Inverted Garden

Bienestan and the joys of minor albums

It takes a major artist to make a minor album; a big career is the only yardstick capable of measuring the relative size of a work. And sometimes, it takes a minor album to confirm that an artist is indeed major. The smallness and the modesty of a lesser work gives needed perspective on what surrounds it, like a truck parked in a forest of sequoias.

Guillermo Klein's Bienestan, which Sunnyside released in June, is the first minor album of his career—a milestone that I view as a triumph. For the last decade and half, Klein has been releasing big albums. I don't mean that in the rock sense. He and Los Guachos aren't holing up in Scottish castles for 13 months to write and record. I mean they're big in their sound and their vision, accentuated by their rarity. When Klein gets around to releasing an album, it's greeted by a certain kind of jazz fan and critic (I'm obviously among them) as a major event. Indeed, the three albums Klein released prior to Bienestan made the New York Times jazz critics' end-of-year top-10 lists. (Una Nave in 2005; Filtros in 2008, and Domador de Huellas in 2010.)

Bienestan is the first Guillermo Klein release that doesn't feel like a major event, and I'm betting it won't find its way onto the year-end lists. I don't mean that as a slur. In fact, it's a gorgeous album. Aaron Goldberg, Matt Penman, and Eric Harland form a masterful piano trio, slinking through Klein's arrangements with tightly coiled intensity and rhythmic precision. The best tunes, like "Manha de Carnival (Orfeo Negro)," are restrained but nonetheless carry the latent wallop of undetonated TNT—every snick-snack from the drums suggesting potential explosions. When Miguel Zenón and Chris Cheek come in on saxes, they're both (no surprise here) big-toned, dazzling—a pleasure.

Yet, unlike Klein's previous albums, the dominant mood here is casualness. Whereas Klein's other albums have felt like the main attraction, this is all after-hours playing. Half the band has left; Guillermo is fooling around with his distortions of Bird's "Moose the Mooche;" Miguel walks in (he wasn't playing the gig) happens to have his horn and starts soloing. Instead of brooding through some 12-minute-long composition with a full complement of horns swooning around him, Bienestan is about Klein dashing off a music-nerd retake on "All The Things You Are" then tossing it over to Goldberg to have fun with. Klein and Goldberg met in the early 90s when they were both college students in Boston, and I'm betting Bienestan is as close as we'll ever get to hearing what was going on in those Berklee and Harvard practice rooms.

The album is also a clear glimpse into Klein's process. It's his only album so far that doesn't feel finished. "All The Things You Are," which kicks off the album, is a disfigured skeleton of the tune, the odd-time-signatured bones on which Klein could have hung his typical thick, harmonic flesh. "Implacable," the second track, is a Reichian jigsaw puzzle that appears in more confident form as the introduction to "Coplas del regreso" on Domador de Huellas, an album which—tellingly—was recorded seven months after Bienestan but released almost a year earlier. Some of Klein's originals on Bienestan, "Burrito" and "Human Feel," were given richer renditions when Klein's flagship group, Los Guachos, played them at the Village Vanguard in May. (Both may very well make it onto Klein's next Los Guachos album.)

Bienestan, then, is a sort of sketchbook, Klein working out ideas that we'll find more fully illustrated on future recordings. That's no reason to lament what Bienestan could have been; rather, it's a rare opportunity. Delayed in its release for two years, with an odd mix of tunes, and an unfamiliar lineup, this is the kind of album that in another era might only have found its way to us posthumously. It's a sign of the progress of Klein's career that it's with us in his prime, and that this dashed-off work of old friends feels not only revealing but profound.

Guillermo Klein: Sunday Magic at the Village Vanguard

Ever since Bill Evans's classic 1961 recordings the phrase "Sunday at the Village Vanguard" has had a mythic ring. Tourists go to the Vanguard on Friday and Saturday. The real people, the die-hards, go to the Vanguard on Sunday. The music isn't something the die-hards do on a night out, it's part of their weekly routines—as essential to good living (if not as mundane) as a home-cooked dinner or laundry. You do routine things—even beautiful routine things—on Sunday.

