2023-11-17 23:05:34
Joaquín Sabina has a thread of his black sand voice left and we don’t know how many concerts. This Thursday, New York witnessed the miracle of a singer who cannot sing, of a sitting rocker. The theater was packed to capacity. Madison Square Garden and, one more night, the skinny man rode his poetry like El Cid to Babieca. It is impossible to deny that here, where he has only played twice, he knew goodbye.
“Survivor, yes, damn it / I will never get tired of celebrating / Before the tide destroys / The traces of my marble tears,” sang Sabina, survivor of everything, in one of her first songs at the recital, to which people She arrived with tears – saline and liquid – ready to jump.
The one from Úbeda appeared with an indigo blue jacket, an oxymoron of narrow trousers – has he filled out any trousers in his life? – and a white bowler hat, with a Caribbean air, the first nod to the respectable establishment, where English was not spoken nor was the one who searched the bags. at the door, looking for flasks of tequila.
After just one song – ‘When I was younger’ – the music stopped and the naked poetry arrived, freshly painted, unmistakable. “Hospitable longed-for streets / that perfume the skin of my ballads / of my Hispanic accomplices from the Bronx / homeland of the fugitive’s heart / that celebrates the miracle of being alive / singing in Spanish in New York.”
He responded with a standing ovation, although it is much more of a miracle that he is alive and singing, after excesses and ‘marichalazos’, than that he is doing it in Spanish in a city with neighborhoods taken over by bachata, with the roar of northern music at the barbecues, where An opera by Granados was premiered a century ago, which has a consolidated flamenco festival and reggaeton even in the soup.
But Sabina has something special: It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to find a singer with such a popular pull on all shores of Spanish, from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, from Guayaquil to Barcelona.
“The most exciting thing is not being in the capital of the world, but that in the capital of the world there is room for you, that Latin public who has the same country as me,” he said in his first thank you to the public. “My homeland and that of my songs is not a territory, it is a language in which we all understand each other.”
Sabina is from Tirso de Molina as much as from Palermo, from Plaza Garibaldi, from La Candelaria or from Washington Heights. At the concert there were Dominicans dressed to the nines excited by rum, posh people from Madrid drunk on gin and tonic, cool Argentinians throwing beer around. Stopping to talk to anyone was a tour of Hispanidad, which is the territory of the Spanish, the weapon with which Sabina shoots.
Joaquín Sabina, in his concert at Madison Square Garden in New York Javier Ansorena
Fausto, an undocumented Ecuadorian, with a tattoo of Sabina on his arm, said that the one from Úbeda «It is a lifestyle“, a way of being, someone who educates you, who makes you read” and who was considering getting his papers just so he could travel to Spain and see him again. Yanieth, from Venezuela, “fanatic”, knows all the songs. Vexxy, a Dominican, has already traveled to Colombia to see him and now she repeats with her cousin, Jaime, who says that Sabina “is something out of this world.” “I’ve known him since I was a teenager, since the first time I fell in love and they broke my heart,” says Fabricio, a Peruvian, coming from Illinois, at the bar counter.
To all of them, with great grace, he told that the great Anglo troubadour, Bob Dylan, played a few blocks north, at the Beacon Theater. “And yet you have come to see me.”
The poet who wanted the Madison Square Garden theater is from Úbeda, not Minnesota. And he sang to a Costa Rican who was “the most Mexican of Mexican singers” in ‘Por el bulevar de los Sueños rotos’ by Chavela Vargas. And he made the Latin public sing a Spanish song with ‘And yet I love you’, with the help of his best banderillera, Mara Barros. And he became related to him rock argentino in ‘It rains on wet’, the creation by colleras, and with clubs, with Fito Paez. And he Mexicanized, once again, with a sweet and melancholic ‘Wedding Nights’. And he made them dance rumba in the Madrid suburbs with ’19 days and 500 nights’. And he remembered the locals in ‘Contigo’, which he disrupted to sing that he doesn’t want ‘Paris with a downpour or Manhattan without you’.
Halfway through the concert, Sabina sang the ‘Song for the Magdalena’, her hymn to the prostitutes with whom she performed. The audience accompanied him from end to end, unleashed in the climactic verse – ‘The most lady of all the whores, the most whore of all the ladies’ –, with voices of all the accents of Spanish, and one could only think about the jienense: ‘The most Spanish of all Hispanic singers, the most Hispanic of all Spanish singers’.
Nobody cared if Sabina sang well or badly, that has never mattered. ‘I have always wanted to grow old without dignity, even though the rifle no longer has a cartridge left,’ she sang in her recent ‘Sentiendolo mucho’. But he sounded dignified, with an impeccable band behind him, lowering his tone and phrasing slowly, like a good bullfighter with his left hand. And with exultant moments, where everyone forgot his age, with pure ‘rock and roll’, like ‘Princesa’, where he jumped up to Fernando León de Aranoa, impossible to camouflage with his height and his long hair in the first rows. The filmmaker, author of the recent documentary about Sabina, assured ABC that he went to the concert because, like another great, Luis Eduardo Aute, “he was passing through here.”
It was a night, above all, of emotion and connection. Among the public, many acknowledged to this newspaper that they came with the fear – and for the fear – that this was their last big tour outside of Spain. In the last song, ‘And they gave us ten’, with the verse ‘we said goodbye, I hope we see each other again’, Sabina replied “I hope, I hope”, with a melancholy that she knew of goodbye. After the last note, she took off the black bowler hat with which she ended the recital and walked alone to the side of the stage, in a deafening ovation, with a smiling and tired jaw.
#homeland #songs #Spanish