MUSICIANS IN TRANSIT

Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music

MATTHEW B. KARUSH

Duke University Press • Durham and London • 2017

© 2017 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

Text designed by Courtney Leigh Baker

Typeset in Whitman by Westchester Publishing Books

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Karush, Matthew B. (Matthew Benjamin), [date] author.

Title: Musicians in transit : Argentina and the globalization of popular music / Matthew B. Karush.

Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016028811 (print) | LCCN 2016029536 (ebook)

ISBN 9780822362166 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 9780822362364 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 9780822373773 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Music—Argentina—20th century—History and criticism. | Musicians—Argentina. | Music and globalization—Latin America. | Music and transnationalism—Latin America.

Classification: LCC ML231.5 .K37 2016 (print) | LCC ML231.5 (ebook) | DDC 780.92/282—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028811

Cover art: Astor Piazzolla and the Quinteto Nuevo Tango. 1962.
Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación.

For my parents,

RUTH AND NATHANIEL KARUSH,

with love

And in memory of my sister,

DEBORAH ERWIN,

1966–2016

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note about Online Resources

Introduction

1

Black in Buenos Aires:

Oscar Alemán and the Transnational History of Swing

2

Argentines into Latins:

The Jazz Histories of Lalo Schifrin and Gato Barbieri

3

Cosmopolitan Tango:

Astor Piazzolla at Home and Abroad

4

The Sound of Latin America:

Sandro and the Invention of Balada

5

Indigenous Argentina and Revolutionary Latin America:

Mercedes Sosa and the Multiple Meanings of Folk Music

6

The Music of Globalization:

Gustavo Santaolalla and the Production of Rock Latino

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was immeasurably improved by the many friends and colleagues who read chapter drafts, discussed theoretical issues, made crucial suggestions, wrote letters of support, and in a few cases, shared source material. I am particularly grateful to Ezequiel Adamovsky, Jeremy Adelman, Paulina Alberto, Paula Alonso, Jason Borge, Alejandra Bronfman, Lila Caimari, Illa Carrillo Rodríguez, Oscar Chamosa, Chris Ehrick, Eduardo Elena, Sandra Gayol, Danny James, Deborah Kaplan, Valeria Manzano, Andrea Matallana, Michael O’Malley, Fabiola Orquera, Silvana Palermo, Pablo Palomino, Fernando Ríos, Karin Rosemblatt, Jessica Stites Mor, John Tutino, Barbara Weinstein, and Eric Zolov. Kip Hanrahan and Gustavo Santaolalla both agreed to let me interview them, and their memories and insights proved enormously helpful. At Duke University Press, Gisela Fosado, Lydia Rose Rappaport-Hankins, and Sara Leone were as efficient and supportive as any author could want. In Mark Healey and Bryan McCann, Gisela found two terrific readers; they provided generous, insightful, and illuminating critiques.

I am grateful as well for the support of several institutions. A fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities freed me from my teaching obligations for a year, while the History and Art History Department and the Provost’s Office at George Mason University funded several research trips to Argentina. The chapter on Oscar Alemán appeared previously in Eduardo Elena and Paulina Alberto, eds., Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Likewise, the material on Gato Barbieri in chapter 2 appeared in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. I am grateful for permission to republish.

In different ways, my children, Eli and Leah, are both music lovers. Their enthusiasm for talking about and listening to music—even the strange, old music I make them listen to—is contagious and helped make working on this book the most fun I have had as an historian. Their mother, my best friend, partner, and colleague Alison Landsberg, has had a more direct impact on the book. With the exception of these lines, she has read every word of the text, most of them more than once. I can only hope that some of her creativity and analytical brilliance has made its way into the final product.

NOTE ABOUT ONLINE RESOURCES

Nearly all of the music discussed in this book is available on compact discs and on the Internet. To guide readers to the most relevant performances, I have created a website to accompany the book: http://matthewkarush.net/musiciansintransit/.

INTRODUCTION

In 1994, on the eve of his appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, the Argentine rock star Fito Páez was asked to consider the place of Latin American popular music in the world. In response, he claimed that musicians from the global South had a distinct advantage over those from the North: “I could enjoy the Beatles, but they never heard [Chilean folksinger] Violeta Parra. They have missed out on a part of the world.”[1] Páez’s wry observation is a reminder of the inequality that structures global cultural exchange. Popular music produced in the United States and Britain has been elevated to universal status, a cultural product that is consumed and emulated everywhere in the world. By contrast, the music of other societies is of more particular, local significance; when it circulates internationally, it is often packaged as a novelty. North American musicians can indulge a taste for the exotic or they can simply ignore the music of the rest of the world, a choice that is typically not available to musicians from elsewhere who want to attract even a local audience. In other words, while Latin American musicians like Páez have been forced to compete directly against Elvis Presley, the Beatles, or Michael Jackson, the reverse has never been true. Páez interprets this apparent weakness as a strength: Latin American musicians have greater resources at their disposal. They can and do draw on local, regional, and global styles in order to forge their own music.

Yet most revealing about Páez’s comment was his choice of Violeta Parra as an example. By invoking a musician who was not from Argentina, Páez implied that there was a transnational, Latin American musical tradition to which he, as an Argentine, had privileged access. But what exactly is it that has made Violeta Parra available to Argentine rock musicians but not to their English-language counterparts? Why did Páez consider this Chilean musician to be part of his musical inheritance? Parra’s music circulated on recordings made by Odeon, a subsidiary of the British multinational recording company EMI and, in fact, the same company that distributed the Beatles albums in South America. In this sense, Parra’s was a typical case: corporations based in the United States and Europe were responsible for the majority of music recording and sales in Latin America throughout the twentieth century; they forged the commercial links that allowed popular music to circulate. The globalized music industry made it possible for Argentines like Páez to hear both the Beatles and Violeta Parra.

Nevertheless, multinational corporations were not solely responsible for these musical connections. In fact, Parra was virtually unknown in Argentina when she died in 1967. Although both Chilean and Argentine folk musicians were recorded by the local branches of multinational corporations, cross-pollination was minimal. It was only in 1971 when Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa recorded an album of Parra’s songs for the Dutch multinational Philips that the Chilean artist’s music reached a broad audience in Argentina and throughout Latin America. Although Sosa shared her company’s desire to sell records, her decision to record these songs reflected her own political ideals: she appreciated Parra’s leftist commitments, and she wanted to express her solidarity with Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile. In a self-conscious effort to construct a revolutionary Latin Americanism, Sosa and many of her Argentine fans embraced Parra and the other musicians of Chile’s Nueva Canción (New Song) movement.[2] Their metaphorical border crossing created a new marketing opportunity for the multinationals and thereby shifted the transnational flow of popular music. Musicians like Parra and Sosa pursued their own aesthetic and ideological goals as they traveled along circuits wired by global capitalism. Their journeys, alongside thousands of other, structurally similar ones, produced the Latin American musical identity Páez invoked. By navigating the ideological and economic structures of the transnational music industry, they transformed them.

This book will trace the itineraries of seven influential musicians from Argentina in the decades after 1930. Argentine musicians were active participants in the global culture industry, and their extensive interactions with musicians, genres, and audiences in the United States, Europe, and Latin America proved consequential. Deeply enmeshed in a transnational field, their nationality nonetheless mattered: it gave them access to specific cultural resources, it established a particular relationship with local and regional audiences, and it marked them when they performed abroad. Argentine musicians traveled on terrain molded by the unequal distribution of economic and political power. They confronted genre distinctions, marketing conventions, and even ethnic or cultural identities, all of which imposed limitations but also created commercial and musical opportunities. Responding creatively to these opportunities, they produced innovative music and achieved commercial success, but they also generated new ways of conceptualizing their national, regional, and ethnic identities. And these new identities, expressed in music itself and in the publicity and critical discourse that accompanied it, had effects beyond the realm of popular culture. The ideological, aesthetic, and commercial maneuvers of Argentine musicians in transit enabled their fans to reimagine Argentina’s relationship to the rest of the world.

The Globalization of Popular Music

The musical journeys that are the subject of this book were made possible by globalization, understood in its most basic sense as an increase in transnational interconnectedness and integration. Propelled by trade, conquest, colonialism, capitalist development, migration, and innovations in transportation and communication technology, globalization is a long-term, historical process, but one that has accelerated in recent decades. And as many scholars have described, globalization has had a direct and profound effect on identity and social organization. In one particularly influential account, Arjun Appadurai argues that the intensification of transnational flows of media in the contemporary world has yielded an unprecedented circulation of images and scripts, making available “new resources … for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds.”[3] Musicians are active participants in this process, developing their own styles through engagements with musical elements and genres that circulate transnationally. In fact, as I hope to demonstrate in the chapters that follow, the history of popular music cannot be understood apart from these global cultural flows and the social, political, and economic forces that structure them.

Contrary to naïve predictions, globalization does not imply the emergence of a single, unified world culture. Globalization has always been uneven, in the sense that levels of interconnectedness vary across geographical space. Moreover, multinational corporations have thrived not by obliterating local cultures but by adapting their own products to local regimes of taste and by packaging the heterogeneous cultural products of the world for consumption by diverse audiences. Theorizing this phenomenon, Renato Ortiz has argued that cultural globalization follows a different logic than the processes of economic and technological globalization to which it is linked. While the world is evolving toward a single economic structure and toward the diffusion of a common set of technologies, diversity remains an inherent feature of global culture. Rather than impose homogeneity, “mundialization,” as Ortiz prefers to call cultural globalization, disseminates a new “pattern” or “world vision” that coexists with and recasts existing worldviews by introducing new hierarchies and values.[4] Seen in this light, the persistence of diverse cultural expressions or practices does not constitute resistance to globalization. On the contrary, a globalized world implies the existence of diversity, but it is a diversity in which every cultural practice or product is in dialogue with world culture. Invoking the fictional setting of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Néstor García Canclini argues that “there are many more options in our future than choosing between McDonald’s and Macondo.”[5] In fact, essentialist localisms like García Márquez’s magic realism are themselves strategic; they can only be understood as engagements with world modernity, ways of locating oneself in the global.

Within the realm of popular music, engagement with the global is hardly new. For centuries, musical styles and elements have followed the movements of people, producing a long history of transnational hybridization. As Ignacio Corona and Alejandro Madrid put it, “Music is the perennial undocumented immigrant; it has always moved beyond borders without the required paperwork.”[6] Or to cite Ned Sublette’s more colorful metaphor, “Musicians lost their virginity a long time ago, so reports of immaculate conception are to be viewed with suspicion.”[7] In the Americas, in particular, musical purity is nowhere to be found; popular music has long reflected the intersection of indigenous, African, and European cultures.[8] The invention of the phonograph and the advent of mass culture more generally accelerated the transnational flows of music and the promiscuous mixing that resulted. In the form of commodities, music circulated rapidly across long distances, exposing audiences on an everyday basis to music produced far away.

Yet not all music has crossed all borders all the time. On the contrary, the globalization of popular music has been organized by deeply hierarchical, commercial, and ideological structures that facilitated certain musical flows while preventing others. Musicians occupy specific locations within global cultural and economic structures as determined by their class, race, gender, and nationality. They do not enjoy equal access to all genres or to the means of musical production and dissemination. Globalization, in other words, has a politics; inequalities of power and prestige have shaped the transnational flows of music in historically specific ways.

Three decades after Emile Berliner’s invention of the gramophone in 1888, a wave of corporate mergers began to give the global music industry its modern shape. The result was, in David Suisman’s words, “a truly international political economy of culture—with a heavy American accent.”[9] By the 1930s, a handful of multinational corporations—especially RCA Victor, EMI, and CBS—dominated the recording industry and enjoyed substantial ties to both broadcast radio and film production. New technology had democratized access to music as commodity, but corporate consolidation put production decisions in the hands of a very few. Moreover, this industry was already global in its reach. Almost from the beginning, North American and European companies pursued international expansion, and they quickly established vibrant markets in Latin America, as well as in Asia and throughout Europe. In addition to selling their domestic catalogues in these foreign markets, record companies also realized that foreign musical traditions and tastes created other opportunities. As early as the 1910s, the major companies produced thousands of recordings in foreign countries for sale in those markets as well as among immigrant groups in the United States. In this way, the early globalization of the record industry promoted the recording and dissemination of vast amounts of music from around the world. And even though ultimate control of the process lay in the hands of North American and European executives, decisions about what music to record were often left to the locals. Aware of their own ignorance of foreign tastes, the record companies tended to defer to local intermediaries.[10]

Nevertheless, the hegemony of European and, especially, North American companies over the globalization of popular music had substantial effects. These companies conceived of the music they recorded abroad as “local,” defined implicitly in contrast to North American popular music, of ostensibly universal value and appeal.[11] This vision of the world shaped the globalization that ensued. In each country, the record companies offered chiefly two product categories: North American music and local music. The May 1942 Argentine catalogue of Odeon and Columbia Records—both, at this point, owned by EMI—was typical: alongside numerous local tango and folk bands, there was a lengthy list of North American dance orchestras, jazz bands, and crooners. Only a tiny handful of records—one each by folk bands from neighboring Paraguay and Bolivia, one by a Mexican bolero singer, one by a Spanish flamenco artist, and one by Brazilian Hollywood star Carmen Miranda—represented the whole rest of the world.[12] This market logic meant that though music flowed transnationally, it did so only via certain established channels. Moreover, the vast technical and economic advantages of the U.S. recording and film industries combined to elevate North American popular music to a position of unrivaled prominence and prestige. As a result, even when they played local genres, musicians throughout the world emulated the sonic characteristics of North American music. They fashioned “alternative modernisms” that reconciled local music with the up-to-date styles of instrumentation and rhythm they learned from North American records.[13] Traveling North American musicians certainly borrowed from the music they heard abroad, and a series of fads exposed North American fans to “exotic,” international sounds, but the musical sharing was deeply uneven and unequal.

