Jazz from here, with the world inside it. An island can be a boundary on a map. In music, it can also be a point of departure.

For more than twenty years, Pep Garau has been proving the latter. A trumpeter, improviser and educator, he is one of the most active figures in the Balearic jazz and contemporary music scene, with a career that has moved through jazz, funk, soul, folk and experimental music, and has brought him into projects with musicians including Salvador Sobral, Jorge Pardo, Perico Sambeat, Maria Schneider, Hermeto Pascoal and Miho Hazama, among many others.

But when Pep leads his own band, all of that experience stops being a CV and becomes something else entirely: rhythm, melody, improvisation and a willingness to play.

The Pep Garau Sextet was formed in Mallorca in 2019 and has since developed a repertoire of its own in which jazz enters into open conversation with Latin and Afro-Cuban rhythms. Bebo Valdés, Jerry González and Carlos Henriquez are among the reference points, but never as models to imitate. They are part of a musical landscape from which Garau writes and searches for a voice of his own.

In recent months, that search has taken shape in new music and a new project, Amarar, with a repertoire that moves between Cuban pulse, contemporary jazz, melody and a rhythm section that plays a central role. In recent concerts, the new compositions have sat alongside boleros, sambas, tributes to musicians such as Freddie Hubbard and Claudio Roditi and, above all, plenty of room for the music to change once it reaches the stage.

For Alternatilla, Pep brings together a formidable band at Llubí’s theatre: Toni Vaquer on keyboards, Tomeu Garcias on trombone, Joan Garcias on double bass, Benji Habichuela on percussion and Marius Koopmann on drums, with Pep Garau himself on trumpet.

A line-up in which rhythm is not simply a foundation but an engine; where trumpet and trombone can talk, answer one another or push forward together; and where every composition leaves enough room for six musicians with strong individual voices to reshape the music as it happens.

Because this is also something we want to celebrate at Alternatilla: you do not have to look far to find extraordinary musicians. What matters is giving them the space to go far with their music.

On 29 November, that space will be Teatre de Llubí.

Six musicians from Mallorca. Music with no interest in borders. And enough rhythm to prove that roots know how to move too.