Sunday is also the night at the Vanguard on which you're most likely to hear a great show. Jazz bands get tighter and bolder the more they play together, and a week-long stint at the Vanguard is often a process of gradual improvement. A promising piano trio with solid ideas on Tuesday becomes a potent and intuitive music machine by Sunday. To crib from poker, on Tuesday, the musicians play the tunes; on Sunday, they play each other.

I've rarely visited the Vanguard twice in one week, but every time I have, I've been rewarded. Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos' first show on Sunday was the latest confirmation that ten sets (and, in this case, a recording session) do a lot to hone a sound. I loved Los Guachos' performances on Tuesday, but the band sounded tentative on some of Guillermo's new material ("Artesano" felt even more off-kilter than intended). On Sunday night, Los Guachos strutted with an ecstatic shuffle. They owned the material, and their confidence allowed them greater freedom and creativity.

On "Juana," a song the band has been playing for 15 years, tenorman Bill McHenry showed that he knew the music well enough to play directly against its current. Instead of mimicking the song's jaunty clave-heavy groove, McHenry sang out a tectonic procession of long, heavy notes. Usually a soloist flys fast over the top of the music; McHenry allowed the rest of the band to rush under him—a great ship at anchor resting atop the waves. McHenry has been playing a version of that solo on "Juana" for years (you can hear it on Los Guachos II), but his version on Sunday was a more extreme rendition, and it was all the more expressive and moving for it.

Los Guachos' interpretation of the first movement of Alberto Ginastera's "Piano Sonata No.1" also showed the benefits of a week's hard work. What had been moving but inconsistent on Tuesday landed with a wallop on Sunday. Ginastera's daughter Georgina and her companion, the Argentine poet Albino Gómez, sat in the audience. After the set, Guillermo admitted that he'd been nervous in the presence of such porteño cultural royalty. If Guillermo really had the jitters, they didn't hamper his playing. It was the strongest version of Ginastera the band had played all week, Guillermo told me, even more assured than what they'd recorded the previous day for their album.

It's that remark, that the band's best came not during an exhaustive recording session but on a lonely Sunday night in a basement club, that reveals why these visits to the Vanguard can feel so magical: there's the possibility that you'll witness the music in its most perfect form. If you're so lucky—as I think we were on Sunday—it'll exist for just a moment in the ears of you and about 100 other people. Then it'll fade, and the band will start playing—imperfectly, beautifully—once again.

Parallels: Guillermo Klein at the Village Vanguard

One of the new compositions that Los Guachos played last night was a tight, off-centered round called "Parallel." It was a highlight of the second set and spoke to a deeper truth in Los Guachos' construction: in many ways, this band of eleven speaks in a series of concurrent dialogues. Some of the clearest, most arresting moments of last night's performance came when these two-way conversations rose above the rest of the music—Jeff Ballard and Richard Nant exchanging rhtyhms on drums and bombo; Guillermo Klein and Ben Monder weaving piano and guitar lines between one another's strings; dueling strikes in the horn section cutting through the air like clashing épées.

Many arrangers with eleven instruments at their disposal would deploy them more or less in unison, making loud, bold music. Great arrangers like Guillermo carve lots of small ensembles out of a larger ensemble. The trick is creating a tremendous density of ideas while not piling on too much sonic weight. At this, Guillermo is a master musical manipulator.

Ethan Iverson was there last night as well, and he has a nice review of the show over at Do The Math. (Jeff Ballard, indeed!) And via Ethan's blog, I discovered the meaning of a cryptic remark Guillermo made to me last night. "You're an eminence in Argentine jazz now, people are quoting you," Guillermo told me as we stood by the Vanguard's backdoor on Waverly Place. I laughed it off as flattery, but I should have realized Guillermo doesn't flatter.

