RIPMJAZZ
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Jazz Magazine

Jazz magazine: órgano oficial del “Hot Club” de Barcelona was the official journal of the Hot Club de Barcelona in the final biennium of Spain’s Second Republic. The club had been founded in April 1935, and the journal functioned as its voice, documenting local activities and the city’s debates around jazz. Publication began with no. 1 (August 1935) and continued through no. 8 (June 1936).

Each issue was a slim, magazine-style number—typically eighteen pages long—built on a regular architecture: it opened with an editorial on the general jazz scene, moved to a section on Hot Clubs in Spain and orchestral activities, followed by a “Correo de discos” record-review column, then a featured bibliographical essay and a historically or pedagogically oriented article, before turning to a “Cinema” section on jazz in film, a “Miscelánea” of varied topics, and a short news wrap-up under “Breaks.”

Originating as the Hot Club de Barcelona’s newsletter, the magazine was created to report on the world of jazz and music in general while chronicling the club’s own life. In editorial lineage it emerged from the merger of Música Viva and Mundo Musical (organ of the Sindicato Musical de Cataluña). The hot-club publishing effort was first steered by Ernesto Guasch and Juan Aragonés and—once it became the club’s official organ—by the pianist-composer Nicolás Surís Palomé. Its pages mixed local writing with translations and reprints, reflecting tight ties to the Hot Club de France: pieces by Hugues Panassié, Charles Delaunay, and Jacques Bureau appeared alongside items drawn from Jazz-Tango, Jazz Hot, and Radio Magazine in France and from the Argentine press (Síncopa y Ritmo). A Madrid correspondent, Juan Valcárcel, joined in March 1936. Editorially, the journal championed what contributors called “jazz auténtico,” valuing swing as essential and aligning—though not uncritically—with early Hot Club de France aesthetics. Studies of the run show how Jazz magazine became a forum where critics, musicians, and aficionados in Barcelona debated authenticity, modernity, and the place of Spanish composers within jazz.

In historical and political terms, the Hot Club de Barcelona (founded in 1935) cast jazz as a marker of modernity and internationalism in the city, but the military uprising of July 1936 and the ensuing Civil War abruptly disrupted this ecosystem and effectively closed the magazine’s brief run as cultural policy and press controls shifted under wartime conditions.

Nicolás Surís Palomé (1903–1991) was a Catalan pianist and prolific composer active before the Civil War and later under Franco; he published a wide range of popular and dance pieces—documented in the Boletín Oficial del Estado and in the Biblioteca Nacional’s catalogs—and left recordings from the 1940s–1950s.

Notable articles include “Tratado de instrumentación popular” by E. Peña Morell (a pedagogical piece), “La conferencia del maestro Samper” by an anonymous author (a long report and summary of Baltasar Samper’s lectures at the Ateneu Polytechnicum), and “Hot from Paris” by Charles Delaunay (news from the Paris jazz scene).


Cinema