Economic expansion and powerful new transportation and communication technologies have been the engines of a pronounced acceleration of globalization in the period since World War II. Although globalization in this more recent phase has continued to reinforce cultural diversity, it has reorganized transnational flows and shifted the dynamics of cultural production, a phenomenon that is visible within the realm of popular music. As in the earlier period, the more recent intensification of globalization has been accompanied by corporate consolidation. Although many local record companies were founded in the intervening decades, by the 1990s, the Latin American music markets were again dominated by a small handful of multinational corporations; in the late 1990s, the six so-called majors—BMG, EMI, PolyGram, Sony, Warner, and Universal—accounted for between 80 and 90 percent of the music sales in the region. Yet this domination did not lead to the decimation of Latin American musical styles. On the contrary, the majors thrived in the region mainly by providing consumers with Latin American repertoire. Although much of this business reflected “domestic” sales—Argentine consumers, for example, buying albums recorded by Argentine artists—a substantial proportion was “regional.”[14] Unlike in the early decades of the music industry, Latin Americans were now consuming a great deal of music from other Latin American countries. Differences were even more striking on the level of production. Beginning in the 1980s, the most commercially successful Latin American popular music was produced not in Latin America at all but in New York, Los Angeles, and especially Miami. Particularly successful was a new form of Latin pop created in Miami and marketed to consumers throughout Latin America as well as to Latinos in the United States. García Canclini has described the Latin music produced in Miami as “glocal,” because unlike earlier forms of pop music, “it puts Anglo and Latino repertoires into interaction.”[15] And yet, as García Canclini notes, this hybridization remains unequal: only a few artists are selected by the multinationals for distribution to North American and European audiences.

These shifting structures shaped the transnational terrain on which popular musicians traveled. They created aesthetic and commercial opportunities, but they also put limits on what sorts of musical expressions were viable, and they informed how those expressions would be understood by different audiences. Up to a certain point, the specific form that globalization took was the result of the economic interests and ideological dispositions of the (mainly) men who ran the major multinational corporations. However, commercial, popular music was not produced in boardrooms but in recording studios and on concert stages. In pursuit of new audiences and opportunities and in their desire to engage with musicians and genres from other countries, musicians traveled both literally and figuratively across national borders. Through their creative agency, these musicians in transit redirected transnational flows in ways that those in the boardrooms never anticipated.

Argentina in the Global Music Industry

Argentina’s distinctive position in global cultural circuits makes it an illuminating vantage point from which to examine the history of music globalization. Argentines have been fully incorporated into these circuits both as consumers and producers since the beginning of the mass cultural era. Over the course of the twentieth century, Argentine musicians performed exotic spectacles for consumption by Europeans and North Americans, and they also led the way in the production of music for the Latin American market. These two forms of musical production, enabled and disseminated by the same global music industry, intersected in complex ways. The efforts of Argentine musicians to navigate the global music industry yielded aesthetic innovations and novel personas. As this book will demonstrate, these innovations had unpredictable and transformative effects on identity formation both throughout Latin America and within Argentina.

The record industry arrived in Argentina within a few years of its founding in the United States and Europe. Attracted by the growing population of upwardly mobile consumers in Buenos Aires and other cities, four companies—Victor, Columbia, Brunswick, and Odeon—overwhelmed the local competition and dominated the market by 1920. These companies sold their extensive catalogues of jazz records and focused their local production efforts on the tango, a popular dance genre. They capitalized on the power of the new medium of broadcast radio to promote their products, and tango and jazz soon dominated the air waves and dance floors of Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, Argentine tango also circulated internationally. Thanks to the ability of traveling Argentine performers to appeal to the taste for the exotic, a tango dance craze erupted in Paris, London, and New York in 1913 and 1914. In 1921, the Hollywood film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (dir. Rex Ingram) featured a famous tango executed by Rudolph Valentino and thereby ignited another brief boom. But although the tango did maintain a presence in the United States and Europe through dance band repertoires and stereotyped performances, the extensive recording of the tango in Buenos Aires was aimed primarily at Argentine audiences, for whom the genre represented an authentic, local style that was every bit as modern as jazz.[16]

Argentine tango musicians were also among the first Latin American performers to build a significant audience throughout the whole region. Of course, even before the rise of sound recording, Latin American popular music and dance had been shaped by a history of transnational exchange: the tango itself first emerged as a local adaptation of the Cuban rhythm known as the habanera.[17] But the advent of mass culture created the possibility of constructing a unified, Latin American market for popular music. The first significant effort in this direction actually came by way of the film industry and involved the promotion of Argentine singer Carlos Gardel, tango’s biggest star. Following the invention of sound film in the late 1920s, the Hollywood studios sought to maintain their commercial advantage in Latin America by producing films in Spanish. Between 1931 and his early death in 1935, Gardel starred in seven full-length movies for Paramount. Filmed first at Paramount’s studio in Joinville, France, and later in New York, these movies packaged Gardel, in Nicolas Poppe’s words, “to appeal to a transnational Hispanic identity.”[18] This effort, in turn, exerted a significant influence on Gardel’s music, primarily through the work of screenwriter Alfredo Le Pera, who became the singer’s main lyricist. Avoiding the use of the Buenos Aires slang known as lunfardo, Le Pera produced tango stories that were not rooted in local cultural geography and thus had more universal appeal. Although Hollywood soon abandoned the Spanish-language film market, Gardel’s films had a profound effect on the nascent Argentine film industry. Over the next few years, local studios produced dozens of tango films and quickly gained a dominant position within the Latin American market for Spanish-language film. Gardel and his Argentine successors, most notably tango singer and actress Libertad Lamarque, became major stars throughout Latin America and helped make the tango popular throughout the region.[19]

Argentina’s centrality in Latin American mass culture waxed and waned over the course of the century. Argentine neutrality during World War II led the United States to restrict the amount of raw film stock the country could import. Local film production plummeted, and the country ceded its dominance in the Spanish-language film market to U.S. ally Mexico.[20] It would be several decades before an Argentine musician would achieve commercial success in Latin America on a level approaching that of Gardel. During the 1950s, Argentines continued to consume North American music in massive quantities, and they listened to genres from elsewhere in Latin America, including bolero, mambo, and baião. Meanwhile, Argentine popular music—tango and, increasingly, folk music—sold primarily in the domestic market. Yet while the domestic film industry never regained its regional dominance, Argentine musicians would once again manage to find significant Latin American audiences in the 1960s and early 1970s and, again, in the 1980s and 1990s. Part of the work of this book is to make sense of the aesthetic maneuvers and ideological transactions that enabled those commercial triumphs.

This book will demonstrate that the efforts of Argentine musicians to connect with foreign audiences profoundly influenced the construction of national identities at home. In this sense, it builds on other studies that have explored the way foreign encounters have informed and transformed nationalist movements. For example, Sugata Bose has demonstrated that modern Indian nationalism was partly forged by Indians living outside their homeland. Facing discrimination and exploitation, migrant communities in South Africa and Southeast Asia elaborated an anticolonial politics that united Indians across linguistic and religious divisions. In this case, as Bose concludes, “globalism and nationalism were not antithetical.”[21] Similarly, Argentine nationalism was also produced transnationally. As Argentine musicians traveled within the global networks of mass culture, they transformed their music and their modes of self-presentation in order to take advantage of the specific opportunities that were available. In Europe, the United States, and other parts of Latin America, they encountered ideas about race and about “Latin” culture that did not match those that circulated at home. As they navigated the gap between these expectations and their own established identities, they drew on the wide range of musical resources that global mass culture made available. The results of this process included new, hybrid musical styles and genres but also new ways of performing Argentineness. As a result, these transnational encounters made new forms of national identity available to Argentine musicians and fans at home.

At stake in the engagements of Argentine musicians with foreign music and audiences was the question of how Argentina fit into global hierarchies: was it a cosmopolitan nation built on European roots, or did its history and culture mean that it had more in common with the rest of Latin America? This question lay at the heart of the country’s historically polarized debates over national identity. In the nineteenth century, elite Liberals sought to strengthen the country’s connection to Europe by encouraging immigration and limiting the influence of the local population. The massive waves of immigration that arrived from southern Europe between 1880 and 1930 provoked a backlash, but even as intellectuals celebrated criollo, or native, culture, they often stressed its Spanish roots. Unlike other Latin American countries, Argentina never developed an official or widespread discourse of mestizaje. Rather than celebrate the racial mixing that produced the local population, Argentine intellectuals tended to emphasize the country’s whiteness, a vision that rendered both Afro-Argentines and indigenous groups nearly invisible. In the mid-1940s, Juan Perón transformed Argentina by building a populist movement that appealed directly to the working class. Although deeply nationalist and, in many ways, anticosmopolitan, Peronism stopped short of questioning the idea of Argentina as essentially European and white.[22] Nevertheless, Perón’s elite and middle-class opponents, who were scandalized by the way the movement empowered their social inferiors, reacted by labeling Peronists “cabecitas negras,” or little blackheads. Using a racial insult to mark a class difference, the term identified Peronists with the internal migrants who flooded into Buenos Aires in search of jobs in the growing industrial sector.[23] In this way, anti-Peronists implied that white, European Buenos Aires represented the real Argentina in opposition to the uncivilized masses of the interior. By emphasizing the nation’s European roots, this anti-Peronist discourse, which in turn became constitutive of Argentine middle-class identity, distanced the nation from mestizo Latin America.[24]

Throughout the postwar period, Argentina’s relationship to the world remained a site of contestation, and Argentina’s musicians in transit pushed the conversation in new directions. Their engagement with European ideas about race and modernity and with North American stereotypes of “Latin” identity made available new ways of conceiving this relationship. After the fall of Perón in 1955, middle-class anti-Peronists deliberately crafted a new, cosmopolitan form of Argentine national identity, and music played a significant role in that effort. Later, Argentine musicians responded to the advent of rock and roll, the emergence of the youth market, the rise of revolutionary movements, and the deepening of globalization by developing new genres that interpellated their audiences as Latin. Although musically these genres bore few similarities to each other, they each encouraged fans to embrace specific forms of identification that challenged the historic idea of Argentina as more European than Latin American. By navigating the unequal, often exploitative structures of the global music business, Argentine musicians produced not just new music, but also new ways of conceptualizing their nation’s place in the world.

Doing Transnational Music History: The Career Narrative

Many of the issues raised by transnational music history are iterations of larger theoretical questions about music and identity, questions that have generated a massive sociological and musicological literature. Although this scholarship is too vast to tackle here, suffice it to say that I am sympathetic to accounts that stress that music does not reflect preconstituted identities from which local consumers choose. Rather, identities are produced, maintained, and at times transformed through the dissemination and consumption of musical products.[25] For this reason, as Joshua Tucker has argued, studies of popular music need to analyze more than just the musical texts themselves. In particular, he argues for the need to pay close attention to the role of mediators, such as record producers and radio station managers, who actively construct the meanings that attach to specific forms of music.[26] But at the same time, it is equally important not to let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. Although some historians prefer to focus on the social history of music production—labor conditions, legal structures, economic arrangements and outcomes—I would argue that popular music history ought not to avoid analysis of the music. Even though specific meanings are not intrinsic to particular musical forms or elements, once such meanings have been forged, they are embedded in musical elements that listeners can hear. If we ignore those elements, we cannot hope to make sense of the process of identity formation through music.

In this book, I approach the transnational history of Argentine popular music by constructing career narratives for seven influential musicians. These career narratives are not quite biographies. I do not dwell on questions of personality or psychology, I generally avoid the musicians’ childhoods as well as their romantic and family lives, and I do not share the biographer’s pretense of completeness; since each of these musicians was prolific, my accounts are necessarily selective and partial. Yet like biographies, these chapters move chronologically, tracing the arc of each musician’s career. Unlike some musicological studies that analyze an entire oeuvre synchronically, this approach highlights the ways each musician’s work changed over time. But the approach historicizes the music in other ways as well. The focus on careers puts the musicians’ interactions with record companies and audiences front and center. In this sense, I heed Tucker’s suggestion about the importance of mediators: these chapters highlight the ways producers, managers, songwriters, record company executives, music critics, and others helped construct the meanings that attached to music. As a result of the extensive music globalization of the postwar period, the careers I examine had pronounced transnational aspects: all of these musicians traveled internationally, they all pursued foreign audiences, and they all drew on the transnational flows of popular music as they developed their own styles. My approach, then, treats the musicians themselves as key mediators between cosmopolitan musical forms and domestic audiences.

In the career narratives that follow, music emerges as a privileged site for studying the complex interplay between structure and agency in a globalized world: the ideological and economic structures that comprise the transnational field of popular music impose constraints on musicians’ creativity, yet by pursuing the opportunities that are available, musicians often transform those structures in unpredictable ways.[27] I approach this process with the understanding that the realms of art and commerce cannot be easily separated. The innovations of popular musicians are simultaneously aesthetic and commercial, involving decisions about rhythm, melody, instrumentation, and arrangement, but also about contracts, marketing, and image. And even aesthetic choices are never purely aesthetic; in commercial popular music as in other arenas, tastes are shaped by social and cultural contexts. Like anyone else trying to sell a product within a capitalist system, musicians need to respond to the market. I therefore conceive of popular musicians as opportunistic, in the sense that they actively respond to the opportunities that the music business makes available. Recognizing the strategic aspects of a musician’s practice does not in any way diminish his or her artistic achievement. In any case, my analyses are those of a historian, not a music critic; I aim to understand how music circulates, how its meanings are constructed, and how it makes possible new identities, not to pass judgment on its aesthetic value.