In his review of Klein's show at Duke over the weekend, The Thread's Brian Howe cites my Argentine-jazz radio documentary pretty extensively. A nascent discussion is even breaking out in the comment thread with the Argentine bassist Pablo Aslan. (My reply is awaiting moderation.) NPR jazz blogger-in-chief Patrick Jarenwattananon has a must-read guest post there as well.

Photo credit: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times (from Guillermo's last appearance at the Vanguard, August 2010)

Fer Isella: Talking Guillermo Klein and Argentine jazz

Guillermo Klein and Los Guachos open their week-long run at the Village Vanguard tonight, and loyal readers will know that I'm very excited about it. I've been writing about Argentine jazz for the last three years, and this blog offers plenty of resources for those who are new to Klein and his jazz argentino brethren. First, there's my radio documentary "Sounds of Upheaval: Guillermo Klein and the new Argentine jazz," which played last August on The Checkout. Then, there are the interviews and commentary that a source no less than National Public Radio dubbed "a treasure trove of Argentine jazz." (How's that for horn-tooting!)

Last year, as I rushed to translate and edit said treasure trove, one essential interview fell through the cracks: a discussion about Guillermo Klein with his friend and collaborator Fer Isella. Fer is an award-winning record impresario, a top-notch producer, and a wonderful pianist and singer. His first album, Doña Furia Gaucha was an elegant and lyrical document of his years in New York with the band Makanudos. His upcoming album, Cosecha, features a lot of the key players on the Buenos Aires scene—among them Guillermo Klein's closest collaborator, Richard Nant. Fer is one of these people—specific to certain sectors of the music business—who's so talented he ends up performing pretty much every role, from negotiating major distribution deals to laying down backing vocals. This is not the last you'll hear from Fer Isella on this blog, but in honor of Klein's visit, I thought it high time to post this short discussion.

Eric Benson: Limbo Music, your record label, distributes Guillermo's albums in Argentina. How did that start?

Fer Isella: I had this dream of Guillermo being a person of recognition in his own country. He’s a composer who doesn’t only have a beautiful soul, he also has a very brilliant mathematical mind. He combines rhythms in this very smart way; but it’s not cold. He doesn’t start making some multiplications or something like that. He finds a very organic way to twist rhythms, like Ligeti used to do.

Anyway, when I moved back to Buenos Aires from New York in 2005, I discovered that none of Guillermo’s albums were out here. The musical community knew Guillermo very well, but the larger audience hadn’t started to follow him. So we started talking about getting his albums released in Buenos Aires, and that happened on my label, Limbo.

EB: And then you actually co-produced his last album, Domador de Huellas [ed note: click on the link to listen to the full album], his record of Cuchi Leguizamón songs. How did that come into being?

FI: Well, first, I want to say something about El Cuchi. He was this amazing folklore composer from Salta, in the north of Argentina. During the 70s, Argentine folklore was very popular throughout the world, and the voice of that era was Mercedes Sosa. A lot of the songs she was singing then were composed by Cuchi Leguizamón, but most people didn’t know that—even here in Argentina.

I actually saw El Cuchi a lot growing up. My family is from Salta and my father, César Isella, is a famous songwriter. He composed the Latin American anthem, and he was also very popular in the 70s. So my family was very close with El Cuchi. We used to have these beautiful music sessions and barbecues—all the things we do in Argentina. I captured him on video once, which I think is the only video that exists of him playing in a concert.

EB: What about El Cuchi as a musician?

FI: As a composer, I’d compare El Cuchi to Thelonious Monk. Both had this very strong base in the roots of the music—in Monk’s case jazz, in El Cuchi’s case folklore—but took it to some other level of complexity. And El Cuchi was a great performer, again like Monk. He didn’t have a perfect technique but a very personal technique.

