Luis Martín Diez (Segovia, 1946 – Pozuelo de Alarcón, 2025) last performed with Nuevo Mester de Juglaría on June 29, at the foot of the aqueduct, near the place where he was born – the Avenue of Death and Life, a “common street”. … “One thousand five hundred and twenty-one and in April for more details…,” he said, repeating several times from the verses of Society by Luis López Alvarez. He no longer took the stage at subsequent concerts of the group in which he played, sang and lived for 56 years. On the twenty-third of the same month, he would have been 79 years old.
The death of Louis Martin – almost everyone’s Louis Mestre -, on November 14, leaves the formation of traditional music without one of its founders, without the usual pandoria, without one of the voices of the many passages of his songs, without one of the main persons involved in the field work, from city to city, collecting the guttas, the romances, the passages that end up in live repertoire and in albums of popular composition. Mester is also left without his “sly and sometimes sour” friend, without the talent for mentally solving near-impossible mathematical operations on truck trips to the next party. Because, as his partner and main voice of the Maester, Fernando Ortiz de Frutos, recalls, “Luis was a man of science,” although influenced by a passion for folklore.
A professor of physics at several institutes in Madrid and at the Complutense University, where he studied, he has never stopped boasting about the land. “We Segovians have a very large province and the largest city in the province of Segovia is called Madrid,” he said at every opportunity in interviews and even at concerts in the capital, where he always pointed out “at the right moment” that the Mestre members were happy to perform “in the largest city in the province of Segovia.” Fernando Ortiz adds: “He also said that Madrid is a city located on the road that runs from Segovia to Navalcarnero.”
Thus, among the jokes, he almost highlighted the fact that the Maester moved San Isidros for nineteen consecutive years from the Plaza Mayor in Madrid. “We supported Tierno Galván, we sang with him the first time as mayor, and the last time with Gallardón. Not with Ana Botella, but with her we played in the Plaza de España, which is bigger,” recalls Luis Martin in the report published in these pages on the occasion of the half-century anniversary of the group.
He also remembered those concerts from the first, last years of the Franco regime and those that followed, when they came to perform “accompanied” by armed police at the premiere of “Los comuneros” in Medina del Campo’s Segovian Square. In the crosshairs of censorship, the authors of the protest song were not only restricted, but were also banned from performing, because their call was not just a call to celebrate and dance: “The strength of the traditional song is that it comes from the people. “If four scoundrels knew / What the cost of work / They would not abuse the people / Nor the daily wage,” would have occurred to the best poets, but it occurred to the farmer from the chinchilla,” he said in his appeal for popularity and as an example of those “brusque” words.
Luis Martin, in Folk of Segovia 2024
Luis Martín was part of the group of Sigovian friends who studied in Madrid at the end of the 1960s and from which Nuevo Mestre emerged, after passing through the prickly pear. Fernando Ortiz, whom he had known since he was fourteen, was finishing high school in Ramiro de Maezto and was already giving romantic parties in the institutes; He had been called to participate in a competition in November 1969 and did not want to go alone. With the improvised name of Clan 5, Marian Nieto (soon replaced by Llanos Monreal) and Milagros Olmos, as well as Rafael San Frutos and Luis, joined forces with a pandoria from 1925 that he had always maintained. They won the New Values Competition with this improvised name that lasted two concerts, because the phrase written by Juan Pedro de Aguilar on the Cope Network, crediting them with the role of the new minstrel player, would give them the final role.
Then came countless live performances and long-running successful recordings with the Philips (Fonogram) label. In 1971, “Romances and Popular Songs” inaugurated a discography that grew at the rate of one title per year until 1978, with the exception of “75”, when they published two: the legendary “Romance de El Pernales” and “Segovia viva”, in which Dolzaynero collaborated with distinction, among others, Agapito Marazuela. Their greatest achievement would follow: “Los comuneros,” which they would expand on in a later work. All this without leaving aside his other professional career or collection work in the cities, where more than three hundred cassette tapes have been digitized, says Fernando Ortiz, part of whose content appears in a series of videos on YouTube: 30 episodes of a series called “From the Mestre Archive”, in which the voices of the informants are mixed or supplemented with the versions prepared by the group of those songs, as well as a collection of photos or videos.
In the midst of that storm, at the “Nuevo Mestre Gathering,” Luis Martín was “highly organized and, above all, in the best sense of the word, a great visionary,” enthusiastic about seemingly impossible projects, Ortiz points out. He still had time for the Segovian Roots Music Festival and the Agapito Marazuela Encounters, because the work and commitment there were personal, although he credits the group: “He made the effort, everything, and put it on his back. Popular Segovia is an invention of Louis. He helped the master as much as he could, yes, but he was the one who was determined and who had fought so long for it. He directed thirty-three versions, from 1984 to 2017 – when he was succeeded by Jaime Lafuente – although he never completely distanced himself. Contrary to what one might think, this did not begin in a secret way. “Luis managed to get the first festival sponsored by the Spanish National Radio and broadcast by the European Broadcasting Union throughout Europe. In came, nothing more and nothing less, the Neapolitan New Folk Song Company, perhaps the most important European folk group of the time. “He started out in such a way that he had no choice but to maintain the level,” says Fernando, father of current veteran course manager Cristina Ortiz.
Pedro Piqueras, who was a member of the group Carcoma, who became a collaborator with Nuevo Mester, a narrator in some “Los comuneros” concerts and sang in the recording of the song “Salamanca la blanca”, was remembered on November 16 in his segment “A my way, more or less” of the Spanish national radio program “It’s Not an Ordinary Day”. “Everyone knew him as Louis Meistre, mainly in popular music, in traditional music, where Louis was one of the greatest, one of the best actors,” he said. After noting his role as “co-founder of Nuevo Mester de Juglaría”, which he described as “the most important group in the rediscovery and dissemination of traditional Castilian music and the ability to motivate the youth of the 70s, 80s and 90s”, the journalist recalled his other great legacy: “Luis Martín was also, without a doubt, the soul of the people of Segovia.”
The Segovian Festival, like the Nuevo Mestre Festival, will have to continue without what was one of its pillars. The group will once again sing its songs to the wine, to the duero, to the gabareros or to Padilla, Bravo and Maldonado, as they have done for many years at the Villalar Festival, always supported by the cry of “All the people of Castilla feel the collective”. “We have to move forward. We must continue, because the project is still alive and because Louis wanted it to continue. “To continue is a tribute to him, the best we can do for him,” says Fernando Ortiz.