The first three chapters of this book explore the various ways in which peripatetic Argentine musicians engaged with jazz, whose associations with North American modernity enabled them to contribute to new versions of national identity, even as they sometimes reproduced existing racial and ethnic stereotypes. Chapter 1 focuses on Afro-Argentine swing guitarist Oscar Alemán, who leveraged his phenotypical blackness as well as his musical talent in order to build a career that took him from Brazil to Buenos Aires to Paris and back to the Argentine capital. Alemán’s commercial success in Argentina during the 1940s and 1950s problematizes simplistic accounts of Argentine racism, yet his association with a specific version of black jazz eventually limited his appeal. In chapter 2, I compare the trajectories of Lalo Schifrin and Gato Barbieri, two jazz musicians who left Argentina for Europe before settling permanently in the United States. Arriving abroad in the 1950s and early 1960s respectively, both musicians were labeled “Latin,” an ethnic category and a musical descriptor that meant nothing to them before they left home. Schifrin and Barbieri responded to this challenge in different ways, but both achieved commercial and artistic successes, even as they embodied and reinforced many North American ideas about Latin identity. Chapter 3 traces the career of Astor Piazzolla, the legendary composer, musician, and bandleader whose travels in Paris and New York led to his invention of the New Tango in the early 1960s. For Piazzolla, North American cool jazz served as a model for transforming an old-fashioned dance music into a sophisticated and up-to-date genre that expressed a cosmopolitan nationalism perfectly suited to Argentina’s anti-Peronist middle class. Although the New Tango garnered limited interest in the United States during the 1960s, two decades later, it proved attractive to the emerging audience for “world music.”

The final three chapters chart the transformation of Argentine popular music in the context of the dramatic and sustained expansion of the global record business that began in the late 1950s. New marketing strategies pursued by the multinational recording companies created new opportunities for Argentine musicians to collaborate with and borrow from their counterparts in other Latin American countries as well as to capture audiences from throughout the region. In chapter 4, I examine the trajectory of Sandro, who began his professional career as a rock and roll singer before helping invent a new genre known as balada. Sandro’s music, built from an eclectic, transnational mix of musical sources, became an aesthetic preference that marked consumers from throughout the Americas as Latin. Mercedes Sosa, the subject of chapter 5, achieved something similar by way of a politicized style of folk music that disseminated a revolutionary Latin Americanism. In the early 1960s, Sosa appealed to a small audience of connoisseurs who appreciated her highbrow poetry and sophisticated music. She became a domestic and international star by reinventing herself as the embodiment of an abstract, essentialist indigeneity. This persona, crafted in dialogue with European and North American images and ideas, enabled Sosa to combine Piazzolla’s cosmopolitan nationalism with Sandro’s mass, Latin American appeal. The final chapter explores the advent of the innovative genre of rock latino in the 1990s by examining the career of its most influential producer, Gustavo Santaolalla. In the 1970s, Santaolalla crafted a hybrid form of rock music by incorporating elements from Argentine folk music. After relocating to Los Angeles in 1978, he remained interested in combining rock with local musical styles, but his experience in the United States transformed his understanding of what that could mean, encouraging him to move beyond folkloric conceptions of identity. Santaolalla served as a key mediator between the multinational record companies’ quest for a Latin product and Latin American fans’ desire for an authentic rock music of their own.

The career narrative approach has necessitated difficult choices, since I could not hope to include every major figure in Argentine popular music. Experts will no doubt quibble with my selections. Some artists who make brief appearances here—Carlos Gardel, Atahualpa Yupanqui, Charly García, María Elena Walsh, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Fito Páez—and many who are absent—Enrique Villegas, Valeria Lynch, Andrés Calamaro, Gustavo Cerati—might easily have merited their own chapters. Nevertheless, each of the musicians I have chosen had an extensive international career, and each attained an important level of influence either in Argentina or abroad. Most important, as I will argue, the seven musicians in this book all emerged as key mediators between Argentina and global, musical culture. My effort to cover the most popular genres—tango, jazz, balada, folk, and rock—means that my selection reproduces certain imbalances in Argentine musical culture: regional musics such as chamamé and cuarteto are underrepresented here as are, more problematically, women. The male domination of genres like rock and jazz is an important topic for historical analysis, but it is beyond the scope of this book.

Obviously, music was not the only medium through which Argentines connected to global culture or the global economy, nor was music the only engine of identity formation in the postwar period. Nevertheless, as I hope this book will demonstrate, the journeys of Argentina’s musicians in transit had powerful effects. The globalization of music enabled Argentines to engage with transnational discourses of race and modernity. The music that resulted from these encounters contributed to the elaboration of new ideologies and identities that shaped Argentine history, including middle-class cosmopolitan nationalism and revolutionary third worldism. Over the course of the postwar period, musicians increasingly encouraged their fans to reimagine Argentina as a Latin American nation. The commonsensical mental geography that lay behind Fito Páez’s reference to Violeta Parra—the idea that Latin American music constitutes a meaningful category and that it belongs, in some sense, to all Latin Americans—was a product of musical journeys made possible by the globalized music business. That mental geography, in turn, had significant consequences. By the end of the twentieth century, popular music had enabled new versions of Argentine identity and even new social movements.

1

BLACK IN BUENOS AIRES

Oscar Alemán and the Transnational History of Swing

In 1973, the African American magazine Ebony sent its international editor, Era Bell Thompson, to Buenos Aires to do a feature on Argentina’s tiny black community. Although Afro-Argentines represented nearly one-third of the population of colonial Buenos Aires, they had since virtually disappeared from official records. Miscegenation, war, and disease contributed to this demographic decline, but as historian George Reid Andrews showed many years ago, the invisibility of Afro-Argentines was at least as much the product of racism and of the hegemonic idea of Argentina as a white nation.[1] For the Ebony article, “Argentina: Land of the Vanishing Blacks,” Thompson interviewed every self-identifying Afro-Argentine she could find. Among them was Oscar Marcelo Alemán, a jazz guitarist who had enjoyed substantial fame and commercial success in Paris in the 1930s and in Buenos Aires during the 1940s and 1950s. By the time Thompson met him, Alemán had recently been rediscovered by Argentine jazz aficionados after a decade in obscurity, during which he had supported himself by giving guitar lessons in his home. Although he told Thompson that he was the son of a Spanish father and an Indian mother, Alemán insisted on his blackness: “ ‘Some of my six brothers are even darker than I,’ he smiled, ‘we think there was a black man somewhere.’ ”[2]

Throughout his long career, audiences both at home and abroad perceived Alemán as a black man, a perception that was made possible by his dark complexion and his own avowal of a black identity, but also by his association with jazz music. Nevertheless, the precise meanings that attached to his blackness changed over the years. This chapter will trace the vicissitudes of his career while reconstructing the shifting discursive landscape within which that career developed. Alemán was a talented musician who played the music he loved, but as with any artist, both his musical creations and the popular reception of those creations were shaped by the world in which he lived. Alemán responded creatively to his audiences’ varied racial expectations, performing multiple black identities over the years. In the Parisian nightclubs of the 1930s, being black gave him a certain cachet. Similarly, once he returned to Buenos Aires in 1940, his racial identity strengthened his claim to being Argentina’s most authentic jazz musician. Yet as a black jazz musician, he challenged ideas about Argentine national identity in ways that ultimately limited his career horizons.

Alemán’s artistic production as well as his commercial successes and failures illuminate the transnational construction of blackness in the middle decades of the twentieth century and complicate our understanding of race in Argentina. Scholars have generally interpreted Argentine racism as a by-product of the desire to join the modern, civilized world.[3] Yet Alemán’s career demonstrates that other transnational forces were also at work. Under the influence of North American jazz and French “negrophilia,” Argentines were powerfully drawn to blackness as an emblem of modernity. Alemán’s reception in his own country was shaped by local appropriations and reworkings of these transnational discourses as well as by Argentine attitudes toward Brazil, where the guitarist had spent many of his formative years. Anthropologist Alejandro Frigerio has argued convincingly that Argentina’s self-image as a white nation is premised on the active denial of phenotypic evidence of African ancestry and the firm association of blackness with foreignness. In this way, Afro-Argentines are located in the nation’s past and rendered invisible in the present.[4] Yet at the same time, the ambiguous status of blackness in Argentina created space for Alemán to reinvent himself as an attractive exotic in his own country. By developing an exciting and entertaining musical style and by navigating these complex racial discourses, Alemán became a star for two decades in a country thought to be averse to any reminders of its own blackness.

Beginnings: Criollismo and Exoticism

Oscar Alemán was born in 1909 in the remote province of Chaco in northeastern Argentina. As a child, he performed alongside his father and siblings in the so-called Moreira Sextet, a music and dance troupe that specialized in the traditions known collectively as criollismo.[5] The dominant trend in Argentine popular culture during the first two decades of the twentieth century, criollismo involved the celebration of the nation’s rural traditions. During this period of massive immigration and rapid modernization, native Argentines looked back nostalgically to the culture of the legendary gauchos, brave and violent cowboy figures who roamed the vast pampas, or plains, outside Buenos Aires. At the same time, many foreign-born newcomers also embraced these cultural practices as a means to assimilate. Both groups were likely to read the pulp fiction that narrated the heroics of gaucho rebels, to join criollista clubs, and to attend the criollo circus, where gauchos performed equestrian feats. Although Alemán never explained why his father, the Uruguayan-born Jorge Alemán Moreira, used his maternal surname for the family group, it was likely a strategic choice. While “Alemán” sounded foreign, “Moreira” would have reminded audiences of the most popular literary gaucho of the period, Juan Moreira, whose exploits were first described by Eduardo Gutiérrez in a pulp serial published between 1878 and 1880 before becoming a staple of criollista literature and theater.[6] Alemán’s father chose the group’s name, its costumes, and its repertoire with an eye toward cashing in on the popular craze for gaucho traditionalism.

At the age of five or six, Oscar accompanied his family to Buenos Aires, where they performed at two well-known venues, the Teatro Nuevo in Luna Park and the Parque Japonés. Oscar specialized in dancing the malambo, a stiff-backed, stamping dance performed by gauchos in head-to-head competitions. A 1917 photograph shows him dressed in elaborate gaucho costume, dancing with his sister while his father sits behind them strumming a guitar. The photograph leaves little doubt that audiences would have seen the two children as Argentines of African descent. With his dark complexion and traditional costume, Oscar embodied a well-known criollo type: the black gaucho. Blacks were quite visible in the culture of criollismo, particularly as competitors in payadas, the improvisatory rhyming duels waged by gaucho guitarists. Criollista literature, such as José Hernández’s celebrated epic, Martín Fierro, had prominently featured black gauchos, and many of the most famous real-life payadores were Afro-Argentine. Despite the endemic racism of the period, blacks were recognized as authentic participants in the native, rural culture of Argentina.[7] Within the racial codes of criollismo, then, Alemán’s blackness served the Moreira Sextet’s effort to depict itself as an authentic gaucho troupe. For very pragmatic reasons, Oscar Alemán began his performing career with an unequivocally racialized persona.

FIGURE 1.1 • Oscar Alemán in 1917 dancing as a gaucho in the family troupe. Crisis (January 1975), 30.

From Buenos Aires, the Alemáns took their act to Brazil, where Jorge also hoped to make money in the cotton trade. Business did not go well, and when word came of the death of Oscar’s mother, who had stayed behind in Buenos Aires, the family fell apart. After his father’s suicide, the ten-year-old Oscar found himself alone in the port city of Santos in southern Brazil. While making a living opening car doors for tips, he taught himself how to play the cavaquinho, the small, four-string guitar used in Brazilian samba and choro. By 1924, Alemán was performing on cavaquinho at a Santos hotel when he was discovered by a Brazilian guitarist named Gastão Bueno Lobo. Lobo and Alemán formed a duo called Les Loups, a name created by translating Lobo’s last name into French. Although the duo’s repertoire was varied, Les Loups specialized in what was known as Hawaiian guitar. In other words, they offered popular songs from a range of different genres, in instrumental versions that featured a guitar played flat on the performer’s lap and fretted with a metal slide. Although Alemán later claimed that he and his partner traded roles, Lobo, who had apparently visited Hawaii years earlier, was the Hawaiian guitar specialist, while Alemán typically accompanied him on guitarra criolla—“native” or Spanish-style guitar. The duo performed on the radio and on stage in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere in Brazil before traveling to Buenos Aires in 1927 as part of a variety troupe led by the Argentine comedian Pablo Palitos.[8]

Over the course of a decade in Brazil, Oscar Alemán had become a professional guitarist, specializing in music that was quite different from the criollismo of his childhood. In the process, he shed one racial persona in favor of another. In Argentina, Les Loups were marketed as an exotic import. The duo was a big enough hit to receive a contract from Victor, the North American multinational record company whose Argentine branch specialized in recording local tango bands.[9] In Les Loups’ official photograph for Victor, Alemán and Lobo appear seated, dressed in white suits with neckties and fancy shoes. Alemán fingers a chord on his guitar, while Lobo holds his flat on his lap, Hawaiian-style. To signal the duo’s musical identity, each of the two musicians has a lei around his neck. The popular music magazine La Canción Moderna printed the photo under the headline “Bewitching Guitars [Guitarras brujas]” along with a notice describing Les Loups as a “notable duo of Hawaiian guitar soloists, marvelous interpreters of popular regional music.”[10] The magazine did not mention the musicians’ racial or national origins, and there was no hint that Alemán was a native son. On the contrary, the leis, combined with the group’s French name and Alemán’s dark skin (in the photo, he appears much darker than Lobo) suggested a vague exoticism. In 1917, Alemán’s blackness had reinforced the Moreira Sextet’s claims to Argentine authenticity within the criollista idiom. A decade later, he might still be read as black, but instead of dressing as a gaucho and dancing the malambo, he wore a lei and performed in a Hawaiian guitar duo. In this context, his phenotype now accentuated his exoticism.