So when Guillermo came to Buenos Aires to stay, in 2009, we started talking with Sunnyside records about doing a Cuchi album. It's been very intense and very emotional having this amazing, but not very well-known composer reframed in the brilliance of Guillermo and this band.

EB: Do you see this project as being part of some larger trend in Argentine jazz.

FI: Well, there are a lot of crossovers. The thing about Buenos Aires is that it's not so limited in styles. A musician who does rock might be great jazz piano player, and I think that affects the scene. Look at Guillermo. He’s doing this really folkloric music but framing it in contemporary jazz. That’s happening a lot. There’s Escalandrúm. There’s Ramiro Flores. Then there’s this school I have of being open to people like Bjork or Radiohead. Even if we’re doing jazz stuff, we’re trying to get closer to the feel of that music than to, say, standards.

EB: And where do you think that comes from?

FI: Well, part of it comes from following some steps that guys from the US have taken. I could mention the Bad Plus. They’re huge here. People are fascinated by the way they're presenting jazz. They see them, and they start recording jazz with a rock attitude. That's also happening in the compositions. People are composing music they know, but with some other twist. You have a lot of people doing things in electronic folklore like tremolo. Then there’s this style that’s booming here called cumbia digital—it's a mixture of folkloric cumbia and the electronic scene. My friends from Zizek Records are touring all over Europe with digital cumbia right now.

EB: In the US, there’s been this tortured discussion about how jazz is dead, how jazz is losing the young audience...

FI: Here it's for people in their twenties! You were in Pedraza, [a club in a private house], the other day and it was people in their 20s and 30s, but mostly their 20s. The scene is cool, it's a nice play to hang.

EB: When did that kind of scene develop?

FI: We had a really horrible tragedy that happened in a rock club here, [a fire at the Cromañón in 2004 that killed nearly 200 people], and since then all the clubs have been suffering to stay open. So now a lot of the really interesting things are happening in people's houses. They're not legal, but a lot of the scene is happening there, and they're even more packed with people than the regular places.

EB: Who’s in the audience mostly?

FI: I see a lot of students. Now there are five of six good music schools here. There are a lot of people studying here who aren’t thinking only about Berklee. I don't see a lot of people leaving like they did before. And then you have a lot of people in the audience that are coming for the hang, who are coming because it's not pretentious. It's good vibes.

This interview was conducted on December 16, 2009 at Isella's office in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

Guillermo Klein & Aaron Goldberg's Bienestan

Loyal readers probably don't need to be told again that one of this blog's heroes is the Argentine composer and pianist Guillermo Klein. In early May, Klein arrives back in New York for a week at the Village Vanguard with his 11-piece ensemble, Los Guachos. (They'll be recording a follow-up to 2008's Filtros during that time, as well.) I was planning to hold off on any Argentine jazz blogging until the week before the Vanguard shows, but last week I received word that a new Klein album is set to drop on June 14th.

The record, Bienestan, is a collaboration between Klein and pianist Aaron Goldberg, with crack players Miguel Zenón, Chris Cheek, Matt Penman, and Eric Harland filling out the band. Klein composed and/or arranged all the songs on Bienestan and Goldberg takes on the role of featured soloist. "We were conceiving of it almost in a Gil Evans-Miles kind of way," Goldberg writes in the press release announcing the album.

Needless to say, I'm hugely excited. Klein's contrapuntal duet with keyboardist Esteban Sehinkman—which introduced "Coplas de Regreso" on Klein's last album, Domador de Huellas—executed mind-bending rhythms with maximum tension and propulsive force. Goldberg filled in ably for Sehinkman when Klein came to the Vanguard last year. Those brief moments of piano-Fender Rhodes conversation are enough promise for me. But you might need more. Sunnyside has pre-released two tracks from Bienestan. Here they are:

Burrito:
 

Anita:

The Guillermo Klein WBGO Show

My radio piece on Guillermo Klein and the new Argentine jazz is now streaming on WBGO's website.

