The Sant Andreu Jazz Band at 20 (part 1)
When a musician, or singer, or an entire band dusts off a long-forgotten tune that most people today haven’t heard before, and performs it with care, respect, joy, and even passion, that performance in effect brings the composition back to life. It may have never been truly “dead” at all, but merely dormant, waiting to be revived, heard, and enjoyed again. In the world of jazz, musicians today who indulge in classics from several decades or a full century ago are to be commended for keeping the genre alive in a very real way. Even more impressive and reassuring is to see new, young generations of jazz musicians learning and playing songs that their great-grandparents may have danced to at one time.
So, how about a jazz band playing such classics that consists of musicians mostly still in their teen and pre-teen years?
Such a remarkable music project is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. For those who are already familiar with the Sant Andreu Jazz Band, 2026 comes as a special opportunity for nostalgia and review of the SAJB’s accomplishments in the past twenty years. For those who are new to the band or to the swing, bebop, and bossa nova it has performed and recorded throughout that time, this is an opportune time to join the celebration.
The SAJB was born in 2006 as a modest little band Joan Chamorro created as an extra-curricular project while teaching at the Escola Municipal de Musica de Sant Andreu, the music school in Barcelona’s quiet Sant Andreu neighborhood, some distance from the city’s popular tourist destinations.
An accomplished multi-instrumentalist and jazz devotee, Chamorro decided to create a band to teach the school’s students traditional American jazz. Most of the students had been in the school learning classical music, so the idea of playing jazz came as a curiosity of sorts. “Some of them do learn classical music from a young age,” he says, “but I don’t think it should be an advantage. If you work from the beginning of learning using the language of jazz, being rigorous with the technique, transcribing good references, etc., the result I think can even be more authentic and powerful. Starting from a young age with jazz music opens your mind.”
Chamorro recognized that teaching a new group of kids both the basics and fine points of learning and playing jazz required a new method. “It was all a gradual thing,” he says. “Before starting with the Sant Andreu Jazz Band I realized that something needed to change in the way of teaching music to children and young people. I learned that the language of music was better approached as another language: through listening, memory, the need for repetition, and above all the enjoyment of what you are listening to and playing, from the first day you pick up an instrument.
“From there I changed my way of teaching and based myself on making them listen to melodies and solos, on working from memory, from the beginning.
“The results kept coming and, little by little, I had the opportunity to work with groups at the Sant Andreu Municipal Music School, where I was able to put this way of teaching into practice, but in a group. I saw the potential that all this had and I continued working on it…From there, year after year I have continued working so that all this would bear fruit, which was already intuited from the beginning: boys and girls who played jazz, and they did it with an authentic sound, with joy, with desire, making this music their own.”
Andrea Motis, who had been learning trumpet at the school, remembers, “My first teacher was not Joan Chamorro, who was only giving lessons for the big band and saxophones, but not any other instrument. So, I was taught by another teacher at the school, Toni Gallart, and he was a great teacher for me. At the same time my parents put me in piano lessons, but I didn’t take many because I was busy doing sports and other things, and it became a lot of things to do.”
She was 11 years old when she started with the SAJB. “Joan knew me from when we did auditions for concerts, where we would do saxophones and trumpets together…but I remember — I saw that the saxophones were playing jazz, and I became more fond of what they were playing. Then I wanted to start saxophone as a second instrument in the school. When I started saxophone lessons, Joan was my teacher. He saw that I really had an interest in jazz music and I wanted to study, and I could play both trumpet and saxophone, so he invited me to be part of the Dixieland band. He would do it apart from the official hours of the school, for free.”
Magali Datzira was also very young when the music bug bit. “I was 7 when I started to play double bass. My brother Iscle [a saxophonist] is two years older than me, and he started to play before I did. I wanted to do that, too. My parents aren’t musicians, but they love music and listen to music, and I come from kind of a musical family. And my aunt is a musician.
