The Mas i Mas Festival closes its twentieth edition with a tribute to the Zeleste venue, opened in 1973 and which changed the city's musical skin, bringing together important elements of what was then called the Ona Laietana, in the P62 venue, full of a participatory audience
Zeleste was a flagship of popular music with cachet, with class, from the 70s and 80s of the last century. Irregular management, accompanied by a new location that didn't quite work out, led to its closure in 2000. As could not be otherwise in a culturally and socially cainita city like Barcelona, Víctor Jou (1939-2023), the mentor of the invention, wove a rich tapestry of music around jazz, rock, and Cubanism, all with Mediterranean aromas. In other words, the Zeleste hall was a pantheon of endless fusions, alliances, and controversies. Zeleste was also a booking agency, record label, and music school. The musical result became known as the Ona Laietana. Under the name 1973-2023 50 anys Zeleste Ona Laitena Barcelona, the tribute concert is an initiative of Jamboree, the jazz club and other venues in Plaça Reial, which also has its ups and downs. With this proposal, the Mas i Mas Festival, in its twentieth edition,captured a massive presence, a natural clientele of Zeleste, who found five decades ago, in the Born space, an emotional refuge, which accommodated a very broad musical forest. The room behaved like a cultural transformer, a kind of incubator of interdisciplinary ideas and projects avant la lettre. The stage, populated by qualified young musicians, of the packed P62 hall pleased the audience, in which the social segment under 35 years of age was conspicuously absent.
The soundofthe Ona Laietana went from Jaume Sisa to Xavier "Gato" Pérez (1951-1990), in his rock phase in Secta Sònica, alongside Jordi Bonell, composer and fine guitarist, to whose figure the first part of the session was dedicated, as well as to Música Urbana, an incipient and, then, restless Dharma; Toti Soler, who could not attend. Also Blay Tritono and the Orquestra Mirasol –a group that underwent various transformations in its short existence and that deserves to be discovered by audiences absent from the hall–, represented, on Saturday night, by Xavier Batllés' mandolin and honored by Lluís Vidal's piano playing. More Iceberg, Max Sunyer's progressive rock quintet, which years later would evolve into the jazz fusion of a new formation, Pegasus.