The music of Les Loups was part of an international fad. Sparked by the hit Broadway musical Bird of Paradise (1911) as well as the appearance of Hawaiian musicians at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, a Hawaiian music craze swept the United States. Tin Pan Alley publishers produced hundreds of songs with Hawaiian themes, while companies like Edison, Columbia, and Victor rushed to record Hawaiian musicians playing ukuleles and lap steel guitar for the mainland market.[11] Although the Hawaiian music fad waned in the 1920s, some Hawaiian artists continued to record and perform throughout Europe and the United States, and the lap steel guitar was widely adopted by North American musicians specializing in blues and country music.[12]

Les Loups’ records represented the application of a recognizably exotic sound (slide guitar) and look (white suits, leis) to familiar musical genres. Between December 1927 and December 1928, Les Loups recorded nine two-sided records for Victor. The following year, the record company added the tango violinist Elvino Vardaro, named the group the Trio Victor, and cut six more sides. Taken together, these records feature ten tangos, ten waltzes, and four fox-trots.[13] All of the records are built around Lobo’s Hawaiian-style slide guitar or Vardaro’s violin, relegating Alemán to the role of accompanist. In the absence of any other instruments, the job of maintaining rhythmic propulsion falls to Alemán, and he responds with regular, somewhat stiffly strummed chords. At the end of each phrase, however, Alemán typically plays a single note run that intertwines with Lobo’s melody.

FIGURE 1.2 • Les Loups publicity photo. Alemán is on the left. Primera Plana (December 15, 1970), 8.

Alemán’s own accounts of his musical development during this period are vague, but close listening reveals several possible sources of influence. On the waltz “La criollita,” Alemán plays improvised bass lines that are reminiscent of the approach of the Brazilian string ensembles that specialized in choro music.[14] Another possible indication of Brazilian influence is the fact that unlike most North American jazz guitarists, Alemán played without a plectrum, or pick. As a result, he could maintain a simple bass line with his right thumb while using his other fingers to pick out single notes. But even if Alemán’s playing on these early records shows signs of Brazilian influence, his approach is also comparable to that of tango guitarists like the Afro-Argentine José Ricardo, Carlos Gardel’s longtime accompanist, or even that of the jazz guitar pioneer Eddie Lang, whom Alemán would later cite as an influence. These stylistic similarities reveal the broad overlap among choro, tango, and jazz, musical genres that are too often seen as discrete, unrelated traditions.

Thanks to the development of the radio and to the worldwide reach of multinational recording companies like Victor, the globalization of popular music was well under way in the 1920s. In this early period, genre boundaries were less tightly policed than they would be later. Argentine tango bands played fox-trots and “shimmies” in order to please audiences who wanted to dance to the latest North American rhythms, and visiting jazz bands often repaid the favor by playing tangos.[15] South American and North American genres constituted themselves in just this sort of give and take before audiences throughout the Atlantic World. This transnational cross-pollination is evident in Les Loups’ varied repertoire. In 1927, the Paul Whiteman jazz orchestra’s recording of “In a Little Spanish Town,” composed by pop songwriter, Mabel Wayne, spent fifteen weeks at number one on the North American Billboard chart and was number twenty-one in Brazil.[16] The following May, Les Loups recorded it as the b-side to a tango composed by Lobo. Thus a North American pop tune meant to evoke a quaint Spanish village gained a South American audience and was rerecorded by an Argentine/Brazilian duo featuring Hawaiian slide guitar. Although Lobo and Alemán were marketed as exotics, their music was not, in fact, pure, authentic, or traditional. On the contrary, they were professional musicians who tried to sell records by offering a distinctive, self-consciously hybridized version of the global pop music of the day.

Alemán became a professional musician at a moment when much, if not most, of the popular music that circulated transnationally was associated with blackness. Although many of the leading jazz musicians of the day, including Paul Whiteman and Eddie Lang, were white, the genre attracted attention in Paris, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere precisely because it was seen as an African American creation. Likewise, even though some white Brazilians were embarrassed by the mixed-race bands who made choro music popular abroad, blackness was a selling point in Europe.[17] Even tango, whose famous practitioners were almost all white, had well-known Afro-Argentine roots.[18] Alemán’s racial appearance, so useful as an indicator of his exoticism, made a certain sense in musical terms as well.

Black Guitarist: Jazz Stardom in Paris

In late 1928, Harry Flemming, a black tap dancer from the Danish Virgin Islands then on a South American tour, heard Les Loups in a Buenos Aires nightclub and asked the duo to join his show. Lobo and Alemán accepted the invitation, performing their Hawaiian guitar repertoire as part of Flemming’s Hello Jazz revue at Montevideo’s Teatro 18 de Julio in January 1929. The next month, Flemming and his troupe left for an extensive tour of Europe, and with them was Les Loups. Although the duo split up after two years, Alemán would remain in Europe for more than a decade. Based primarily in Paris, he worked regularly in the touring and recording band of the legendary African American performer Josephine Baker, played alongside dozens of other well-known North American and European jazz musicians, and honed his guitar technique. By the end of the 1930s, he was an accomplished player with a recognizable, hard-swinging style of improvisation. During his years in Europe, Alemán’s blackness was reconfigured once more. Arriving several years after the tumulte noir that overtook the continent in the 1920s, Alemán’s racial appearance conferred a certain legitimacy that his Argentine origins could not. No longer an indication of a rural Argentine “criollismo” nor of a vague, tropical exoticism, his blackness now resonated with cosmopolitan images of jazz modernity.

By the time Alemán arrived in Europe, black musicians were not the novelty they had once been. African American performers had danced the cakewalk in Paris as early as 1902, but World War I incited a new French fascination for blackness by bringing thousands of black soldiers to the continent. James Reese Europe’s Harlem Hellfighters regimental band achieved enormous popularity performing a mixture of classical music, minstrel tunes, and early jazz throughout France in 1918. Other African American groups soon followed, including Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra, eliciting an enthusiastic response on tours of Britain and France. The fascination of Picasso and other modernists with African sculpture and masks had prepared the Parisian avant-garde to embrace jazz as an expression of an essential blackness. Between 1918 and 1925, “negrophilia” was, in Bernard Gendron’s words, “the most widespread fashion movement in Parisian cultural life.”[19]

Unlike belly dancing and tango, two of the most popular Parisian fads of the 1910s, jazz eventually lost its association with exotic spectacle and thereby achieved a more enduring place in French popular culture. At first, jazz had been criticized as an alien import threatening French tradition. Particularly problematic was the widespread notion that only black (and therefore foreign) musicians could play the music well. But beginning in the late 1920s, several French musicians gained acceptance as jazz musicians. This trend culminated with the founding in 1932 of the musical appreciation society called the Hot Club de France and its sponsorship two years later of a new quintet led by gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt and featuring only French musicians. While jazz retained it associations with blackness, the idea of French jazz was no longer oxymoronic.[20]

At the same time, French audiences developed a more nuanced understanding of blackness itself. In particular, Josephine Baker, France’s most iconic black performer, engineered a rather dramatic transformation of her public image. Although Baker’s initial appeal lay in her performance of primitive, black sexuality, she was also figured as an emblem of modernity. This duality reflected the attitudes of French avant-gardists, for whom jazz represented both African primitivism and cutting-edge modernism. The famous images of Baker created by poster artist Paul Colin explicitly linked her erotic blackness to modern skyscrapers and Art Deco design. By 1930, Baker had abandoned the banana skirt and crafted a much more sophisticated, high-fashion image. Starring in advertisements for skin lotion, hair pomade, and cigarettes, Baker was figured as the epitome of the modern woman. In her movement from savagery to refinement, Baker seemed to enact the civilizing mission of France’s colonial project.[21] In any case, by 1931, when Oscar Alemán arrived in Paris to join her band, French audiences were accustomed to thinking of jazz music and of black musicians as both sophisticated and ultramodern.

While discussions of jazz in Europe often depict it as an instance of bilateral cultural exchange, the jazz milieu of the 1920s and 1930s is more accurately seen as a broader Atlantic World phenomenon.[22] Jazz traveled along circuits forged by the Argentine tango and the Brazilian maxixe, which had aroused North American and European enthusiasm during the 1910s. It was not a coincidence that one of the first magazines dedicated to promoting jazz in France was called Jazz-Tango.[23] Since the first Paul Whiteman records had become available in Buenos Aires in 1918, jazz had attracted South American fans and musicians. During the 1920s, Brazilian bands that specialized in choro and maxixe also played jazz, as did the leading Argentine tango bands. Moreover, Parisians in the grip of negrophilia did not limit their consumption of blackness to its North American variants. The legendary Brazilian band Oito Batutas, led by the samba pioneer Pixinguinha, enjoyed a six-month stay in Paris in 1922, earning enough acclaim to significantly improve its reputation back home.[24] Likewise, many of the African American jazz musicians who performed in Europe also toured Brazil and Argentina. Violinist and clarinetist Paul Wyer, a pool shark known as “the Pensacola Kid,” played in W. C. Handy’s Memphis Blues Band in the 1910s before touring England and France as a member of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra and several other jazz bands. In 1923, he traveled to Buenos Aires, performing in both the Argentine capital and in Rio de Janeiro. He would remain in Argentina for the rest of his life, leading several outfits including the Dixie Pals, whose long residency at the swank Alvear Palace Hotel made it one of the most prominent Argentine jazz bands of the 1930s.[25] And Wyer was not alone. The Philadelphia-born pianist Sam Wooding first toured Europe in 1925 as the leader of the pit band for a revue called The Chocolate Kiddies. Wooding’s band played throughout Argentina for six months in 1927, igniting the enthusiasm of Argentine jazz fans anxious to get their first look at an authentic band composed entirely of African Americans. Two years later, Josephine Baker herself brought her scandalous version of jazz performance to Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro.[26]

When he arrived in Europe as a member of a Hawaiian guitar duo, Oscar Alemán was already a part of this transnational jazz scene. The duo’s recordings of fox-trots, as well as its inclusion in a revue called Hello Jazz, suggest that jazz’s various associations—as modern, cosmopolitan, and black—also attached to Les Loups. After Alemán moved to Europe, these associations would deepen. Unlike in South America, European advertisements for Harry Flemming’s Hello Jazz foregrounded race, announcing that the troupe was composed of “whites and blacks.”[27] In the revue’s European sojourn, which included stops in France, Belgium, and Italy, as well as an extensive tour of Spain, jazz took on greater prominence. Flemming hired European and North American jazz musicians, including trumpeter Robert De Kers and trombonist Jules Testaert, both from Belgium, as well as saxophonist Ray Butler, and formed a jazz band called Flemming’s Bluebirds specializing in “real North American music.” In Spain, they shared a bill with Sam Wooding’s band, now back in Europe.[28] Alemán was still not playing jazz music—at least not in public—but he was closely connected to the world of jazz.

Alemán became a jazz musician in 1931 when he left Les Loups and joined Josephine Baker’s newly formed band, the 16 Baker Boys. Robert De Kers and Jules Testaert were members of the new band, and it was likely they who recommended the Argentine guitarist to Baker. But Alemán’s South American roots, and particularly his Brazilian background, were also helpful. Baker had established enduring ties with Brazilian musicians during her 1929 visit. In particular, she was a fan of Romeu Silva’s Jazz-Band Sul-Americano. Silva’s group emulated the classy and refined sound of Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, recording sambas, maxixes, tangos, and fox-trots for Odeon in the 1920s. Silva spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s touring Europe, performing alongside Baker at the Casino in 1931. When Baker returned to the studio for Columbia Records in 1931 and 1932, she enlarged her backing group with several Brazilian members of the Jazz-Band Sul-Americano: Romeu Silva on tenor sax, Luis Lopes da Silva on bass sax, and the drummer Bibi Miranda. The guitarist on these recording sessions was Oscar Alemán.[29] Led by an African American singer and composed of a mixture of Europeans and South Americans, Baker’s recording band was a microcosm of the transatlantic jazz world; as a capable player who had lived for years in Brazil and therefore spoke Portuguese, Alemán fit right in.