“I wanted to play the flute in the public school of music,” she says. “Every year there are just a few openings, but I got in because my brother was in, and that makes it more easy. But there was only a place open for double bass, and I think I didn’t know what it was.”
She recalls there may have been just a few openings for other instruments, but she “randomly” chose double bass — an unusual instrument for a little girl. “I was too young to not like it, just because…but after the first classes I told my mom that my fingers hurt!
“In the beginning,” she says, “the band didn’t have the name Sant Andreu Jazz Band, it was more like an ensemble, playing Dixieland. Iscle was in, Andrea, Eva, Raul Castro was playing the tuba….”
Arnau Julia was the band’s first drummer. “I had been studying at the Escola de Música Municipal de Sant Andreu since I was six years old,” he says. “I studied classical percussion, and when I was eleven, I decided to continue my studies at the Conservatori Municipal de Música de Barcelona.
“At that time, I wanted to stay connected to the Sant Andreu school, and they told me I could enroll in a combo (a modern music group). The teacher of that combo was Joan Chamorro. That was where I learned how to play the drums and how to play jazz. The following year, Joan founded the Sant Andreu Junior Jazz Band, and later he created the Sant Andreu Jazz Band.”
The band began to draw attention, as did Chamorro’s teaching method, which produced the astonishing results of very young children playing well-known jazz standards much as the original legends had done several decades earlier. “It was very exciting to see what was happening, he says. “For me it was also a surprise to see them play with such a level, with so much desire and with such good taste and musicality.”
“The SAJB was born in 2006, because the first concert we did at the Jazz Cava in Terrassa was in 2007; that is, we prepared for it during 2006. There we already had:
Andrea Motis, 11 years old (trumpet, alto sax)
Eva Fernández, 12 (soprano sax, clarinet)
Jaume Ferrer, 12 (tenor sax, clarinet)
Eduard Ferrer, 8 (alto sax)
Iscle Datzira, 11 (alto, soprano sax)
Raúl Castro, 14 (tuba)
Pablo Fernández, 14 (trumpet, soprano sax)
Arnau Julià, 15 (drums)
Adrián González, 18 (piano)
Eva Garín, 20 (trombone)
Andrea’s younger sister Carla recalls how her involvement with the SAJB began. “At 7 years old, I moved to the music school where my sister was, and where everything started. My sister played trumpet with her teacher, I played guitar with my teacher, and then Joan started the combo, and my sister joined the combo.”
In 2008, Carla herself entered the world of the SAJB with some hesitation, explaining, “One day I was with my father waiting for Andrea’s rehearsal to end, and Joan Chamorro met me and told me, “If you buy a banjo, you can join the group,” and I said, “No, I don’t want to play the banjo, because I don’t like it.”
Chamorro didn’t give up on his suggestion, but Carla still refused, preferring to stay with guitar and not switch over to banjo, which Chamorro needed for the Dixieland music he was teaching the band. But her parents, convinced she would have fun in the group, encouraged her to accept the banjo — which she did, reluctantly at first. Lo and behold, her attitude went through a major shift. “I fell in love with the banjo and Dixieland music,” she says.
While it’s never a guarantee that any young music student will take to jazz specifically, Carla offers an observation that many current and former members of the SAJB have made about Chamorro as a teacher: “Joan has a talent for making you love this music,” she says. “He makes it fun for the children. He’s a funny person. You absorb his energy, and then, as you grow up, you start listening by yourself, and start to investigate it on your own.”
She recalls Chamorro making mp3s for the students to download and listen to. He has always guided his young musicians through jazz history via the recordings of Louis Armstrong, Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and countless other legends. “At the beginning, I remember Joan gave us albums on mp3 — classics and ‘easy’ ones, very melodic and easy jazz for the children…And then you’re discovering Miles Davis and Charlie Parker…”
As Arnau Julia remembers, “I didn’t know what jazz was until Joan gave us some CDs with recorded jazz music. From then on, I started listening to jazz every day. I learned all the melodies and solos by heart — mainly because I loved the music and didn’t have access to much else. My parents didn’t know anything about jazz, and I didn’t have many other ways to discover new music. Joan was the person who opened up a whole world to us — and here we are today, working as professional jazz musicians.”