NPR's Patrick Jarenwattananon gave a generous shout-out to the show and this blog's "treasure trove of Argentine jazz."

And you can find that treasure trove below...

Guillermo Klein and the New Argentine Jazz: Radio Documentary and Interviews

My radio documentary, "Sounds of Upheaval: Guillermo Klein and the new Argentine jazz" debuts tonight on The Checkout. Listeners in the New York area can catch it on WBGO 88.3 FM. (Or streaming live everywhere!) The Checkout airs at 6:30 p.m. My segment will likely start around 6:39. (I'll post a link as soon as it's online.)

I didn't move to Buenos Aires expecting to find jazz. I'd grown up in New York, the jazz capital of the world, and going to hear "the music" in Argentina seemed roughly equivalent to catching a baseball game in Paris—a waste of time that would only make me long for home.

About a month after arriving in Buenos Aires, I went to hear Ramiro Flores's quintet at Thelonious. My expectations were low. The venue was cool. The music was astounding. When Ramiro and his band played "L'aprés-midi d'un Curupi," his riff on the legend of a well-endowed Paraguayan faun, it sounded as savvy and of the moment as anything Jason Moran was doing at the time.

L'aprés-midi d'un Curupi

The more Argentine jazz I heard, the more I became convinced it was special. Not only was this accomplished music on aesthetic grounds, but it also seemed to have a deep connection with its time and place. This music was the soundtrack to Buenos Aires in 2008. The link between American jazz and post-millennial New York had felt more strained.

I wanted to know why Argentine jazz was so vital. The quest led me to seek out many of Buenos Aires' jazz musicians, to pick their brains, to befriend them, and to begin to assemble an answer.

The New Argentine Jazz

Pipi Piazzolla talks about how the Argentine economic crisis changed jazz...

...and sticks around for a rhythm class

Juan Cruz de Urquiza examines the legacy of his group Quinteto Urbano

Richard Nant discusses his years at Berklee

Esteban Sehinkman delves into the theory behind his Real Book Argentina

The Cutaia brothers talk about the history and mystique of their club, Thelonious

Fer Isella gets into the nitty gritty of mic placement (coming soon...)

Plus, previously published interviews and profiles:

Guillermo Klein on his Argentine roots
Dino and Jose Saluzzi on family music
Ramiro Flores on self-analysis
Pipi Piazzolla on sharks and drums
The Ale Demogli Quintet kills at Thelonious

Pipi Piazzolla: How the crisis changed Argentine jazz

A lot of Argentine jazz musicians have told me about the profound effect the economic crisis of 2001-2002 had on their lives. Pipi Piazzolla, however, was the man who seemed to most fully grasp the crisis's economic and cultural impact. After hearing Piazzolla allude to the legacy of the crisis during one of Escalandrúm's shows, I asked him to more fully unpack the history for me.

EB: How did the economic crisis change the Buenos Aires jazz scene?

PP: Before the crisis in 2001, a lot of groups came here. People like Dave Holland would come to play in clubs—not in big theaters—and they’d get paid really well. We’d get Madonna, Michael Jackson. And this was every week.

So, the truth is that for local musicians, it was very difficult to compete. One time, Dave Holland was playing in the auditorium of the Bauen three nights in a row. I couldn’t go, because I was playing two blocks away with my jazz group. It was really difficult.

EB: So Dave Holland was direct competition?

PP: Yes, and it was also one-to-one. [During the 90s and early 2000s, the Argentine peso was pegged to the value of the US dollar.] A ticket that cost $20 dollars would cost $20 pesos. It wasn’t expensive. Now, when artists come from abroad, they might still charge the venue $20 dollars, but now it’s $60 pesos for us. It costs a lot to go. But back then, Dave Holland would charge $20 pesos, and I would charge $10 pesos. That’s the situation we all faced.

