I wasn’t really sure I was all that up-to-snuff when Jordi, my good friend and budding agent, brought me for a first glimpse of La Cova del Drac. We parked his tiny SEAT—Spanish cousin to the better-known Italian FIAT—against the high curb, and all six feet of me thrust into the effort of crawling out of our motorized can of beans. It was the economy model, which meant there was no interior paneling. You could see down to door metal from your low-grade vinyl, minimalist passenger seat as you pushed off for a landing on the sidewalk.
Once we got on our feet, a few older cobblestones glistened through the worn pavement, massaging the thin soles of my dancing shoes. Cold radiated off the stones underfoot, and off the beautifully aged, chipping masonry that seemed to close in around us on the narrow street—like a strangely appealing medieval vice.
“Doncs, clar…you can start with your standards,” Jordi advised. With his broad Barcelona vowels, he sounded like the Catalan version of a New Yorker who knows the score. “Però, home…sooner or later you’re going to have to do some of your own songs. If you really want to go over, if you want to last, you need to sing your own material here, something new.”
I knew he was right. This was the land of singer-songwriters. The medieval troubadour spirit that had tuned Catalunya’s musical heartstrings still lingered, long past its ancient hey-day. On the one hand, music was still encouraged here, in more and subtler ways than in many other places, and with a passion that was and still is widespread among the general populace. On the other hand, it is a discerning public; and no one gives out approval Christmas-wrapped.
“They’re my translations of some old jazz standards,” I rallied; I still felt I had something worth sharing. “I’m the troubadour now, and the tradition we’re talking about is called ‘Trad’. Nobody’s ever heard these songs in Catalan. That’s new.”
“Què dius, ara…sure we have. What’s her name…Nuri… daixonses…. She does ‘Jim’, she does—I don’t know what else she does but she does it so don’t say we don’t have it,” he rattled on, very New York.
“But it’s too clean,” I argued. “It sounds like a language exercise. There’s feeling, there’s distortion in the jazz voice. You can’t just pronounce things like you’re doing a grammar lesson. My God, there’s enough drugs in Barcelona to give you a jazz language that’s been dragged over the coals. And there’s more than enough Angst. You just don’t hear it in Catalan. Not yet. But you will.” I tried to be coy. I don’t do coy.
“Dragged what? Dragged ungst?” He wrinkled his face as if I’d said something in Mandarin. Then he opened an unassuming door to a passageway through the crumbling wall.
Inside, textures were fresher, a bit newer. The feel of the place reminded me of the first time I had shown these time-worn corners of Mediterranea to my son.
“This place looks like a slum!” he had remarked, steeped as he was in all the garnered wisdom of a teenage lifetime spent in suburban Chicago. I tried to explain how older things were appreciated here, how an exterior beautified with the patina of age was often preserved, while the interior would be gutted and completely remodeled.
“It still looks like a slum,” my son insisted, reliably unimpressed.
But the interior of La Cova del Drac didn’t really live up to that completely remodeled ideal I’d described to my son. It was close enough not to look quite as ramshackle as the entry-way. But even so, the space was cramped and rough-edged. It felt like a long, thin slice cut into a building that had other parts used for other purposes. Vocalists and musicians would need to make their music down at one end of the narrow space, for the chosen few who could squeeze in, while folks way down toward the street side would just have to do their very best to see and hear, squinting through the smoke.
Well, ain’t that jazz.
My friend Jordi had timed our visit to catch the bar off hours. The bartender offered a warm smile over polished glass, the one that had probably gotten him the job. Two lovers near the door shared a publicly intimate moment, leaning toward each other over their wine and pa amb tomaquet—he, holding her hand too eagerly; she, tucking her glossy hair behind a perfect ear, over and over, to punctuate her most thoughtful remarks. Two men sat against the wall at a small table that barely held their full ashtray and empty glasses. Comfortably dressed in undergraduate grunge, they glanced over casually and tossed a quick greeting in our direction. At the table next to theirs, an ageless, undercover drag-queen freshened her black nail polish, and stared intently at us through troweled mascara.
“Bona tarda,” Jordi introduced me, said I was a singer, asked where the boss was, nowhere to be found, maybe this evening, come back—I caught bits and pieces of their city-talk. Lots of Ostres—no, home, no—what on earth did oysters have to do with it? I would definitely be needing an agent soon, if this was how you needed to negotiate just to get past the help. The bartender enjoyed a macho drag on his filtered Gauloise, and then actually took the time to do that smoke-up-the-nostril thing before going on.
“Black train,” he said, in Castilian, and a few other things I didn’t catch because, to tell the truth, I was still childishly amazed at that smoke-up-the-nostril thing.
“Are we taking a train somewhere?” I asked Jordi, very much needing to be at least marginally involved here.
“No, it’s a group,” he explained, slowing down for me. “They’re playing next Thursday night, and there’s an open mike. A good chance to meet a few people, let them hear you.” The bartender smiled again, stretching his graying mustache as far as it would reach across his face. Then he poured me an incredibly generous cognac—at least two fingers more than I could ever have gotten back home. I soon learned that this was a standard Spanish measure, but at the time it was right up there with—you guessed it—smoke up the nostril.
