The Catalán contemporary folk quartet Trèvol took the unusual path of releasing a live album as their second recording; the 17 tracks on La Gran Trevolada were recorded before an enthusiastic audience at the Festival Folk Internacional Tradicionàrius in Barcelona on April 11, 2025. It was the closing concert of the festival and also a celebration of the release of the group’s first album, perhaps ironically titled Qui omple un estadino és pas un graller (He who fills a stadium is not a scoundrel).
The young musicians of Trèvol, two women and two men, blend Catalán folk music with other genres in contemporary arrangements and with a vibrant attitude designed to appeal to a younger audience. All of them sing and Laia Glück plays gralla, a member of the oboe family; Léonie Martet plays the five holed wooden whistle called the flabiol and the tamboril cylinder drum; Bernat Garcés plays keyboards and Martí Fleta drums and percussion.
On this concert they were joined by more than 35 collaboratorss, including the Valencia trio Celobert, the energetic Barcelona world music quintet El Pony Pisador (The Prancing Pony, named for the inn near Hobbiton in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings), and the Catalonian women’s Appalachian music quintet Bum Titis (say “boom ditty”).
It’s at times a highly charged performance, with the band leaning into Catalonian politics on numbers like “Ni un pam de terra” (Not even an inch of land) with one of the women singing lead over a jazz-inflected arrangement. The satiric “Pasdoble dels Turistes” pokes fun at the tourists who invade Iberia every summer:
Tourists everywhere! Tourists of all kinds! They come from all over the world to roast their backs. Tourists by the millions; they leave the beach full of plastics and cardboard and jump from the balconies.
That song, a raucous number with what sounds like all four members singing, may sound vaguely Mexican to American listeners, because the two-step pasodoble (a dance originally based on bull fighting moves) is used in a lot of Mexican folk and popular music.
Celobert adds a Cuban jazz spin to “Es Caulets” with fiddle and electric bass. El Pony Pisador joins in on the Celtic sounding “Lo Pardal,” providing a big choral sound on the vocal parts and filling in the instrumental arrangement with pipes, fiddle and more. Bum Titis plays a bluegrass intro to “Pasdoble de l’Estevet Sastre,” which devolves into a raucous newgrass stomp en español. I particularly enjoy the numbers where Garcés sets his keyboard to sound like a Rhodes, like the jazzy fast waltz “Molontrull,” which features lots of playful interaction among keys, flabiol and gralla, with one of the guys singing lead.
There’s lots more. This was a very fun show for an appreciative and involved crowd. The young and energetic Trèvol will be releasing their second studio album in the spring of 2026.
(Microscopi, 2025)
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