“To live and not be ashamed of being happy” could be Jorge Drexler’s motto. It is a verse from ¿Qué será que es?, the Spanish version of the track by the Brazilian Gonzaguinha that the Uruguayan musician played in the final stretch of Saturday’s concert at the Palau Sant Jordi. A generous concert, two and a half hours long, with a notable rhythmic and scenic display and presided over by the charisma of an artist who was capable of transmitting proximity, intimacy, in fact, within the vastness of the venue. He has the gift of the anecdote and the favor of an audience that celebrates his stand-up comedy skills, as he demonstrated all alone at the Palau de la Música in 2025. And despite the astonishment at the hostility that characterizes the present, he pursues happiness with the determination of a Quixote and a delicate irony hanging from his smile. Equally ascribed to the melancholy of the milonga, at times he verges on an overdose of consonant rhyme, as happens in Cuando cantaba Morente with “candente“, “inclemente” and “latente” (almost all poets have a bad afternoon), but the consistency of his songbook is undeniable, as is the communicative capacity of a voice that takes on harmonic challenges without virtuosity.
Utopian and sentimental by nature, and with enough artistic and humanistic resources to “not get fed up with oneself,” as he explained a few months ago to ARA, Drexler brought together 7,200 people, everyone seated, for the Barcelona presentation of the album Taracá (2026), whose songs took up a good part of the repertoire. This is not a minor detail, because the drums of the candombe, the Afro-Uruguayan rhythm that articulates the album, are the engine of this tour. He counts, of course, on the help of a seven-musician band and, in Barcelona, with the special collaboration of percussionist Fernando Ramírez. At the rhythm of the candombe came the best moments of the night: in the first part, pieces like Tamborero, and in the final block, the spectacular Tambor chico, What could it be? —which he took the opportunity to celebrate, in Portuguese, the victory of Lula da Silva in the presidential elections in Brazil— and When in doubt, dance, a song that recalls the infamy of the power that throughout history has wanted to prohibit sensual dance, whether it was the sarabande in the 16th century or reggaeton at the end of the 20th. “In Uruguay, the drum was also a symbol of rebellion during the dictatorship,” he recalled before performing Tamborero.
Drexler began the concert with Toco madera and ¿Cómo se ama?, two songs from Taracá that exude the undeniable influence of C Tangana, explicit in Tocarte (the track they shared on the album Tinta y tiempo, from 2021) and also present in the visual apparatus: two vertical screens and one horizontal that offered black and white images, the majority in accordance with what is expected at a concert, but some quite surprising, such as those provided by a camera installed inside a drum. The first songs already showed the good rapport between the musicians, the depth of the triple percussion and the desire to share the spotlight, a constant in a concert in which the singer Miryam Latrece, the guitarist and singer Flor Gamba, the double bassist Alejandra López and the drummer from the Ebro region Marc Pinyol had a special prominence.
Tribute to Serrat in Catalan
On this tour, Drexler incorporates a small stage that he uses in the central segment of the show for his more intimate repertoire, though not exactly alone because at times the band also participated by playing on the other stage. In this more secluded space, there was one of the most emotional moments of the night, when Drexler sang Milonga del moro judío, the ecumenical utopia of the Jewish Moor who lives with Christians and who does not know which God is his, nor who his brothers are. “Long live a free Palestine!”, shouted a spectator in the silence of the Sant Jordi.
He opened the part on the small stage with Las palabras and then gifted a version of Paraules d’amor by Joan Manuel Serrat. Drexler is a fan of the most candid lexical associations… It was the first time he sang it live, and he managed it with the help of the audience, whom he informed that it was the first song in Catalan he had heard forty years ago. In addition to singing Paraules d’amor, he also used Catalan to greet and to repeat thanks (“gràcies” and “merci”). All of this contributed to reinforcing the idea that the one at Sant Jordi was not a conventional concert. “It is the biggest concert I have ever played in Europe! Barcelona always giving me joy”, he had said a while earlier. His son Pablo lives in Barcelona, and he has a group of admirers there, musicians who on Saturday were also among the audience such as Meritxell Neddermann (who collaborates on the album Tacará), Pau Vallvé, Macaco and Salvador Sobral, among others. Oh, and he did not forget that in the eighties, while working as a street musician, he had played in front of the Barcelona cathedral.
Furthermore, taking advantage of the fact that the singer Julieta Rada is in Barcelona these days (she is performing on November 5th at Jamboree), he invited her to sing The age of the sky and to pay tribute to her father, Rubén Rada, the legendary Uruguayan musician who passed away on August 23rd. Together they performed Candombe dance, with the essential assistance of the band. It was the transition for the return to the main stage and to kick off the final stretch of a concert that ended at a quarter to twelve with Everything transforms. A night of souls especially happy, with a first part in which the performance moved in fits and starts, too subjected to the dynamic of monologue-stories and dedications (also to Open Arms in Stardust), and with an unstoppable second part, without shame of being happy.
