Jazz In Argentina.
History And Present.

By Miguel
Bronfman and Janny Dierx.

In the “roaring
twenties”, Argentina
was a prosperous country and its capital, Buenos Aires,
resembled in many aspects European cities like London,
Paris and Berlin.
All the cultural and intellectual activity, following a strong tradition from
the preceding century, was imported from those cities, and so was jazz: at the
beginning, it didn´t arrive from the United States, it came from Europe,
where it had been “discovered” in the previous decade.

In the thirties, jazz got
installed in the city´s cultural life. In the
first years, however, things were not easy for the new music in a mostly
conservative society: there were xenophobic groups that opposed jazz, claiming
it was against the “National Identity” (represented by tango and
folkloric musical expressions), and thus made efforts to eradicate it.

Fortunately, jazz was not only
strong enough to survive this reactionary attacks, but also received some vital
influx from a diversity of factors, especially the radio boom and the
supportive attitude of intellectuals and writers of the time, who embraced
jazz, as tango musicians had already done some years before.

Actually, the local antecedent of the first jazz bands were the tango
orchestras, and most of the times the musicians and conductors were the same. Gradually,
the technical knowledge began to deepen and musicians got more professional,
jazz broke its ties with tango, and new jazz orchestras were formed, emulating
the models of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller.

Meanwhile, the first Argentine
jazz musician that exceeded his country´s
boundaries was causing a big sensation in the pre-war French cabarets. An
incredibly gifted guitarist with unmatchable swing, Oscar Alemán
had first been hired by the exotic dancer Josephine Baker while she was performing
in Buenos Aires.
In the euphoric Parisian jazz scene of the thirties, Alemán
got the chance to play and record with the most important musicians,
were they European (like the members of the legendary Hot Club de France) or
American expatriates, like Bill Coleman or Freddy Taylor. He was often compared
to Django Reinhardt, whom he frequently got to play
with. Unfortunately, those duets have escaped recording, and we have to content
ourselves with just imagining how the Gypsy and the Argentine might have
sounded together.

With the beginning of the Second
World War, the European dream was over for Alemán,
who returned home to enjoy  considerable success and a
prolific recording career until the end of his life in 1980. Alemán´s recordings are now available in cd format; a true legacy from one of the first musicians to
use jazz to expand the Argentine musical frontiers, and who, with only a few
years in Europe, gained a place in jazz history (in 1998 Acoustic Disc released
a comprehensive anthology, Oscar Alemán: Swing
Guitar Masterpieces, 1938-1957)

Albeit jazz kept on developing,
following with some delay the changes that were taking place in the United States,
it was only in the sixties that two other musicians achieved international
projection: Lalo Schifrin and Leandro “Gato” Barbieri.

In 1956 Dizzy Gillespie gave
several concerts in Buenos Aires,
and thus had the chance to listen to Lalo Schifrin´s Orchestra, a sixteen piece band with a
modern repertoire and a style that mixed elements from Stan Kenton, Count
Basie, Latin-jazz and bebop. Gillespie was impressed by the young compositor
and conductor,
and told him that they should work together one day. For
Schifrin, the dream came true four years later. When Gillespie knew he was in New York, he called him
right away and asked Schifrin to compose some music for him. One thing led to
the other: soon Schifrin was the pianist and musical director of Gillespie´s new quintet, and some time later he
composed the  Gillespiana suite, recorded in November, 1960. The
album became a huge success, the suite gained the best of critics and Schifrin,
under Gillespie´s wing, got the necessary
exposure to become known in the jazz world.

Encouraged by Schifrin´s
experience, Barbieri migrated to Rome, Italy,
a couple of years later. Once there, he soon found his way when he got to play
with trumpetist Don Cherry, embracing for a while the
free jazz style and collaborating in emblematic projects such as Charlie Haden´s Liberation Music Orchestra (1969) and the
Jazz Composers Orchestra (1968), formed by Cecil Taylor, Pharoah
Sanders, and Larry Corryell.

Barbieri
is the only Argentine jazzman that has played real free-jazz, and while he did
it he gained recognition among the style´s
adepts and from critics like Leonard Feather and Nat Hentoff.
But  it was
with the soundtrack to the film Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci,
1972), that he got the attention of a larger audience.

In 1973 Barbieri
returned for a brief period to Argentina,
for he was interested in South American music. He assembled a group of Latin
American musicians with a strong emphasis in the different and varied rhythms
of the whole region, and thus blended a unique style of free-jazz, Latin
American music and folk rhythms highly original and, most important, full of
political content. Barbieri intended to make the
world aware of an oppressed people, and thus turned his back on abstraction to
explore his own cultural roots. The result was the album Third
World, and a sequence of four “Latin American Chapters”,
the albums that constitute his most important work.

