DJ B Jones, from nights on the road to the Olympus of electronic music: “Now we are the center of the party”

Beatriz Martínez (Jaén, 1982) says that she began dreaming big from the beginning. Not many years ago, when life was not as planned, she left her youngest daughter in the care of a friend and every night she traveled 160 kilometers from her home in a town in the Community of Madrid to the center of the capital to learn the trade of disc jockey. A decade later, artistically known as B Jones, this July he will become the first Spanish artist to perform on the main stage of Tomorrowland, the most important electronic music festival in the world that is held every summer in the Belgian town of Boom. . She and she will do it twice: on Fridays, July 15 and 29. “It’s a dream come true, I still can’t believe it and lately I’ve been working every day around that time. It is an enormous responsibility, ”she tells EL PAÍS excitedly.

After a first stage in Ibiza, where she got married and became a mother at the age of 19, a love separation led her to start from scratch in Madrid, where she reconnected again with that type of music that had impressed her so much as a teenager. “I fell into a depression when I saw that I had been working all my life, fighting, but without doing anything for myself, for Beatriz. I realized that since I was little the world of DJing, the booth, electronic music, had aroused a great passion in me and I had never tried it ”, she recalls now. She set the goal and gave up everything to achieve it. She left work, she moved to a town far from the capital where she had bought a house and every night she drove to the city so that the DJ of the Kapital nightclub, Javier Coello, would help her with the studio work. .

“I put all my energy into it. I would go every night, come back to take my daughter to school and in those hours when she was in class is when she slept”, she recalls. The effort paid off. Being a finalist in a contest and several bowling in clubs where she fell out of favor allowed her to make her way in a world in which the presence of women is still a minority. It is enough to take a look at the huge billboards installed on the roadsides of the Balearic island that announce the parties in the big summer clubs to see that the majority of those who lead them are men. “I think there are fewer women in this field because of a social issue. We are still in a world where, when we are born, the girl is given a doll and the boy is given a truck, even though it is changing. These professions that perhaps we women have not dedicated ourselves to because of how we were educated and how we grew up. There is a lot of work to be done ”, she maintains. She speaks clearly: “If someone hasn’t taken me seriously for being a woman, I haven’t paid attention to them.”

Already established in Ibiza, this year, the summer in which the island has recovered the great nights in the clubs after two years of pandemic, it has its own party at the Hard Rock Hotel that, under the title of Come Closer, It allows her to invite other colleagues to DJ with her every Tuesday. Throughout the summer she is also a DJ at the party Future Rave by the well-known David Guetta at the Hï Ibiza nightclub and has scheduled sessions at various international festivals, as well as Tomorrowland. DJing with figures like Guetta is another of his dreams come true, although the session that still lingers in his memory is the first in which he worked with the Dutch DJ Tiësto, whom he admires for his music and character and whom he credits with having DJs have become one of the prominent elements of electronic music parties. Another of his references is DJ Kryder, a well-known artist of British origin with whom she fell in love during confinement and who is currently his partner.

Martínez claims the importance of electronic music in the world of culture. “In the Netherlands, for example, it is very important; on the king’s birthday the DJs play in the street. In Spain we have many more styles of music and perhaps that is why it has not been so important”. Despite this, he has no doubt that Ibiza is the world mecca of this musical style, the only place on the planet where you can take a car and in 10 minutes you go from seeing a great star of this musical universe like David Guetta to another like Carl Cox or Calvin Harris. “And that every day. All the electronic artists in the world are on the island, ”he recalls. What is clear to her is that today’s electronic world is constantly changing: “The DJ has stopped being in a corner of the room to be the center of the party.”