Alemán’s ascent within the Parisian music scene was rapid. He immediately became an integral part of Baker’s touring band. In addition to his jazz guitar work, he sang in Portuguese, French, and Spanish, played the pandeiro (a Brazilian tambourine) and the cavaquinho, danced rumba, and occasionally played Hawaiian guitar. Despite his inability to read music, Alemán even served for a while as the band’s musical director. On stage, he was often a comic presence; one photograph shows him imitating Baker herself, wearing skimpy briefs, spangled gloves, an elaborate headdress and women’s dancing shoes. When he was not touring with Baker, Alemán gained steady work as a studio musician, sideman, and bandleader, and by 1935 he was, along with Django Reinhardt, one of the two most prominent guitarists on the Parisian jazz scene.[30]

European audiences saw Alemán as a person of African descent. Charles Delaunay, the longtime leader of the Hot Club de France, described the Argentine guitarist in overtly racialized terms: “Oscar was a small bonhomme with copper-colored skin—a métisse, as we said—sharp and quick as a monkey, always ready for a joke.”[31] For his part, Alemán loudly objected to any hint of racism. On a tour of Rome, some audience members refused to let Alemán go on because they took him for an Ethiopian.[32] Once the Italian fans had been convinced of Alemán’s national origins, the guitarist honored the terms of his contract, but he refused to play any encores. An anecdote told by North American trumpeter Bill Coleman is even more revealing. Alemán had a regular gig for a while playing in Coleman’s band at a Parisian nightclub called the Villa d’Este. According to Coleman, the French heavyweight boxer Georges Carpentier, a regular visitor to the club, used to call Alemán “little monkey” in English. The guitarist did not speak English, but he eventually asked his bandmates what the word meant. The next time Carpentier came by the club, Alemán shouted out from the bandstand, “Hello Georges Carpentier, you big white monkey!”[33] That he felt free to respond so confrontationally illuminates both his personality and the racial context that shaped his life in France. Like the many African American jazz musicians who chose to live and work in Paris during the interwar years, Alemán was able to take advantage of the relative freedom afforded by French negrophilia.[34]

FIGURE 1.3 • Alemán performs with Josephine Baker. Sintonía 10:430 (November 25, 1942).

FIGURE 1.4 • Alemán imitating Baker. Crisis (January 1975), 31.

In fact, within European jazz circles, Alemán’s blackness could be helpful. According to one anecdote, Duke Ellington visited Josephine Baker in Paris and asked to meet Alemán, about whom he had heard great things. Impressed by the guitarist’s chops, he invited Alemán to tour the United States as a soloist with the Ellington band. Baker, however, refused to part with Alemán, explaining that it would be impossible to replace a guitarist who could also sing and dance and for whom she had had seven suits and pairs of shoes custom made. But her final argument was the most telling: any replacement for Alemán would have to be black.[35] Alemán was often the only black member of Baker’s band, and she valued him in part for helping her satisfy her audience’s desire for jazz authenticity, which it associated with blackness. Similarly, a poster for a 1939 Dutch jazz festival featuring Alemán billed him as “the extraordinary black guitarist,” while an announcement in a local magazine explained the relevance of race: “He will bring the authentic element, being the only black man at the Jazzwereldfeest.”[36] Interestingly, North American and British observers, for whom an Argentine jazz guitarist was much more of an anomaly than a black one, did not often remark on Alemán’s blackness. For example, the famous British critic Leonard Feather, a great admirer of Alemán, referred to him as an “Argentinian Indian.”[37] But in France and in much of the rest of Europe, the modernity and excitement of jazz was still deeply connected to its status as black music. In that context, Alemán’s dark skin conferred prestige. Of course, in France Alemán’s blackness also underscored his foreignness. Here, the contrast with Django Reinhardt is instructive. Despite entrenched anti-gypsy sentiment in France, skin color and linguistic affinity helped Reinhardt secure the sponsorship of the Hot Club de France, backing that Alemán never enjoyed. According to Reinhardt’s biographer, this sponsorship enabled him to record hundreds of sides and helps explain why the legendary gypsy guitarist has eclipsed his now obscure Argentine rival in jazz history.[38]

Like Reinhardt, Alemán developed a guitar style that was not steeped in African American blues, typically considered the wellspring of jazz. Neither guitarist played with the behind-the-beat, relaxed feel and blues tonalities of Eddie Lang, the Italian American who performed on countless jazz and blues records in the 1920s and early 1930s.[39] Yet Alemán was no Django copy. Unlike Reinhardt, who famously played a Selmer Maccaferri, Alemán preferred a metal-bodied, National tricone resonator guitar, which had a much heavier, almost electric tone (see figure 1.3). More interesting are the stylistic contrasts. As an accompanist, Alemán often combined chords with single-note ostinatos reminiscent of his playing in Les Loups, while Reinhardt preferred the percussive, up-and-down strum known as la pompe. Alemán’s solos tend to be more restrained and perhaps more thought out than those of Reinhardt, who was given to displays of reckless virtuosity and seemingly spontaneous improvisation. It is tempting to attribute these differences to genealogy: whereas Reinhardt applied gypsy melodies and styles to jazz, Alemán must have drawn on Brazilian and Argentine traditions.[40] Without ruling out those influences, I would argue that other factors were more decisive. Alemán was an entertainer before he was a jazz guitarist, and he developed his style over the course of a career dedicated to showmanship. The Josephine Baker show was long on crowd appeal and short on jazz virtuosity. Bill Coleman’s account of his Villa d’Este stand with Alemán makes it clear that customers came to the club not to sit and listen, but to dance.[41] Meanwhile, as a sideman on jazz recordings, Alemán had developed the ability to express a complete musical idea over the course of a short solo.

These influences are apparent in the handful of sides Alemán recorded in 1938 and 1939, his only sessions as a front man during his European phase. Inspired by the success Reinhardt had enjoyed with the jazz standard “Limehouse Blues,” Alemán recorded the tune with a sextet including the Brazilian drummer Bibi Miranda and the Danish violinist Svend Asmussen. Unlike the Reinhardt version, in which the guitarist solos with his usual joyful virtuosity, Alemán’s take on the song seems built for dancing. The track opens with a brief, heavily syncopated drum break from Miranda, signaling the group’s emphasis on rhythm. Alemán’s solo never ventures far from the melody; instead, he focuses on clever ornamentation and rhythmic play, offering short repeated phrases, quick runs, and sustained notes struck with heavy vibrato. The result is a deeply swinging feel and a fun, extremely danceable record. Given his appearance and given the racial expectations of his European audiences, Alemán probably sounded black, but this was a blackness that did not express itself via the serious melodrama of the blues. Instead, Alemán’s guitar style was forged in the light popular entertainment of the music revues.

Losing the Jazz Wars: Race and the Rise of Bebop in Buenos Aires

The Nazi invasion of Paris in June 1940 swiftly ended the city’s reputation for racial tolerance. Although jazz survived in occupied France, it did so by trumpeting its Frenchness and downplaying or even denying its African American origins.[42] Fearing imprisonment, Alemán, like many African American jazz musicians, decided to leave Paris and return home. In his hurried departure he left most of his possessions behind, and his two metal-bodied National guitars were confiscated at the border to be melted down and used for the German war effort. Still, he brought something far more valuable from his decade in Europe: a reputation as a jazz guitarist who had earned commercial success and critical acclaim in Paris. Welcoming him home as a national hero, one local jazz magazine declared him “the most famous Argentine musician in the world of jazz” and marveled that “an Argentine is, on his instrument, one of the greatest practitioners in the world.”[43] The jazz columnist for the music magazine Sintonía could not contain his astonishment: “It is difficult to believe that a phenomenon like that represented by Oscar Alemán could occur among us.”[44] Alemán quickly translated his reputation into paying work. By May 1941, he had formed a new quintet with Argentine jazz musicians and was performing at Gong, a porteño nightclub.[45] In October, his quintet played a major concert at the Teatro Casino and began appearing twice weekly on Radio Belgrano, the city’s most popular radio station.[46] The following month, Alemán signed a contract with Odeon Records and made the first of dozens of sides that he would record for the multinational company over the next two decades. Alemán remained a significant presence in the porteño entertainment world until the late 1950s: throughout this period, his groups enjoyed regular nightclub and radio gigs and toured Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay. But if Alemán was celebrated as an Argentine jazz musician, he was also seen as a black man, and for local critics, his blackness was closely articulated with a particular version of jazz, one that gradually fell out of favor as time passed. In this way, race imposed clear constraints on Alemán’s Argentine career.

Despite some significant overlap, the meanings that attached to jazz in Argentina were different from those that accompanied the music in France. Argentines were not immune to negrophilia: local critics had responded to Josephine Baker’s visit in 1929 with the same mixture of condescension and awe as their French counterparts.[47] But black musicians remained far less numerous and therefore far more exotic in Buenos Aires than in Paris. With a handful of exceptions, such as Paul Wyer and the saxophonist and clarinetist Booker Pittman, who was a major presence on the local scene in the late 1930s and early 1940s, most jazz musicians in Buenos Aires were white Argentines. Jazz was extremely popular both on the radio and on the dance floors, but it was always a distant second to tango, which reigned supreme throughout the 1940s. In 1941, jazz accounted for 18 percent of the music programs heard on porteño radio stations, a substantial portion but a far cry from the 52 percent dedicated to tango.[48] Given the well-known popularity of jazz in the United States and Europe, Argentines perceived the genre as the sonic expression of modernity itself. Yet no Argentine jazz band could ever express Argentine national identity in the way that Django Reinhardt’s Quintette du Hot Club de France could express Frenchness.

As a black Argentine jazz musician, Alemán challenged the categories through which Argentines understood jazz. Nevertheless, he could not single-handedly nationalize the music. In fact, his association with the genre occasionally put him at odds with Argentine nationalism. At one concert in 1943, Alemán was about to take the stage after a succession of tango bands, only to find that the master of ceremonies, the self-proclaimed “defender of tango” Julio Jorge Nelson, refused to announce him.[49] More seriously, Alemán sometimes had difficulty navigating the intense nationalism of the Perón regime (1946–55). Asked at the last minute to perform at an official event at which the president and first lady were to speak, Alemán, no fan of the government, recognized that he had little choice but to accept the invitation. But when he showed up with his quintet, he was told that President Perón did not want to hear any North American music. Alemán managed to avoid sanction by playing “Caminos Cruzados,” a song by the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona. It may not have been Argentine music, but at least it avoided the taint of imperialism.[50] For the most part, Alemán did not face official harassment, but as a jazz musician in Argentina, he played a foreign music.

Although Alemán’s association with jazz sometimes called his Argentine identity into question, his blackness was initially a boon to his jazz career, just as it had been in Paris. In fact, Alemán’s reception in Argentina was decisively shaped by the fact that local jazz fans and critics saw the music through the lens of race.[51] During the 1920s, the Argentine media used stereotypical images of blackness to mark jazz as exotic. Local jazz bands often painted caricatures of smiling black people on their bass drums, while fan magazines illustrated their jazz coverage with cartoons of thick-lipped, dark-skinned, and carefree musicians.[52] In the 1930s, the growing international prominence of African American musicians and bandleaders reshaped the way jazz was understood in Argentina. The immense talents and professional self-presentation of musicians like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, and Fletcher Henderson demanded a more complex response than simple exoticism. Yet even when they raved about the musical innovations of African American jazz musicians, Argentine critics and commentators rarely failed to mention their race. In one typical issue of Sintonía, the magazine’s jazz writers referred to “the black trumpeter and singer Luis [sic] Armstrong,” hailed Ellington as “the first figure of black jazz,” and noted that the latest recording by the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra had “all the characteristics of black ‘swings’ [sic].”[53] These writers considered black musicians as a category apart, treating “black jazz” and “white jazz” as two distinct genres.

From the moment he returned to Argentina, Alemán was inserted into this racialized discourse; his blackness was both obvious and obviously relevant. In 1941, Argentine jazz guitarist Jorge Curutchet published an overview of the major practitioners of the instrument for a local jazz magazine. As was typical in such articles, Curutchet divided the world’s jazz guitarists into black ones and white ones, insisting that the latter “cultivate a very different style.” Alemán, “an Argentine guitarist with phenomenal technique and good jazz ideas,” was the last guitarist Curutchet listed in the black category.[54] Five years later, Alemán provided the musical accompaniment for a recital of poetry by black authors from throughout the Americas. The racial essentialism that characterized press descriptions of the event make it clear that Alemán was chosen at least in part for his blackness: “How the throats of black people heat up with their songs of pain and hope! What a feeling of palm trees and cotton, sensuality and mysticism strangely married.… What anxious happiness, what rhythmic sadness.… That atmosphere erupted in the Empire Theater during the recital of black music and poetry offered by the actress Lisa Marchev—immense eyes, voice of the jungle—and the world famous artist of color Oscar Alemán.” Asked by the reporter about his rapport with Marchev, Alemán commented that blacks and Jews have historically faced similar mistreatment. “Meanwhile,” he went on, “black people sing.… I am not a politician. I am black. And all of the black people of the world can be in my beat [pueden estar en mi tam-tam] and in the … mouth of Lisa Marchev.”[55] Reports like these highlighted Alemán’s blackness as well as the spirituality, intensity of emotion, and rhythmic expertise that were stereotypically associated with it.

Alongside his commercial and critical success in Europe, Alemán’s blackness gave him instant jazz credibility. At the same time, the inverse was also true: it was his association with jazz that made his blackness so visible. This becomes apparent if we compare Alemán’s reception in Argentina with that of another prominent musician of ostensibly African descent, the tango pianist and bandleader Horacio Salgán.[56] Beginning in the mid-1940s, Salgán’s tango band was a fixture on porteño dance floors and on the radio. In 1952, when his band replaced Alemán’s as the main attraction on Radio Belgrano’s “Brilliant Rhythms” program, the two musicians appeared together in a photograph published in Antena magazine. The accompanying note referred to Salgán as “an authentic value of our popular music,” but did not mention his race.[57] This silence was typical of coverage of Salgán in the popular press of the 1940s and 1950s: unlike Alemán, the pianist was never described as black. The two musicians were friends, and it does appear that Alemán saw Salgán as black. In an interview conducted in 1975, Alemán’s praise for the pianist included a subtle allusion to race: “He has that rhythm that is born inside one.”[58] But for most Argentines, Salgán’s blackness was rendered invisible by his association with tango.