In the late seventies, military
dictatorships seized power in most South American countries, and an obscure
period began. Like many intellectuals, scientists and artists, Barbieri fled away once again. Surprising and disappointing
everybody, Gato left the activist behind and started
to play some funky-pop, diluted commercial music which, besides his always
melodic improvisations, had no artistic interest or value at all and, for many,
it´s music that sank into oblivion. After many
silent years, Barbieri made a triumphant comeback in
the late nineties, which also included the recording of two new albums and
several tours around the U.S.,
Europe, and his homeland. Although
sporadically because of health troubles (he is 71 years old) Barbieri still performs. And even though his strength has
been considerably reduced, his still has his trade-mark, preternaturally
visceral, emotionally raw sound intact.

The late seventies and early
eighties were a dark period not only for Barbieri,
but for Argentine culture in general. And jazz, always the weakest musical
genre, suffered it amply. As in the beginning of its history, the military
dictators rejected jazz for its “imported” origin –even rock
and roll sung in any foreign language was banned, and jazz had to wait way beyond
the nineties to recover.

It was only from the year 2000
onwards that Argentine jazz started to grow steadily, even abruptly, with not
only a young audience willing to enjoy it, but with a whole generation of young
professional musicians completely dedicated to perform jazz. These musicians,
who brought jazz to the youth and who are now between thirty and forty years
old, had two enormous benefits the previous generation didn´t:
they grew up in democracy, and had the chance to study abroad (mainly in the
United States and, particularly, in Boston´s Berklee School of Music), and then went back to their
country, where they had the chance to make a living with their profession.

The economic stability of the
nineties, on the other hand, inserted Argentina in the international circuit,
and thus celebrated jazz musicians like Wynton and
Branford Marsalis, Michael Brecker, Lionel Hampton,
Oscar Peterson, to name only a few, visited the country frequently, finding
here an enthusiastic audience that anxiously waited and, in some cases, revered
the visiting artists.  These
“good times” in economic terms, also brought the mega-store Tower
Records (which only in Buenos Aires
simultaneously opened four branches), so during those years one could find in Buenos Aires as much music as in New
York or London,
including jazz.

In December, 2001, a big economic
crisis exploded in the country and, although Tower Records closed its stores
and left, and although there were no more visits from abroad for at least three
years, jazz prove once again to be strong enough to survive the crisis.
Independent labels started to flourish, and an array of young musicians started
to find new places to play. There was a big audience for jazz, and since the
foreign starts couldn´t make it anymore, the
vernacular figures had to feed the jazz fans. Also, pioneering figures from
Schifrin and Barbieri´s generation gradually
begun to got the recognition they long deserved, both
as players and as teachers of the younger generations.

These days Buenos Aires´
jazz agenda is excessive. Every year Argentina hosts seven jazz
festivals. The radio is broadcasting more or less 10 jazz programs a week and
every night you will be able to find some live concert somewhere, with at least
seven serious jazz clubs only in the capital. One of the most notable qualities
of the youngster´s generation,
is the willingness they show to find their own voice through the jazz language.
Indeed, if anything distinguishes this newer generation of musicians, is that
they no longer delve into the past nor in the jazz repertoire (not exclusively,
at least) but instead they play their own music, and many of them give equal
importance to the art of playing to that of composing.

Independent labels like BAU
Records (with pianist Ernesto Jodos, guitarist
Fernando Tarres or sax player Luis Nacht as best exponents) or MDR Records (which released a
series of albums entitled On Piano that featured six solo piano albums by local
pianists/composers) have been holstering this new wave that is already being
called “Argentine Jazz”, but also the big company  EMI has launched its jazz branch through
a sub-label called S´Jazz, which has released
fifteen albums so far, all of them by Argentine musicians, some of them already
established, and some of them making their recording debut.

The purest jazz tradition thus
melts with elements of academic and contemporary  music, New Tango (the music
created by Astor Piazzolla), folk music (particularly
the music from the Andean landscapes in the North-West of the country), and the
rich and diverse musical culture that one can find all over this country; a
country built as a modern nation in the 19th Century through a strong
immigration that lasted way beyond the 1930´s. As a universal tongue, now
jazz is being open to the music those communities brought in with them, through
the immigrant´s grandsons. Italian, Polish,
Spanish, Ucrainian or Jewish music, among others, are
also enriching and nurturing Argentine jazz, a music that, after its first
century, is alive and sounding better than ever.

More references:

Labels:

www.sjazz.com.ar

www.baurecords.com.ar

www.mdrrecords.com.ar

www.melopea.com.ar (for
“classic” Argentine jazz)

Musicians:

www.ernestojodos.com.ar (modern
jazz)

www.adrianiaies.com.ar (jazz and
tango)

www.marianabaraj.com.ar (jazz and
folk Argentine music)