When the whole dollar-to-peso peg exploded during the crisis, all of those artists stopped coming to Argentina. So what happened? The real music fans weren’t going to stop going out, but who were they going to see? Local musicians. I think those fans got a big surprise. Guillermo Klein had just started living here, and he had inspired a lot of musicians to create a new kind of music.

But it goes back before Guillermo, too. Quinteto Urbano released its first album in 2000, and that first track was a chacarera. I think it was the first jazz chacarera that I’d heard in my life.

Quinteto Urbano - Malón

The crisis really made us look inside ourselves. It was a time when everyone was leaving the country. All the musicians went to Spain or Italy, and those of us who stayed said, “I need to put my heart on my sleeve. I’m Argentine! I love Argentina! I’m going to play Argentine rhythms! And by doing that, I’m going to represent my country.”

EB: So, in a way, you became more Argentine than you’d ever been before...

PP: Totally. We stopped looking outside of the country. Sure, I still listen to Miles Davis, but before, you’d never hear a jazz musician talking about playing a bombo [an Argentine drum]. Now, it’s something that every jazz musician is interested in.

EB: And did the opening of places like Thelonious help build the scene too?

PP: Before playing jazz here was something very underground. I remember when I was younger going to hear Luis Salinas playing with Daniel Maza. I’d go from 11 at night until 6 in the morning. I’d just be sitting there drinking a beer or a whiskey, and nobody else would come.

There were only two places and nobody went to them. I remember those years with a lot of fondness, but I also remember how difficult it was—not to play, but difficult to be in that kind of a scene. The vibe was strange—empty clubs, no life. Now, it’s more natural. The new jazz feels like it has a real identity and people can really connect with that.

EB: And that has to do with the actual music that’s being played?

PP: I think so. It’s a movement that has a lot of power. Yesterday, we were rehearsing with Nicolas Sorín, the pianist, and we were talking about the quantity of groups there are right now that play original music. There’s Nicolas’s group, there are trios everywhere, there’s Inmigrantes, there’s Juan Cruz, there’s Argentos, there’s Mariano Otero’s band, there’s Rodrigo Dominguez, there’s Ernesto Jodos, there’s Sergio Verdinelli, there’s Pepi Taveira, and, yeah, a thousand other bands.

EB: And that’s only happened after the crisis?

PP: Yeah, before 2001, we all played in commercial projects. I played with Lito Vitale, a famous pianist from here. I played in a salsa band, I played rock. You had to do that. Now, between the classes and all the groups, I can play the music that I want to. Before, there wasn’t room to play this kind of music, there wasn’t a movement, there weren’t people who would call you to be a part of these groups or to record a new album. All these people are writing new music, and that was just never the case.

This interview has been translated from the original Spanish. It was conducted on July 9th, 2008 at Piazzolla's home in the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

Pipi Piazzolla: Rhythm class

Pipi Piazzolla is the leader of the band Escalandrúm, a damn fine drummer, and probably the most omnipresent musician on the Buenos Aires scene. Want to find Pipi? Go to Thelonious and he'll probably being playing, regardless of which band is on stage.

Eric Benson: Escalandrúm changed its sound in the early 2000s. What was the change? And why did you decide to undertake it?

Pipi Piazzolla: I’d been playing with Guillermo Klein for two years, and we’d been making music that was like instrumental jazz but with Argentine rhythms. I wanted to take that kind of sound to Escalandrúm. I wanted to have a voice that was more Argentine. Escalandrúm was a Latin Jazz group and, suddenly, we became a group that played Argentine music. It was 2002, April and May more or less.

EB: I read an interview where you said that the sound of Escalandrúm changed when you started using claves more than typical counted rhythms. Tell me more about that.

PP: You hear how Cuban music has a clave? All of the music gets built on top of it. In Escalandrúm, we use distinct claves to play in distinct meters.

If you’re playing a song that’s in 7/4 or 7/8, you have distinct claves to play it.
One might be clave #1
Or another could be clave #2
Then you’re going to have this clave #3
Things that are more clave #4, you can put the music on top of that without having to count. The music sounds more fluid. You don’t have to count strictly, because the clave gives you a framework within which to play.

