From October 2007 to August 2008, I lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, working first as a reporter for the biweekly ex-pat newspaper The Argentimes and then as a jazz chronicler and scene hanger-on for All About Jazz. During most of my stay in the South, I kept an irregularly updated blog called Type and Tonic (the title was supposed to conjure a boozy Graham Greene ex-pat life) that covered my adventures in Patagonia, my thoughts on the difficulty of learning Spanish, and, increasingly, my time spent listening to Argentine jazz.
I never officially closed Type and Tonic, but after a blog post entiteld "June 9th is...Guillermo Klein day" I got a commission to write a piece for Down Beat on the post-crisis history of Buenos Aires jazz—a story of economic recovery, peripatetic musicians, and a perfect storm of art and commerce that gave birth to a new jazz idiom. Energized by the assignment—and delusional about its scope—I conducted 15 hours of interviews with the key Buenos Aires players, producers, and club owners in an attempt to capture the movement from all sides. By the time the piece was due, its word count had been slashed to 800, and what I'd envisioned as a lyrical feature ended up reading like the abstract to an encyclopedia entry.
For the last year and half, I've been stewing over the piece that could have been. I've written a 5,000 word draft of what I'd hoped to have published, then realized (after some helpful comments from Digital Dying's Justin Nobel) that the concept needed a make-over. I also realized I needed to go back to Argentina, both to make the story current again and to ask the questions that have peaked my curiosity over the last year.
I'm sitting in an apartment in San Telmo right now, having arrived in Buenos Aires this morning. Thanks to WBGO's Josh Jackson and freelance reporter Anil Mundra (formerly of the Global Post and NPR) I've grown the stubs of radio sea-legs and, for the next week, I'll be setting out to tell the story of Argentine jazz in a medium that's new to me.
I'm not sure how much blogging I'm going to be doing down here, but I'll try to file a few updates in this Type and Tonic revival/Inverted Garden double bill. I've already eaten a choripan and am headed off to a "puerta cerrada" jazz club tonight. It's suddenly feeling very June 2008...