FIGURE 1.5 • Alemán (left) with Horacio Salgán. Antena (December 2, 1952).

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Afro-Argentines had figured prominently among tango musicians and composers. Yet by the 1920s, when the birth of the recording and radio industries transformed tango from dance music to a genre of songs, lyrics rarely mentioned black characters, and the term negro was applied as a nickname to many tango performers who lacked any identifiable African ancestry. In this context, blackness alluded not to race but to class, signifying a populist affiliation with the poor Argentine communities from which the tango was said to have emerged. During the 1940s, a popular revival of the older genres milonga and candombe reminded audiences of tango’s origins in the music and dance of Afro-Argentines, while firmly locating tango’s racial blackness in the distant past.[59] The modern tango was the quintessential musical representation of Argentine national identity and as such it was white music. Within Argentine popular music, therefore, the visibility of blackness varied with the nationality ascribed to the genre. African ancestry was visible in an Argentine musician who played jazz, a foreign music, but not in one who played tango. Notwithstanding their phenotypic similarity, jazz blackened Alemán, while tango whitened Salgán.

During Alemán’s period of commercial success in Argentina, the pages of local jazz magazines were filled with debates over the alleged racial essence of the music. In an essay published in an Argentine jazz magazine, the Chilean musician and critic Pablo Garrido insisted that jazz arose from “the anguish and tribulation of an oppressed race. Jazz is, then, exclusively black-American (negro-americano), and for that reason its authentic interpreters are black-American musicians.”[60] Similarly, Uruguayan critic Francisco Mañosa argued that jazz was “an essentially black music” and that white jazz musicians could only be imitators; to the extent that they improved on the work of their black colleagues, they were no longer playing jazz.[61] On the other hand, just three years later, the same magazine published a column that ridiculed a radio commentator for insisting on the blackness of jazz, noting that whoever hired the Argentine jazz band that played on the same show must not have seen the musicians’ faces.[62]

By the 1950s, this debate over race intersected with another series of arguments provoked by the rise of new subgenres of jazz. In a development that replayed events in Europe and the United States, the Argentine jazz community split between traditionalists and modernizers. Inspired by its French namesake, the Hot Club de Buenos Aires was founded in 1948 to promote local bands who specialized in the old “hot” jazz style associated with New Orleans and, especially, with Louis Armstrong. Just two years later, fans, critics, and musicians who embraced bebop and other styles of so-called modern jazz founded the Bop Club Argentino.[63] Rejecting traditionalism and nostalgia, this group celebrated the vanguardism implicit in new forms of jazz that were as sophisticated and challenging as any modern art. Since modern jazz required an educated audience, the Bop Club organized a series of lectures aimed at “elevating the listener’s degree of comprehension.”[64] As one of the group’s members put it, “Jazz is not the result of a strong dose of enthusiasm, but rather it requires preparation and extremely intense study, as well as a very profound knowledge of music.”[65]

The dispute between traditionalists and modernizers was not fundamentally about race, yet it was fought on discursive terrain that was marked by race. The leaders of the bebop revolution—musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie—were African American, as were many of their most important successors, including Miles Davis and John Coltrane. But while the Bop Club’s members praised these artists, they also celebrated the innovations of white musicians like Stan Kenton, Stan Getz, and Lennie Tristano. The embrace of jazz modernism weakened the hold of racial essentialism; it opened a path to jazz authenticity that did not require blackness. In an essay called “Jazz and Modern Art,” the young pianist Lalo Schifrin, perhaps the leading Argentine musician in the modern camp, compared the best modern jazz to the works of avant-garde composers like Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky. This argument had racial implications: “It is said that only blacks can play jazz.… These are no more than absurd and snobbish arguments and cannot be considered serious artistic theories. Jazz is no longer a mythological legend.”[66] Similarly, Luis Borraro of the Bop Club Argentino argued that like all great art forms, jazz needed to evolve with the times. “You may speak to me about the feeling of the oppressed race. [But] while jazz began as exclusively black, it has universalized. Jazz can be played not just by a black person, but also by a Pole or a Lapp, and authentically.”[67] In these formulations, the argument against traditionalism coincided with the argument against racial essentialism. As a black guitarist who specialized in swing, Oscar Alemán was on the losing side of both debates.

Between 1941 and 1957, Alemán recorded more than a hundred sides for Odeon, first as the leader of a sextet and after 1951, at the helm of a nine-piece “orchestra.”[68] These recordings reveal a guitar style rooted in swing and marked by an easy virtuosity. Having lost his National guitars, Alemán now played a Selmer Maccaferri, the same guitar as Django Reinhardt, but his playing still sounded quite different. His tone was thicker, and his improvisations still hewed closer to the melody. He now developed a theatrical tendency to punctuate his riffs with a ringing harmonic, a high-pitched double stop, or a sustained note struck with heavy vibrato. Above all, Alemán’s records betray a musical personality characterized by humor and showmanship. His rendition of the standard “Sweet Georgia Brown,” recorded in 1941 in his very first session for Odeon, is less inventive and adventurous than the version Reinhardt recorded for Decca three years earlier, but it is a crowd pleaser. Alemán first offers a largely straightforward reading of the melody and then develops playful, heavily syncopated variations, before finishing with a couple of rapid-fire riffs and an explicit allusion to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” His English-inspired vocalizations throughout the piece—“yeah!”—add to the mood of levity. Alemán’s showmanship was even more evident on stage. In a scene from the 1949 film El ídolo del tango (dir. Héctor Canziani), Alemán performs his song “Improvisaciones sobre boogie woogie” at a fancy porteño nightclub. He does a comic, rubbery-legged dance while playing the guitar, puts the instrument down to do some enthusiastic scat singing, and then jumps off the stage to dance with one of the female patrons.

In his initial recording sessions for Odeon, Alemán’s repertoire was comprised exclusively of instrumental jazz tunes—either North American standards or his own originals. But this changed in 1943 when his band cut a lighthearted, uptempo, swing version of “Bésame Mucho,” a bolero first recorded two years earlier by the Mexican singer Emilio Tuero. On the flip side, the band recorded “Nega do cabelo duro” (Nappy-haired Black Woman), a batucada that had been a hit in Brazil during the carnival season of 1942. These two sides marked Alemán’s debut as a singer: he sings the bolero in Spanish and the batucada in Portuguese. They also established a pattern. Over the next fifteen years, Latin American pop songs, especially from Brazilian genres like samba, choro, and baião, featured prominently in Alemán’s discography, often paired with jazz numbers. In contrast to his take on “Bésame Mucho,” which he played as if it were a swing tune, Alemán did not generally “jazz up” his Brazilian material. The rhythm section plays the appropriate Brazilian beat, and while Alemán’s jazz phrasings are still evident in his guitar playing, he generally avoids taking improvised solos, focusing instead on playing the melody with minor embellishments. In 1951, Alemán recorded a version of Waldir Azevedo’s current choro hit “Delicado,” labeled the biggest record of the year by one Argentine magazine.[69] Already covered by some seven Argentine acts by the time Alemán recorded it, the original was a catchy, instrumental baião that Azevedo played on a cavaquinho. Alemán played it on the guitar against a more prominent bass drum pulse and ornamented the melody with flashy riffs, including a series of lightning-fast triplets. The result was not recognizable as a jazz record. Alemán’s recordings of Brazilian pop music were the work of a jazz musician open to another musical tradition, but they were also commercial products, with which Odeon clearly hoped to tap into a bigger market than the one composed of jazz aficionados.

Alemán’s commercialism raised the hackles of Argentine music journalists. For Sintonía’s jazz critic, he was “a black guy [un morocho] who can do whatever he wants with the strings, who feels the rhythm and what it transmits, but … [h]e has two personalities: one legitimate and one commercial.”[70] Such critics were particularly offended by Alemán’s comic scat singing—his “grititos”—which seemed to militate against musical seriousness.[71] And as the proponents of modern jazz gained prominence within Argentine jazz circles, negative reviews became more common. For these writers, Alemán’s records were hackneyed, commercial fare, good for dancing to and appealing to his uninformed fans, but lacking substance. The tone of these reviews was dismissive: “A series of riffs in Oscar’s more-or-less habitual arrangement … it certainly won’t add much to his harvest but it will no doubt please his followers and those who love to dance.”[72] “Why won’t he try to rise to the challenge of renovation and of doing something really serious that will elevate him among those who ‘know’ what jazz is?”[73] Critics particularly lambasted Alemán for his Brazilian and other nonjazz material. Jazz Magazine’s reviewer ostentatiously declined to comment on records like “Delicado” and often gave Alemán’s fox-trots the backhanded compliment, “at least it’s in 4/4 time.”[74] One typical review dismissed the latest Alemán release as “strictly dance music” and pleaded with him to return to jazz: “Now that Django has hopped the fence to bebop, [Alemán] is one of the few who remain to defend a school that seems destined to disappear.”[75] Even if modern jazz aficionados could accept Alemán’s old-fashioned style, they could not forgive his betrayal of jazz itself.

The antipathy of the hardcore jazz audience was not racially motivated. These writers rejected Alemán’s commercialism, his fondness for comic singing and dancing, and his enthusiasm for nonjazz material, not his blackness. Nevertheless, the rise of bebop and other modern genres had disrupted the racial essentialism implicit in the idea of jazz as the expression of African American experience. In so doing, it altered the landscape in which Alemán’s blackness had functioned as a badge of authenticity. For the jazz avant-garde, sophistication, technical mastery, and artistic seriousness were the hallmarks of the authentic musician; being black was no longer sufficient to guarantee Alemán’s jazz credibility. Had Alemán been North American and had his musical style been clearly derived from the blues tradition, it might not have mattered. But Alemán’s blackness was associated not with oppressive cotton plantations or seedy New York bars, but with fancy Paris nightclubs and, secondarily, with Brazil. By the early 1950s, Alemán had been marginalized by the jazz critics of Buenos Aires.

This critical disdain had little effect on Alemán’s ability to earn a living. Until 1957, he continued to record prolifically for Odeon, to appear on the radio, and to perform in Buenos Aires and abroad. Only at the end of the decade did these gigs begin to dry up. Alemán’s career could withstand bad reviews in specialized jazz magazines but not the dramatic change in the musical tastes of the mass audience. By the late 1950s, both big-band jazz and tango had lost their position of dominance on porteño radio waves and dance floors, replaced by new imports from the United States, including singers like Frank Sinatra and, most importantly, rock and roll. This transformation represented a major blow to all Argentine musicians associated with styles that now seemed antiquated.[76] Yet some fared better than others. In particular, some tango stars who could no longer afford to maintain their large orchestras reemerged in small-group contexts. Horacio Salgán, for example, dissolved his tango band in 1957. Later that year, he formed a duo with guitarist Ubaldo de Lío. By 1960, he was performing and recording alongside other tango legends in the Quinteto Real.[77] In this way, Salgán was able to survive the end of the dance-band era. Like jazz in the United States, which had evolved from big-band dance music to the more cerebral, small-group style of bebop, tango was now music for listening rather than dancing. The new, more sophisticated version of the genre was epitomized by the so-called New Tango invented by Astor Piazzolla in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But even if Salgán never achieved the stature of Piazzolla nor even recovered his own earlier prominence, he was able to thrive on a more modest scale. Alemán, by contrast, disappeared into obscurity.

The contrasting career trajectories of Salgán and Alemán reflected primarily the very different status of tango and jazz in Argentina. Whereas tango was the music par excellence of Buenos Aires, jazz was a foreign import. No matter how old-fashioned it seemed, tango would always appeal to nationalist nostalgia. By contrast, once swing jazz came to seem outdated, it was simply jettisoned in favor of the next new import. But race mattered here as well. As we have seen, Salgán’s blackness was invisible in the 1940s and 1950s. As a result, he avoided any association with the primitive, African roots of tango and could be seen as a member of the avant-garde. As early as 1956, the mainstream press linked Salgán to Piazzolla, describing both as key players in a “New Guard” of innovative musicians who were modernizing tango by ignoring the dancers and injecting the music with quality and sophistication.[78] Alemán’s blackness, saturated as it was with associations of frivolity, corporality, comedy, and the Parisian nightlife, closed this path to him. Other Argentine jazz musicians were able to join the jazz vanguard; some, such as Lalo Schifrin and Gato Barbieri, even became international stars. Alemán’s roots in an older style as well as his particular way of being black prevented him from doing so.