Andrea, saxophonist Eva Fernandez, and bassist Magali formed a close friendship at the time, which made the experience of playing in the new SAJB that much more enjoyable.
Chamorro’s ensemble, with its handful of members playing Dixieland standards, began to perform at recitals in classrooms, hotel lobbies, and other less-than-glamorous venues.
Reactions among impressed audiences about the kids and their talents continued to spread.
“I have many memories of those years, Chamorro says, “I remember that all the concerts we did, even before the one at Casa Fuster — from which the first Sant Andreu Jazz Band CD emerged — were an absolute success. People were enthusiastic about our music and the fact of seeing children (at that time, for example, Andrea was 12 years old and not the youngest).”
Alba Armengou joined the SAJB in 2009 when she was 7 years old, and even then demonstrated a great capacity and feel for learning her instrument. A year later, she was already performing her first solo in a public performance:
Saxophonist Alba Esteban’s musical life began when “my parents wanted me to play some instrument. At music school I had to write down which instrument I wanted, but it didn’t matter to me.”
As one of Joan Chamorro’s students, “I started on alto sax when I was 7. When I was 10, Joan told me to try soprano sax. That same year, I started playing with the SAJB.” There she formed a close friendship with Alba Armengou, which proved a great remedy for stage fright in their early performances.
As the band’s reputation began to grow, increased exposure came with invitations to perform in new, more prestigious venues, articles in the local press, and appearances on Barcelona television:
Chamorro continued to welcome new members into band, and began to bring in other young musicians who had not been studying at Escola Municipal de Musica, including Joan Codina, Joan Mar Sauqué, Victor Carrascosa, Marti Ibañez and Irene Reig. Eventually, with the project growing in size, it became necessary to adapt and make a transition to focus on the big band swing of the 1930s and ’40s.
“When I joined,” Magali recalls, “and Carla joined because there was no guitar, we started to play more arrangements like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, big band arrangements. More people joined, and at some point it became the Sant Andreu Jazz Band.”
Due to the new emphasis on the big band swing arrangements, Chamorro also felt it was time for Carla to put the banjo away and learn jazz guitar properly. He recommended a new teacher for her, Josep Traver.
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“Carla learned guitar at the school in Sant Andreu,” Traver says, “then she came with me to the school at Badalona, maybe when she was 13, and I was her teacher for 8 years” [Carla recalls that the time span covered her ages between 10–18]. Her guitar-playing role models were primarily Charlie Christian, whose solos she worked to learn, “and I love it,” she adds. Other important guitar influences have included Barney Kessel, Grant Green, and Kenny Burrell.
Magali says she also enjoyed learning the styles of traditional jazz and American standards, especially as the SAJB grew into a full-fledged big band.
“I enjoyed it a lot. If not, I wouldn’t have lasted so long. But I was young. I don’t remember listening to jazz at home, I was more into Rhianna, Beyonce…but I listened when the teachers said, ‘play this’ — okay, we have to listen to it and play it. And I enjoyed playing with the big band a lot. Playing with the big band is amazing.”
Word-of-mouth continued to enhance the SAJB’s presence in Barcelona, where audiences found themselves surprised and thrilled to see such young musicians playing sophisticated arrangements and sounding like professionals. Home-shot videos of the concerts, filmed by those in the audience, began appearing on YouTube, and Chamorro — always a firm believer in preserving his work with the band on CD and video for posterity — wanted the performances recorded to publicize the band with videos shot by a professional film team.
Ramon Tort picks up the story:
“Yes, we met with Joan at the Barcelona Jazz Orchestra, for which I spent a few years making videos of their disc recordings and live performances. And he suggested that I film the SAJB concert at the Hotel Casa Fuster, which ended up being the first Jazzing in CD/DVD format.”