That Thursday night, the smoke was thick in the Dragon’s Cave. Undergrads and drag-queens were far outnumbered by latter-day hippies and other gainfully unemployed locals. They shared the cramped space with a number of casual-business-dress connoisseurs, and one or two winos who had showered and shaved. The entire informal mix pushed against the shallow stage, to within arms reach of the four-piece Black Train, already plugged in and wailing.
The Train carried one hefty Catalan on keyboard who worked well alongside a leaner Frenchman on sax. The Andalusian bass was reliable, but far too self-absorbed to pay any attention to the Chilean drummer, who squinted and mugged across the rims like a Gene Kruppa wannabe. Their nearly-New Orleans rendition of Saints was reminiscent; but it was too Euro-clean to make it all the way to Basin Street. Still, down in the audience, the frontline druggies were all in love and beside themselves with expendable energy. Long hair flowing, short hair bobbing, their gyrations stirred the reek of hash from their jackets into the smoky air around them.
I later came to suspect that it wasn’t as easy nowadays for an American to become a part of the local jazz scene as it probably had been back in the 1920s. Catalunya was coming into its own now, as a region with a strong cultural identity and national aspirations.
In addition, the European market was forging a successful Euro-identity which, among other things, had its own take on jazz, thank you very much. In spite of all the social and political overlays of the time, there was still a very native openness, that evening, encouraging me to reach across the lights to get the drummer’s attention, at the end of the second set. His smooth Chilean accent made me feel right at home—for some of us living abroad, America becomes a state of mind, an experience, and a place that goes from Canada to the tip of Argentina.
“Sure, why not? The mike’s open. What do you want to sing?”
“Do you know Black and Blue—Negro y triste? In C minor?”
He looked vacant, like a well-intentioned computer accessing data. “Negro y triste, Black and blue black and blue black and blue…Claro que sí…sure we know it. I think Louis Armstrong did it.” We both started the melody line together, staring at each other’s mouth. “Wait a minute.” He stepped back to huddle with keyboard and sax. The dark and mysterious bass leaned in their direction. A sculpture in decision making, hands jutting out into space. Latins talking.
The drummer scuttled back. “G minor,” he said, as if an important bargain had just been struck.
“I think C minor’s better for my voice, more expression. What, is it easier in G minor or something?”
“No, hombre,” he looked away, wounded to the quick, sounding very Castilian all of a sudden. Here I was, not even a musician, just a singer, how did I dare.
“G minor, fine, G minor. I can do it.” I forced a smile.
The drummer smiled back, with the distinct air of victory that comes from making someone an offer he can’t refuse. Which he had, and which I couldn’t.
“Lluna que cau, malament, vida d’esclau…” From the very first measure, every countenance was turned toward the narrow stage way off in the corner; and I was scared. Did they know it? My, but the looks were strange. Bemused. What’s this, behold a relic? It wasn’t at all what I had expected, unless it was just me not being able to handle the unknown. At long last, the applause was encouraging, but with a decidedly courteous edge to it, behind a few smiles of amazement. Oh my Stars and Garters what am I doing here?
But the musicians—the musicians without end, the one-true musicians—actually wanted me to do one more. Was it genuine admiration, or merely a desire to give the North American upstart just a little more rope? They made it easier to negotiate the next number.
Sweet Georgia Brown, C minor; everybody was happy.
In translation, there wasn’t much about sweet, little Georgia that remained down-home as we know it. She became Sweetie Banyols, from Girona province, who tasted like honey on berries, and left all her lovers lickin’ their fingers—an image that sounded far more playful, much less purple and raunchy in Catalan than it generally might in American. God Bless our Puritan Heritage.
When I sang that the only men who didn’t love Sweetie were the dead ones, a general cheer went up. Bells and alarums. I got to see my audience the way I wanted them, no more charity. They wanted to hear it again; and even the well-coifed winos sang along.
My twenty minutes of fame came to an end, and I spotted Jordi at the end of the bar. I swam through an ocean of smiles over to where he stood, comparing boots and belts with yet another angel in black lipstick.
“How was it for you,” I asked, somewhat appropriately. And Jordi launched into an eager evaluation.
“That’s what you need to do, you need to make it our jazz. Dolça Banyols…és fantastic, això…Ostres…” and he started singing, relishing the line where Sweetie was just the finest beauty in Baix Empordà.
“But what happened with the first one?,” I asked him. “It was strange. I didn’t know how to react.”
“What do you mean you didn’t know how to react—they didn’t know how to react. We got no slaves in Barcelona, not even ex-slaves. We just had a lot of people in jail for trying to speak their mother’s language. Mare de Déu. Not too long ago, too; it’s different here.” He got serious. I didn’t think I liked him that way.
“But that’s another story,” I offered, trying to find a tone that let him know it was a story I cared about.
“Yeah, another story, yeah… Hey, how do you like my boots?,” he bounced back, literally. “I got ‘em from a Barcelona queen.” He grinned and winked at no one in particular.
I glanced down at the spotless, red patent-leather pushing up against his frayed blue jeans. “You’ll go far,” I said.
“Déu n’hi do! You too.” His chin gestured toward the door, and he pushed me out with a rubbery smile that said go on, get outa here buddy.
I walked out into the damp, chilled air. It was after midnight, tomorrow was work, but people still staggered or danced in and out of the club. They were in couples, small groups, larger groups. Nobody walked alone, except for the American.
One happy American. Hailing a cab. Grinning like a cowboy at the harvest moon.
© Copyright 2008 by Cary Kamarat . All rights reserved.
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