Jordi Fàbregas dies, great promoter of Catalan folk music | Catalonia

Catalan traditional music is in mourning again. Jordi Fàbregas, one of the pillars of the recovery and defense of this music and one of the great cultural agitators of recent decades, has died on Thursday afternoon at the age of 69 as a result of complications arising after an emergency cardiac intervention made two weeks ago.

Jordi Fàbregas was born in Sallent in 1951 and will be remembered both for his enormous musical work at the head of historical groups, Coses or Primera Nota, and for the founding of the Tradicionàrius festival in 1988 and the Center Artesà Tradicionàrius (CAT) five years later, festival and entity that continue to be the axis around which all current Catalan popular-traditional music revolves, he liked to talk about tradifolk. Fàbregas had recently left his positions as director of CAT and Tradicionárius but was still active as a singer and guitarist. The current thirty-fourth edition of the contest was the first held without his direction and should have been inaugurated on the 15th with the show Almanac that remembered the first album by La Murga.

Despite his intense and fruitful involvement with the tradifolk Fàbregas began professionally in the world of songwriting in 1968, releasing an album in which he interpreted Jacques Brel in Catalan. His first success was achieved with the founding of the trio Coses in 1972 with which he covered great poets such as Miquel Desclot or Miquel Martí Pol. Coses reached great popularity in 1976 with the release of the LP. Via Fora! that contained the hymn Oh, young man. With the dissolution of Coses in 1979, Fàbregas began his career in folk music, first founding La Tecla and immediately La Murga, one of the first groups that the then-called proposed again traditional. In 1987, Primera Nota was created along the same lines, a group that would become the seed of the Tradiconàrius, and later the Orquestra Simfònica de la Canya. Fàbregas’ last musical adventure was the founding of El Pont d’Arcalís, a group with which he still performed.

Parallel to this activity as a performer, Jordi Fàbregas was one of the most active promoters of music tradifolk Catalan also creating the record company TRAM or, in the eighties, the Saraus de Primavera or the Mercè Folk festivals in Barcelona’s main festival. In 1991 he received the National Music Award from the Generalitat of Catalonia, in 1995 the Popular Culture Award and in 2006 the Barcelona Medal of Honor.

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