The SAJB at the time consisted of:
SAXOPHONES
Eduard Ferrer, alto
Iscle Datzira, tenor
Eva Fernández, alto
Jaume Ferrer, tenor
Irene Reig, baritone
TRUMPETS
Andrea Motis
Pablo Fernández
Martí Ibáñez
TROMBONES
Dani Téllez
Raúl Castro
Eva Garín
RHYTHM
Marc Martín, piano
Carla Motis, guitar and banjo
Jan Rodríguez, double bass
Magalí Datzira, double bass
Arnau Sánchez, drums
Tort still clearly remembers his first reaction upon seeing the band play:
“I think the first day I saw them perform was at this concert. A friend had already told me about the band and Joan’s work, but words to describe this band always fall short. It was watching them play when I understood the dimension of the project, and I think the same thing happened to me as to the audience at that first concert: emotion and disbelief.”
From that point on, Tort and his crew became an essential component of the project’s existence.
“To publicize his project,” he explains, “Joan quickly understood that the videos were the perfect element…The relationship we established has been totally organic and progressive. There was no plan, no purpose, no objective, beyond seeing that through the videos we were making, the project stopped being a local thing and began to interact with the entire world.”
Their working relationship was to extend beyond that of filming SAJB concerts when a meeting of minds produced a more ambitious idea: to film a documentary of the kids in the band, as they rehearse together with Chamorro, practice at home, travel to gigs, talk about music, and just have fun in between their preparations for performances (we’ll take a deeper look into the culmination of that idea in Part 2 of this series).
Young piano student Jan Domenech joined the Escola Municipal de Musica in Barcelona in 2010 at the age of 13, where he began learning to play in a combo. “After some weeks, I’m not sure when,” he says, “before a combo lesson, I went to warm up a little bit playing ‘Watermelon Man’ by Herbie Hancock.” At the time, Jan had yet to be taught how to improvise, so as he worked his way through ‘Watermelon Man,’ he was “discovering more than practicing or playing.
“Suddenly, Joan came into the classroom and listened a bit and told me that he liked my ‘swing’. I entered the junior section of the SAJB ‘Jove Band de Sant Andreu’ [the ‘Young Cats’].”
He spent two years in the junior group before becoming a full-fledged member of the main SAJB. “Nevertheless, in that time I played sporadically with the SAJB, before going into the band. I knew almost nothing about jazz. I just had two jazz CDs, one of Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong and another of Tete Montoliu.”
But after watching two concerts by the SAJB, he says, “I knew that I liked jazz.” He and fellow SAJB pianist Marc Martin “grew up together, as if he were my older brother.”
It was becoming clear by then that among the many talented musicians in the band, Andrea Motis in particular seemed to have a special intuition for jazz, and was a quick and insightful student. One remarkable aspect of the early musical relationship between Chamorro and Andrea is how he began to trust and respect her musical judgement and opinions usually reserved for much more experienced musicians. He saw something in her that told him she had an advanced understanding of jazz.
As Josep Traver recalls, “I think Andrea was maybe 14 when Chamorro saw her potential, and started bringing her to his gigs. I remember me, Andrea, a clarinet player, a trombone player — we went to play in Mallorca three days for a jazz festival. She was a little girl, and came with her father Ramon, and later they decided to make the recording, and put the band together.”
Andrea explains how the quintet began:
“I was the first singer in the SAJB. Joan was playing saxophone, and I think I was the only trumpet-playing singer. The quintet [with guitarist Josep Traver, pianist Ignasi Terraza, and drummer Esteve Pi] began because Joan wanted to make a CD under his name, and he wanted to count on a trumpet player and singer who could sing the old, classic jazz. He didn’t know of any in Barcelona, so he told me, ‘I know you’re not a professional yet, and not at the point where you can improvise or have a lot of experience, but what I need you can do, like singing, interpreting the melodies, and you can try some solos to improvise’, because I really couldn’t, especially for a recording. It was very casual, nothing too pretentious. But it went well, and when we presented the album, many people were interested, so we continued doing this project [with the quintet].”
