Grand finale at the 2025 Al Ras Bluegrass & Old Time Music Festival – photo courtesy of the festival
This report on Barcelona’s big bluegrass event is a contribution from Oriol Serra, a journalist in the region.
Mollet del Vallès is an industrial town located just a few minutes north of Barcelona. Legend has it that its name comes from a mythological fish that lived in the area hundreds of years ago, when the current land was a huge, deep lake. For the last quarter of a century, Mollet has been home to Al Ras Bluegrass & Old-Time Music Festival, an annual event that every first Saturday of November turns the town into a meeting point for both musicians and fans of the Appalachian sound.
This year’s lineup featured performances by veteran Slovak dobro maestro Henrich Novák and the up-and-coming Italian quartet Blue Weed, alongside local acts like Herba Foska or the children’s combo Al Ras Bluegrass Kids. The purest essence of the festival, though, was once again to be found in the spontaneous jam sessions that artists and audience members alike held inside and outside the Mercat Vell, an elegant mid-20th-century hall that had once been a marketplace.
The members of Herba Foska all cut their teeth at these jams, as well as those that Al Ras hosts twice a month at different spots in Barcelona, before the quintet (guitar, vocals, mandolin, fiddle, banjo and double bass) made its live debut last Saturday with a lively selection of traditional tunes. And so have the musicians that make up the Al Ras House Band, currently led by fiddler Jordi Marquillas, and singer and guitarist Josep Ponsà.
Since he started performing his own songs a few years ago under the moniker Joe Fields, Ponsà has become a big name in the Catalan country music scene, as a two-time winner of the Texas Sounds International Country Music Awards held in Marshall, TX. On the other hand, Marquillas is a seasoned veteran of countless projects that include Catalan folk pioneers Falsterbo. Just a year ago, he released his own debut album as Littlemarks. Together with the rest of the band, they played a mixture of originals and covers by the likes of Bill Monroe, Merle Haggard, or Alan Jackson, and truly rocked the house.
And so did Henrich Novák, whose show was one of the highlights of the bill. A key figure in the European bluegrass scene with more than four decades on the road – including a performance at the Grand Ole Opry and touring with legends such as Rose Maddox or Sue Thompson – Novák had the support of the Barcelona Bluegrass Band in Mollet. Not that this extraordinary dobroist needs any assistance when he goes onstage. He made that quite clear during an absolutely astonishing solo. But the band’s role must as well be emphasized when reviewing a concert that acquired some delicious transatlantic taste by quoting both Bill Monroe (Uncle Pen) and the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (Anda Jaleo).
If a band can be called the great revelation of this year’s Al Ras, no doubt it is Blue Weed. An exceptional quartet that was formed only three years ago in northern Italy by some very young and truly talented musicians: Francesco Mosna (dobro), Matteo Camera (guitar), Icaro Gatti (double bass) and Marco Ferretti (banjo) – the latter a member of the essential Red Wine along with his father, the legendary Silvio Ferretti. They came out at full throttle from the get-go with wild but heartfelt renditions of standards like Cattle in the Cane, White House Blues, and My Walking Shoes.
The festival ended in a jam session that gathered onstage all the musicians on the bill, and part of the audience, to perform a few good tunes and release some even better vibes. Luckily, the Mercat Vell stage is large enough to fit the 20-plus musicians that performed songs like I Don’t Wanna Write Another Sad Song, an original by Josep Ponsà. Later on, as a grand finale, they delivered a beautiful rendition of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the timeless spiritual recorded almost a century ago by the Carter Family, and since then by the likes of Willie Nelson and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Another song that was played during the final jam session was Mr. Glubo, the opening track from the classic Paris Banjo Session album that was released half a century ago this year, and has since then become one of the cornerstones of European bluegrass. One original copy of that record was given away during the raffle that, as every year, takes place between shows.
One of the funniest moments of the night, it was also one of the most emotional since it brought all of the festival’s organizers together onstage. These guys – Lluís Gómez, Jorge Rodríguez, Ignasi Cardús, Xavier Cardús, Joan Manel Hernàndez, Michael Luchtan – have been building something very unique for the past two decades and a half. And that something is built to last.
