Jazzy usual suspects

At first glance, Pep Sala, co-founder of the band Sau with the much-missed Car­les Sabater, and one of the most rep­re­sen­ta­tive names in Cata­lan rock, and Ray­nald Colom, an ex­tra­or­di­nary jazz trum­pet player, might not have much in com­mon in terms of mu­si­cal style. The Covid lock­down, how­ever, prompted Sala and Colom to come to­gether to make what ended up as Usual Sus­pects (L’Indi), an album with ba­si­cally piano, trum­pet and voice ver­sions of songs such as Jeal­ous Guy (John Lennon), Ab­solute Be­gin­ners (David Bowie), Just Like a Woman (Bob Dylan), Amer­ica (Paul Simon), Ol’ 55 (Tom Waits), Echoes (Pink Floyd) and All Things Must Pass (George Har­ri­son). “We meet often in Santa Eulàlia de Ri­uprimer, where I have my stu­dio and Ray­nald’s par­ents live” , Sala ex­plains. When­ever we saw each other in the bar we would say: “One day we have to get into the stu­dio and have some fun”. Dur­ing the pan­demic, we were both quite bored, and I guess it was time to do it.”

Sala had played with Colom’s fa­ther - “an ex­cel­lent clar­inetist, a true mas­ter” - in the show Cants de pau at the Forum of Cul­tures in 2004, but never with his son Ray­mond, who was born in France but came to live in Ter­rassa at 10 and now lives in Paris most of the time. “When I ar­rived in Cat­alo­nia in 1988, Cata­lan rock was about to ex­plode, and ob­vi­ously my ado­les­cence was quite marked by that. At the time, how­ever, I would not have imag­ined that I would end up mak­ing an album with Pep Sala.”

They en­tered the stu­dio not know­ing what would come out of it. “It was like one of those meet­ings with col­leagues in which you play a song and then some­one plays an­other one”, Colom re­calls. “We ended up with a list of eighty songs, but we went for those with a rich enough har­mony to turn them around.” While Sala played the piano and sang songs by artists who have al­ways ac­com­pa­nied him in Eng­lish, Colom wanted, above all, to high­light the melody, “which is some­thing I miss in the world of jazz”, he said. Sala and Colom will do a small pre­sen­ta­tion tour of­fer­ing mini-con­certs in venues through­out Cat­alo­nia.

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