Thus, the first album to feature an individual SAJB musician, Joan Chamorro presenta Andrea Motis, was recorded in 2010 when Andrea was 14 and quickly gaining the reputation as a true jazz prodigy by any standard. She, Chamorro, and her father Ramon had already turned down contract offers from two major American jazz labels — SONY and Blue Note — agreeing that the time just wasn’t right for Andrea to take such a big step. Chamorro says, “We all believe it was a good decision.”
As for working within the SAJB, Chamorro says of Andrea, “I think during the time Andrea and I shared group leadership, we did pretty well. She always had the power to decide the steps to follow, in a progressive way, until at a certain point she became the absolute leader of her career. Whenever I made decisions, I did so with her best interests in mind. And even though I could possibly be wrong on some occasions, the result is a wonderful present, both musically and personally.”
Andrea agrees. “In the beginning,” she says, “we had a pretty mature relationship within jazz. I always felt he really believed in my singing and playing, so that was very good, because we were also collaborating in the same band apart from the SAJB; he counted on me for other professional gigs, and he put together the quintet that we were leading together, so I never felt ‘minor’ for being young.”
In the SAJB’s early years, Chamorro invited local musicians and teachers he had known and played with to join the band’s performances in and around Barcelona, giving audiences a satisfying mix of the young, up & coming kids and those with considerably more experience. Perico Sambeat, Ricard Gili, Toni Belenguer, Carlos Martin — to name just a few — began to take part as guests in SAJB concerts, as did noted musicians from elsewhere in Europe.
Within a few years, American jazz veterans began appearing onstage as SAJB guests upon receiving the invitation to make the trans-Atlantic visit to Barcelona, even though most of them hadn’t yet been familiar with the project. The tradition began with multi-instrumentalist Scott Robinson, who first played with the band in 2009.
“You know, it’s unbelievable,” Robinson says of the band. “He’s got kids who are eight years old not just playing their instruments great, but playing really with the right feeling, and the right kind of swing. That’s been a pretty constant thing in Joan’s band, having these little kids who don’t look like they’d be doing anything but riding a tricycle and then they get up and play all this music, on multiple instruments, they put the trumpet down and pick up a sax, and then they sing — it’s really something! Joan told me that I’ve been one of the inspirations for that kind of thing.”
Robinson emphasizes the unique nature of the SAJB. “It’s incredible,” he says, “it’s very rare to see that in America, which is the birthplace of jazz, so to see it here in Cataluña is something breathtaking. So for me it’s just an honor to be involved in any way with something like this.”
That same year, another American musician, the late Ken Peplowski, played as a guest of the band. Chamorro explains that Peplowski “was on tour in Europe and had a day off. This is how we planned a concert at the Casa Fuster hotel with Ken as a guest. It was a wonderful thing. Before starting he asked me to wear the Sant Andreu Jazz Band T-shirt.”
Saxophonist Dick Oatts and trumpeter Mathew Simon (who had moved to Barcelona in the mid-1970s) — also sat in with the band for a 2010 concert:
Several more top-rate American musicians were to make memorable visits to the band, and we will recount those as this series of articles proceeds along the SAJB timeline.
“The years passed and we made recordings, to document this work,” Chamorro says, “and so that other young people could see what we were doing and, perhaps, have it as a reference, as it turned out. And we continue, for now, confirming that this way of teaching works. I also keep trying to improve, not so much in the methodology, which I think is quite clear, but in the way of doing it, which for me is also very, very important.
“It’s not just about what you teach, but how you do it.”
It is nothing short of remarkable that all of the above occurred within just the first five years of the SAJB (and just inching into 2011). There was to be much, much more to come …
See you in Part Two!
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