So yeah, we were putting together a ton of distinct meters with different types of claves. You can hear how it works in Escalandrúm’s songs. They’re super complicated rhythmically speaking, but they sound simple.

EB: Do these complicated meters arise out of the claves? Do you say, we’re going to play this clave and then…

PP: No. You have a complicated rhythm and you put in claves so that it sounds more natural. Say you have a song that’s in 11, you don’t have to count, “1, 2, 3, until 11.” You can make it 6 plus 5, which gives you 11. You can make the 6 into 3 plus 3. The 5, you can make 3 plus 2. It’s much easier to feel.

When I lived in Los Angeles, we would play the telephone numbers of our friends. Like, this guy’s number is 765-3243. The 7, we play a clave in 7. The 6, another clave in 6. Five, the clave in 5 is Mission Impossible. You know the theme song Mission Impossible, right? Did you ever think that song was in 5?

EB: No.

PP: Because it sounds natural. It’s a clave. It gets used all the time for playing in 5.

EB: So a lot of these claves aren’t Argentine. How is this Argentine music?

PP: If you listen to it, you’ll feel it. The music is evolving. We’re not going to play an Argentine rhythm like they would have played it 40 years ago. We’re inventing new rhythms with an Argentine flavor. I think it’s in the flavor, the vibe.

EB: And that vibe owes something to the musical legacy of Argentina in general?

PP: We’re very influenced by Argentine music and by jazz. We mix the two. There are improvisations, there are moments when it transforms into chamber music, and yes, it takes a lot of influences from Argentine music. We use folkloric rhythms—with different claves, sure, but you don’t notice that. That’s in the background.

EB: Is it something intentional, or is it something that just comes out because you’re Argentines.

PP: It’s what come out. The other day, we were rehearsing one of my songs, and one of the other musicians says to me, “this part sounds very tango.” That hadn’t occurred to me at all. But it was there. I don’t even listen to tango. Yes, my grandfather is Astor Piazzolla, I listened to tango growing up; but it’s not something I have playing on the stereo all day. But it’s in my blood. It’s in the air. And what’s in the air sticks to you. Like the accent, the way we speak. There’s a little bit of that in Escalandrúm’s music.

This interviewed has been translated from the original Spanish. It was conducted on April 14, 2008 at Piazzolla's home in the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

Juan Cruz de Urquiza: Quinteto Urbano and beyond

In the late 90s and early aughts, trumpeter Juan Cruz de Urquiza led Quinteto Urbano, one of the bands that inaugurated the new Argentine jazz. He remains one of the most prominent players in Buenos Aires.

Eric Benson: What’s changed in Argentine jazz over the last ten years?

Juan Cruz de Urquiza: A new kind of musician has appeared who’s concerned not only with being a good improviser and a good craftsman, but also with composition, with exploration, with searching for his own language. It’s something that’s gaining strength every year.

EB: A lot of people have told me that Quinteto Urbano was a very important group in launching this new wave of jazz...

JCU: It helped kick start the movement. When I returned from the United States in ‘94, I had my group and I had original songs, but there was something missing. People would get together only a few times to rehearse, then they’d play a gig a month later.

EB: You couldn’t play consistently...

JCU: No. But that was our decision. We didn’t dedicate ourselves to playing regularly.

Quinteto was based on two pillars: to rehearse and play every week, and to play original music. We’d rehearse on Mondays and play on Thursdays. It was a totally unique experience for me here in Argentina. Unique because we played sophisticated music and made it sound good simply by working at it. That’d never happened to me before. Now, we’re accustomed to playing more consistently, and we’re more accustomed to playing original music.

EB: And is part of that due to Quinteto Urbano?

JCU: In its moment, Quinteto Urbano represented the appearance of something important and novel. There were always good individuals here, but you’d run into problems when you’d try to put out a true artistic project.