After more than a decade away from the limelight, Alemán was rediscovered in the early 1970s. In 1971, EMI/Odeon reissued some of his 1940s and 1950s material on LP, and over the next three years, Redondel, a small Argentine label, released three albums of new recordings. Now in his sixties, Alemán returned to public performance and drew the attention of a new generation of music journalists. Press reports from this era focus even more attention on Alemán’s race than those of earlier decades. At the beginning of his rediscovery, one article introduced him as follows: “Oscar Marcelo Alemán, 61, one of the greatest guitarists in the world, a black thing [cosa negra] possessed by all the spirits of rhythm and of music.”[79] The following year, a concert review highlighted his “black fingers” and his “black rhythm.”[80] In an extended interview published in 1975 in the left-wing magazine Crisis, Gerardo Sopeña asked Alemán if he thought a musician’s race influenced the music he played, “or in your case, does African descent determine a natural sense of rhythm?”[81] For Alemán, whose answer was a qualified “yes,” blackness once again seemed to open doors rather than close them. Alongside his instrumental virtuosity and his Parisian past, his blackness itself was now a factor that attracted the attention of journalists. By this time, debates over the racial essence of jazz had long since lost relevance, but the black roots of contemporary popular music, including North American jazz and rock as well as Brazilian and Caribbean genres, were well established. In this context, Alemán’s blackness was musically interesting. Blackness no longer anchored a claim of jazz authenticity—the idea of a white jazz musician was entirely unproblematic by the 1970s—but it still carried with it essentialist associations of rhythmic aptitude.

Alemán’s career played out within a set of overlapping circuits that structured transnational, mass cultural exchange in the mid-twentieth century. Jazz music was not simply disseminated outward from the United States; rather, it flowed in various directions among a number of key sites throughout the Atlantic World. Alemán’s connection to the music came by way of Brazil and the cosmopolitan jazz scene in Paris. His position within these circuits shaped his choice of repertoire and his musical style, but it also informed his racial identity: Alemán embodied a blackness that alluded to Parisian nightclubs and frivolous Brazilian tropicalism, rather than to the tropes of African American suffering and oppression. His commercial success in Buenos Aires, as well as the limits of that success, demonstrate that popular music represented a privileged space within which Argentines experimented with evolving, transnational racial discourses. The existence of a black Argentine jazz musician of Alemán’s caliber enabled local fans to engage with images of black modernism and authenticity. Yet his blackness, made visible by his association with jazz, prevented him from embodying Argentine national identity. As a result, his commercial fortunes were directly tied to the international status of blackness. When jazz lost its position as the quintessential musical expression of modernity, Alemán became yet another invisible Afro-Argentine. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, decolonization, black power, and soul music revived Argentine interest in blackness and, not coincidentally, Alemán’s career. Unfortunately, the positive associations that attached to blackness in the musical sphere did not reshape Argentine racial attitudes more generally. In a country that remained committed to a vision of itself as white, it was Alemán’s status as a well-known musician that protected him from discrimination. As he explained in the Ebony article, he was “accepted everywhere” in Argentina, but “with another black man … it might be different.”[82]

2

ARGENTINES INTO LATINS

The Jazz Histories of Lalo Schifrin and Gato Barbieri

The Argentine jazz writers who criticized Oscar Alemán for his commercialism and his enthusiasm for Brazilian music found their heroes in the sophisticated, young musicians of the Bop Club Argentino. Among the most celebrated members of the new group were the pianist Lalo Schifrin and the saxophonist Gato Barbieri. Both born in 1932, Schifrin and Barbieri were featured soloists in the Bop Club’s jam sessions and appeared together on record as early as 1953.[1] Like the other club members, they were purists who defended modern jazz from contamination with other musical genres.

Their purism would not last. Feeling constrained by the limited horizons of the porteño jazz scene, both musicians decided to leave Argentina, first for Europe and then for the United States. The careers and musical output of Schifrin and Barbieri were fundamentally transformed by their encounters with European and North American jazz musicians and audiences. In their travels they traversed a transnational cultural field, with consequences that they could not have foreseen. In particular, both musicians confronted a shifting category that had very little meaning to them before they left home; they were seen as Latin, a term that referred both to an ethnic identity and to certain types of music. Though it clearly imposed limitations, Latin was a label that also opened certain commercial and musical opportunities. Both Schifrin and Barbieri proved adept at making creative use of these opportunities, discarding their purism in favor of various forms of hybridity.

Latin American contributions to jazz have often been minimized by scholars who have been understandably concerned to win a place of respect for the artistic achievements of African Americans.[2] Recently, scholars have begun to question the American exceptionalism built into most accounts of jazz history. They have explored the transnational origins of the genre and charted the existence of a “Latin tinge” that has affected the music throughout the twentieth century.[3] For the most part, though, these efforts have stopped short of interrogating the concepts of Latin music and Latin jazz.[4] Social constructions that reflected the distribution of cultural and economic power in the mid-twentieth century, these terms have compartmentalized Latin American influences, relegating them to a sort of subplot in jazz history. Since Schifrin and Barbieri were neither Caribbean nor Brazilian, they did not quite fit existing models of Latin musical personae. As a result, their experiences lay bare the ideological dimensions of the overgeneralized ethnic category of Latin and the invented tradition of Latin jazz. More important, the concept of Latin jazz, and the specific associations that attached to it, exerted a profound influence on the actual music produced by these Argentine jazz musicians.

Between Schifrin’s arrival in New York in 1958 and Barbieri’s some seven years later, the jazz world underwent significant transformation. The dominant trends of the late 1950s were hard bop, cool jazz, and the modal experiments of Miles Davis; by the mid-1960s, free jazz had mounted its aesthetic and ideological challenges. At the same time, jazz musicians continued to engage with musical genres and elements from Latin America. Schifrin’s arrival coincided with the explosion of North American interest in Brazilian bossa nova, while Barbieri participated in the birth of jazz fusion, in which music understood as Latin played a central, if underappreciated role. Schifrin broke into the jazz mainstream by presenting himself as an authority on Latin rhythms, parlayed that status into a career as a film and television composer, and then successfully shed his Latin identity. By contrast, Barbieri embraced avant-garde free jazz and revolutionary third worldism before changing course in pursuit of a mainstream audience. Working within the constraints imposed by North American preconceptions and by the economic imperatives of the music business, both Schifrin and Barbieri achieved commercial success and impressive artistic innovations. While Schifrin injected Latin American musical elements into Hollywood soundtracks and thereby into global popular culture, Barbieri pushed the concept of Latin jazz in new directions through the incorporation of South American rhythms and instruments. Nevertheless, by identifying as Latin in order to seize the opportunities available to them, both musicians also reinforced many of the stereotypes that attached to the term.

The concept of Latin jazz that would shape the reception of Schifrin and Barbieri in the United States was forged over decades of musical exchange. As early as the 1910s, the Argentine tango and, to a lesser extent, the Brazilian maxixe acquired prominence on New York (and Parisian) dance floors and among the offerings of music publishers. Unsurprisingly, the dance instructors, composers, and musicians who introduced the new rhythms were more interested in commercial success than they were in producing faithful copies of South American originals. Moreover, these dances were marketed not as Brazilian or Argentine, but as fun exotics of generically Latin origins.[5] This pattern would persist, even as the dominant source of Latin American musical exports to the United States shifted from South America to Cuba. In 1930, Don Azpiazú’s hit recording of “The Peanut Vendor” ignited a popular fascination with Cuban rhythms and dance steps that would last for three decades. The Spanish-born, Cuban musician Xavier Cugat, who led the house band at New York’s Waldorf Astoria throughout the 1930s and 1940s and enjoyed a successful career on film and television, helped win an enduring place for Cuban-influenced dance music in the U.S. mainstream. Cugat avoided any attempt at authenticity, introducing exotic rhythmic elements within a familiar musical style reminiscent of the “sweet” big bands of the period. The fad for the Cuban son, or the rhumba as it was mislabeled in the United States, led to the composition of hundreds of pop tunes with English lyrics and Cuban, or Cuban-inspired, rhythms. Featured in Broadway musicals and Hollywood films, as well as on hit records, these songs delivered exoticism in accessible packages. And like tango and maxixe, Cuban-influenced pop tunes were packaged in a way that blurred geography. As Gustavo Pérez Firmat puts it, Latin America emerges in the lyrics of these songs “as a singular atmosphere into which national differences evaporate.”[6] For the most part, that atmosphere was characterized as tropical, languid, romantic, sexy, and fun. By the time Carmen Miranda made her Hollywood debut in 1940, this basic Latin stereotype was well established and capacious enough to include a Brazilian performer.

The popularity of Cuban rhythms inevitably affected jazz, given its status as popular dance music in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of the major swing bands included “The Peanut Vendor” and other Cuban and Cuban-inspired tunes in their repertoire, just as their predecessors had played tangos earlier in the century. However, the idea of a separate subgenre of Latin jazz only emerged in the mid-1940s. Although multiple origins could be identified, three are particularly important. First, the Cuban trumpeter, Mario Bauzá and his brother-in-law Frank “Machito” Grillo, two of a growing number of Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians in New York City, formed Machito and his Afro-Cubans in order to provide employment for black Caribbean musicians and to develop a Cuban-jazz hybrid that would foreground more authentic Cuban rhythms. Second, bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and Cuban conga drummer Chano Pozo collaborated between 1946 and 1948 to produce a hybrid form known as Cubop. Third, the California-based bandleader, Stan Kenton, inspired by the Machito band among others, began to incorporate Cuban drummers and rhythms as a key part of his effort to develop what he called “progressive jazz.”[7]

The imprimatur of jazz luminaries like Gillespie and Kenton gave this new music a prestige that separated it from Latin novelty tunes. Moreover, by foregrounding Cuba and, in the cases of Gillespie and Bauzá, by emphasizing the blackness of Cuban rhythm, these musicians broke to some extent from the tendency to dissolve Latin America’s national and ethnic heterogeneity into a vague Latin-ness. However, there were forces pushing in the other direction. The prominence of Puerto Rican musicians in New York made Latin a useful category, and Kenton’s Latin turn included the incorporation not only of Cuban-style drummers, but also of the Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida. More important, the concept of Latin jazz reified the differences between the two styles that it claimed to mix. Central to the development of Latin jazz was an international division of labor in which Latin America would serve as a source of exotic and exciting rhythm, while North American jazz would provide melody, harmony, and sophisticated orchestration.[8] As Kenton put it in 1947, “Rhythmically, the Cubans play the most exciting stuff.… And while we keep moving toward the Cubans rhythmically, they’re moving toward us melodically. We both have a lot to learn.”[9] This view of Latin jazz as a mixture of two previously unrelated forms entailed the erasure of a long transnational history in which ideas about rhythm, melody, and harmony were passed back and forth among musicians throughout the Americas and beyond.[10] And while the seriousness with which jazz musicians approached Cuban music was clearly a step above the hoary clichés of Latin pop tunes, stereotypes persisted. In particular, Latin music retained its connection to passion, as the title of Kenton’s 1956 album Cuban Fire suggested. In any case, by the late 1950s, Latin jazz was a well-established subgenre that involved mixing Cuban rhythms with jazz orchestration and improvisation. The existence of this subgenre would definitively shape the North American reception of Schifrin and Barbieri, Argentina’s most famous jazz exports.

Marketing Latin Expertise

Boris “Lalo” Schifrin was the son of the concertmaster of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic orchestra. As a boy, he received extensive training in classical music, but after discovering bebop at the age of sixteen, he turned his attention to jazz. Schifrin quickly gained prominence within the small community of modern jazz aficionados in Buenos Aires. Leading a trio of piano, bass, and drums, he was named best pianist in the Bop Club’s annual poll in 1951, at the age of only nineteen.[11] Schifrin emerged as the intellectual of the Bop Club musicians, writing opinion pieces for local jazz magazines in which he argued that Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Lennie Tristano, and others had transformed jazz into a quintessential modern art form, as sophisticated and as worthy of study as any other: “Sobriety, good taste, subtlety, equilibrium and formal harmony characterize a Lee Konitz solo as much as they do a Braque painting, a Bela Bartok quartet or a Fritz Lang film.”[12] By situating modern jazz among European avant-garde art forms, Schifrin sought to legitimize his musical choices as well as to remove jazz from the geographical and social context of its origins: one did not have to be black or even North American to play this music. As a convert to a foreign music, Schifrin policed the boundaries of the genre with particular vehemence. He opposed any effort to mix jazz with elements adopted from other genres, and he was especially dismissive of Latin jazz. In a review of one of Stan Kenton’s recordings, he denigrated the inclusion of Cuban percussion in a jazz band: “The bongos really have nothing to do with swing.”[13] Although he cited Dizzy Gillespie as his favorite trumpeter, he celebrated Gillespie’s contribution to the invention of bebop, not his Afro-Cuban jazz experiments.