Quinteto Urbano was a rare moment. It was six years and three albums. The group hasn’t disappeared, but now it’s in stand-by mode. It’s possible that at some point we’ll get back together, but only if it’s to realize a really solid concept.

Quinteto Urbano - En Subida

EB: You were at Berklee with Guillermo and Richard. I know that was a formative experience for both of them. Was it for you as well?

JCU: It was very important for all of us. Argentine kids who want to study jazz have a different reality now. There are a couple of good schools in Buenos Aires—they have ensembles, the whole experience—and there are a lot of musicians here who can serve as mentors. In our time, we needed to study abroad.

EB: One thing that Richard and Pipi told me is that jazz here has a lot to do with Argentine roots. Richard told me that this started for him at Berklee. How did it work for you?

JCU: I feel the same way as Richard. Before I went to Berklee, I was focused specifically on the jazz tradition—bebop and before. When I was young, my father took me to an academy where they played traditional jazz. I loved Louis Armstrong, Buddy Hackett, Bix Beiderbecke. Later, Clifford Brown appeared, who is my greatest influence to this day. Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw, Tom Harrell—I love those guys. I was really focused on learning the language of classic jazz. I wasn’t searching for a jazz language of my own.

I think the trip awoke a certain restlessness in me—the need to start writing music. We all motivated each other. Guillermo always mentions a time when he passed by a practice room at Berklee, and he heard Richard and me riffing on the harmony of an Anibal Troilo song. We were starting to use jazz as a way to channel our roots.

EB: What did you take from your Argentine roots? Was it something rhythmic? Harmonic? Melodic? Or more the vibe of the music in general?

JCU: I think it was the vibe in general. I wanted to keep being a jazz musician, but I wanted to be an Argentine jazz musician, to have an identity as a jazz musician with all of the jazz foundations—improvisation, interplay—but to try to combine those aspects with Argentine music. And once we started Quinteto Urbano, it was all about the search for an Argentine sound.

EB: Did you see other groups start to join that search?

JCU: For sure. Ernesto Jodos put out a really interesting album with Martin Iannaccone and Sergio Verdinelli. Richard had just come back. And Guillermo was here as well. Guillermo’s stay here was incredible. We played a ton. It was an injection of tremendous creativity.

Then there was Escalandrúm. At the end of the 90s, Escalandrúm sounded like more standard fusion. Then they started exploring the acoustic side of things and in 2002, they put out a disc, Estados Alterados, that had a lot to do with this movement.

EB: Pipi told me Escalandrúm’s sound changed during his time playing with Guillermo.

JCU: I think the crucial moment was the confluence of Quinteto Urbano, Ernesto’s album, Richard’s return, and Guillermo’s arrival. We played together all the time. I think Argentine musicians needs that. We can’t make music that sounds incredible on the first reading like they do in the US and Europe. We need to organize the music beforehand more. That also means we have music that’s very tight, that has a deeply rooted sound.

EB: So a lot of this had to do with building the idea of a group?

JCU: I don’t want to say that Argentine jazz was born nine years ago, but what happened is that we started to explore the question of the concept, the question of experimentation, the question of composition. There have always been good soloists here—Gato Barbieri, Baby Lopez Furst, Fats Fernandez—but the scene was very informal. No one every rehearsed. You’d go to play standards from the Real Book, and it wasn’t bad, but audiences didn’t really respond to it.

Now, audiences really are responding to the music—it’s original music, rehearsed, worked over. Groups like Escalandrúm perform in places like La Trastienda. That’s a venue for 500 people. Ten years ago, it would have been inconceivable for a jazz group to play there. I’m not saying there’s a massive audience for this. Putting out an album is still complicated. But now there’s a real following for what we’re doing.

This interview has been translated from the original Spanish. It was conducted on July 17, 2008 in a café in the Barrio Norte neighborhood of Buenos Aires.