In 1954, Schifrin received a scholarship to attend France’s prestigious Conservatoire de Paris. Over the next two years, he studied with avant-garde composer Olivier Messiaen during the day, while performing jazz with a host of European and North American musicians at night. In addition to frequent nightclub gigs, he represented Argentina in the Second International Jazz Salon at the Salle Pleyel.[14] Although there was little that was specifically Argentine about Schifrin’s musical background or interests, his national identity was clearly visible abroad. He played on a tango recording by Astor Piazzolla because, as he put it, “I was the only Argentine pianist in Paris.” Describing this experience later, Schifrin remarked that it had been “a pleasure to discover the tango,” thereby revealing that it wasn’t until he left Argentina that he derived any enjoyment from the national music of his homeland.[15]

More important for his future musical development, Schifrin began to develop an interest in Afro-Cuban music. At first, this interest was purely pragmatic. As a student, Schifrin needed a source of income, and one of his first paying jobs in France was a stint writing arrangements for what he later called a “Latin dance music band.” Mambo, the up-tempo dance made internationally famous by Cuban bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado, was extremely popular in Paris in the early 1950s, and a steady stream of Cuban musicians visited the French capital. No doubt, Schifrin had already been exposed to Cuban dance music in Buenos Aires, which was hardly immune to the mambo craze. In particular, two Cuban performers, Amelita Vargas and Blanquita Amaro, had relocated to the Argentine capital in the late 1940s, where they brought the mambo, cha-cha-cha, and other Cuban genres to prominence on stage, in the movies, and on the radio. But Schifrin does not seem to have paid any attention to Cuban music until he went to Paris. As he later put it, he “learned Cuban music through the Latin jazz door.”[16] Schifrin was drawn to the Cuban musicians he met in Paris because he knew that Dizzy Gillespie had worked with Chano Pozo and that Charlie Parker had played with the Machito band. Schifrin’s association with Cuban musicians, as well as his fluency in Spanish and French, opened doors for him; he now found steady work as an arranger on albums by French groups interested in incorporating Cuban rhythm sections.[17]

It was by way of another international music fad that Schifrin came to try his hand at performing Latin jazz. During this period, a number of Latin American musicians performed Andean folk music for enthusiastic Parisian audiences. The Argentine folk singer and guitarist Atahualpa Yupanqui had become an international star during a two-month stay in the French capital in 1949.[18] Some six years later, Paris would emerge as the center of a new boom in South American folk music when Ricardo Galeazzi, an Argentine jazz bassist who accompanied Schifrin at the Salle Pleyel and elsewhere, exchanged his bass for the charango, a small Andean lute. Galeazzi joined with another Argentine and two Venezuelans to found Los Incas, who would remain the leading exponents of Andean music in France over the next decade.[19] Although Schifrin did not follow his musical partner into folk, his interests were affected by the trend. In 1955, the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac performed in Paris. Famous for her impressive vocal range and for her self-presentation as an Inca princess, Sumac had made a series of recordings in Argentina in the 1940s before being signed by Capitol records in 1950 and paired with composer and producer Les Baxter, the exotica music pioneer. Although her first few albums had emphasized her Andean roots, in 1954 she tried to capitalize on the Cuban music boom by releasing the album Mambo. As a result, the band that accompanied Sumac in Paris included a New York–based, Puerto Rican conga drummer named Dave Rivera. After seeing Rivera play with Sumac, Schifrin invited him to join an ad hoc quartet, featuring piano, bass, drums, and congas. Together, they played a one-week stint at the jazz club Ringside.[20] Thus the international popularity of mambo, exotica, and Andean folk music overlapped in Paris, affording Schifrin the opportunity to experiment with incorporating Cuban rhythms into jazz.

Just three years earlier, Schifrin had rejected Stan Kenton’s experiments with Cuban percussion in the name of jazz purism. But relocating to Paris had transformed his relationship to his Latin American roots. It was not only that many musical genres from the Americas shared performance space in the French capital, but also that from this distant vantage point, geographical and ethnic distinctions blurred. In his Paris concerts, Yupanqui performed Caribbean songs alongside Argentine ones, but French reviewers heard only “Indian sounds, Indian silence, Indian sweat.”[21] Similarly, the introduction of Cuban conga drums did not undermine Yma Sumac’s Peruvian authenticity, nor did Ricardo Galeazzi’s Argentine origins and jazz background threaten his ability to represent indigenous Andean culture. In Buenos Aires, Schifrin was a jazz musician, with no ethnic or cultural connection to the music of the Andes or the Caribbean, but in Paris he was a Latin American. Just as blackness had opened Parisian doors for Oscar Alemán, Latin identity did much the same for Schifrin. No doubt the Cubop experiments of Gillespie and Parker legitimized the notion of Latin jazz for Schifrin, but it was the Parisian context that created the opportunity and the commercial incentive to experiment with hybrid musical forms.

Upon his return to Buenos Aires in 1956, Schifrin reverted to jazz purism. He organized a big band featuring sixteen of the best modern jazz musicians the city had to offer. The band quickly became a fixture on the radio and in clubs, performing music that ranged from swing standards like “Take the A Train” and “In the Mood” to more contemporary numbers like Horace Silver’s “Doodlin” and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Hey Pete.”[22] That same year, the Dizzy Gillespie band, on a South American tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department, performed a series of concerts in Buenos Aires. In a city unaccustomed to hosting jazz royalty, the Gillespie shows made a dramatic impression. At the invitation of tango bandleader Osvaldo Fresedo, the trumpeter made a late-night visit to one of the city’s clubs, where Fresedo had arranged for Schifrin’s big band to perform. Gillespie encouraged Schifrin to come to the United States, a step that the ambitious Argentine was in fact already considering.[23]

Although it took Schifrin two years to secure a green card, he finally moved to New York in 1958. Unlike in Paris, where he found quick acceptance as a jazz musician, Schifrin was initially unable to break into the local jazz scene. According to his own account, the main obstacle was the musicians union, which would only grant work permits to foreigners after a period of residence. Forced to support himself by playing Latin standards like “Bésame Mucho” in a Mexican restaurant, he considered returning home. His fortunes turned when he got a call from Xavier Cugat, who offered him a job as an arranger. It is not clear how Cugat had heard of Schifrin, but since the bandleader was hardly a stickler for authenticity, it is not surprising that he would be willing to hire an Argentine with no background or expertise in Cuban music. For his part, Schifrin took the job because “the money was incredible.” The commercial dance music he played in this context was a long way away from the modern jazz he had championed in Argentina, but it was an opportunity he could not afford to pass up. For the next year, he worked as the Cugat band’s arranger and pianist, performing on television and on tour throughout the United States.[24] Once again, leaving Argentina seemed to make Schifrin more Latin American. The same geographic blurring that he had encountered in Paris operated in New York, where despite having never set foot in Cuba nor specialized in Caribbean music, Schifrin was a natural fit in Cugat’s “Latin” band.

After about a year with Cugat, Schifrin crossed paths once more with Dizzy Gillespie and thereby moved much closer to fulfilling his musical ambitions. Gillespie asked him to compose some music for his group, and Schifrin responded in 1960 with a five-movement concerto called “Gillespiana.” Impressed, Gillespie invited Schifrin to fill the vacant piano chair in his quintet, a position he would hold for the next two years. “Gillespiana,” loosely modeled on the recent orchestral collaborations of Miles Davis and Gil Evans, was largely a tribute to the trumpeter’s past accomplishments.[25] Certain sections of the work allude directly to Gillespie’s 1940s experiments with Afro-Cuban rhythm, while the movements called “Panamericana” and “Africana” rely heavily on an expanded percussion section of congas, bongos, and timbales. The band recorded the piece with a full orchestra and performed it on a European tour in 1960 and at Carnegie Hall and the Monterrey Jazz Festival in 1961. Schifrin followed it up with “New Continent,” another orchestral piece infused with Latin American rhythms and percussion. While these works do not enjoy anything like the canonical status that the Davis/Evans pieces have today, they were critically acclaimed at the time. Reviewing the recorded version of “Gillespiana” in the British jazz magazine Melody Maker, Bob Dawbarn argued that Schifrin’s compositional gifts followed from his national identity: “Schifrin hails from Argentina, and much of his writing has a natural Latin feel.”[26] Similarly, Ralph Gleason argued that Schifrin’s aptitude for Latin rhythms made him an excellent partner for Gillespie: “[Gillespie] was the first to realize the potential in the use of the congo [sic] and bongo drums in jazz. Schifrin’s familiarity with these rhythms, which has already resulted in ‘Gillespiana’ … is one of the most promising aspects of their relationship.”[27] Despite Schifrin’s background in bebop and in classical music, jazz critics assumed that any Latin American composer would have a deep familiarity with musical genres they thought of as “Latin.” In Schifrin’s case, this assumption was no doubt reinforced by his brief but visible stint with Cugat. “Gillespiana” was conceived as a summing up of Gillespie’s innovative career, and the Cuban elements in this piece and in “New Continent” reflected the trumpeter’s influence on the young composer. Yet critics attributed these elements to Schifrin’s ethnic and cultural inheritance.

If Schifrin’s Argentineness translated into expertise in Cuban rhythms, it also gave him instant credibility as a performer of another Latin American musical genre, the Brazilian bossa nova. Although few remember his role today, Schifrin was actually a key figure in the introduction of this modern hybrid of samba and cool jazz aesthetics to North American audiences. Just as Schifrin was joining Gillespie’s quintet, bossa nova was becoming an international sensation thanks to the popularity of the film Black Orpheus (dir. Marcel Camus, 1959), which featured the new music on its soundtrack. Gillespie himself had a long-standing interest in Brazil, having jammed with samba musicians during his stopover in Rio on the 1956 State Department tour. He later returned to Brazil with Schifrin, who introduced him to bossa nova pioneers Antonio Carlos Jobim, Luiz Bonfá, João Gilberto, and others.[28] As early as 1961, the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet, with Schifrin on piano, began to feature many of the most popular bossa novas—“Desafinado,” “Chega de saudade,” “Manhe de carnaval”—in their live sets.[29] In 1962, Philips recorded one such performance as well as a bossa nova studio album by the quintet.[30] That same year, Schifrin released three albums under his own name. The first, Lalo = Brilliance, included a version of Jobim’s “Desafinado,” while the next two, Bossa Nova: New Brazilian Jazz and Piano, Strings and Bossa Nova were entirely given over to the new genre. He also played the piano on Quincy Jones’s Big Band Bossa Nova album and served as arranger on Luiz Bonfá’s new album for Verve. These recordings came very early in the bossa nova fad; Jazz Samba by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, the first bossa nova album to achieve broad commercial success in the United States, was released in April 1962, less than a month before Dizzy’s first effort. On November 17, the Gillespie Quintet played a set at New York’s Lincoln Center that included several bossa nova numbers.[31] Just four days later, Schifrin performed alongside Stan Getz and two dozen Brazilian musicians at the historic concert at Carnegie Hall that is often credited with launching the bossa nova craze in the United States. By the end of the year, bossa nova was, in one scholar’s words, “literally everywhere in popular culture,”[32] and within the North American jazz scene, Lalo Schifrin was at the forefront of the craze.

Schifrin’s bossa nova expertise was recognized and reinforced by the critics. When Leonard Feather dedicated one of his famous “blindfold tests” to the new genre, he picked Schifrin for his status “in the vanguard of the new samba movement.” Although Schifrin acknowledged that he was not Brazilian, he did claim to speak from authority, mentioning that he had been to Brazil many times and commenting that with the exception of Quincy Jones and Dizzy Gillespie, most North American musicians did not fully understand the subtle harmonies of composers like Jobim.[33] As an Argentine, Schifrin was well positioned to serve as a guide to the nuances of Latin music. In this sense, Schifrin’s role was different from that of Chano Pozo, Gillespie’s earlier Latin American musical partner. Whereas Pozo was as an authentic, black embodiment of Afro-Cuban culture, Schifrin was white and neither Cuban nor Brazilian.[34] In photographs, he typically appeared wearing a sweater and smoking a pipe, emulating the pose of a European intellectual. As Gene Lees put it, “He is a thoroughly cultivated young man of polished tastes, who may be found in intense conversations about Goethe or quoting the poetry of Paul Valéry in French.”[35] As bossa nova became a mainstream phenomenon, even inspiring a popular dance fad, some jazz critics denounced what they heard as commercial “hotel music.”[36] In this context, Schifrin’s endorsement was reassuring. His Argentineness made him a more European type of Latin, one who could support bossa nova’s claim to cosmopolitan sophistication.

In general, critics responded to Schifrin’s bossa nova performances the same way they had to his Cuban-flavored compositions for Gillespie. They praised his ability and associated it with his supposed Latin roots. According to one review of Schifrin’s New Brazilian Jazz album, “His piano playing epitomises the percussive Latin-American keyboard technique at its best.”[37] Or, as Lees put it in Down Beat, “He applies Latin American methods to jazz, in a highly personal way. Sometimes he can be heard repeating a left-handed chord in rhythmic unity with the running Latin chords (octaves with fifths, or sometimes fifths and sixths in between) while he is playing at surprising speed with his right. But the ideas are jazz ideas. As often as not, a solo will start with a single line and gradually develop into a powerful and exciting excursion into the Latin toward the end.”[38] In these appraisals, percussive playing, rhythmic intensity, speed, and excitement constitute Latin qualities, while implicitly melodic or harmonic “ideas” belong to jazz. Notwithstanding his insistence on the harmonic subtlety of Jobim, Schifrin generally agreed with the critics: “The important thing is that all over the world musicians are applying the harmonic ideas of Dizzy, Bird, and Monk to their own countries and cultures.”[39] Of course, he could hardly have had himself in mind when he made this comment, given that he had never sought to apply bebop harmonies to the tango or to any other recognizably Argentine musical form. But as an interpreter of Latin American musical genres, Schifrin accepted the basic division between jazz harmony and Latin rhythm.

FIGURE 2.1 • Lalo Schifrin. Gente (March 1, 1973), 28.

Schifrin’s version of bossa nova had more in common with that of North American jazz musicians like Getz and Byrd than it did with João Gilberto’s. Like his North American counterparts, Schifrin did without Gilberto’s trademark rhythm guitar pattern, moving the samba rhythm to the drums. This approach treated the bossa nova as just another new Latin rhythm to improvise over; it made bossa easily digestible for North American jazz musicians with no previous exposure to Brazilian music. Schifrin’s style is hardly surprising given his musical background. His connection to bossa nova pioneers like Jobim and Gilberto was not a shared cultural inheritance but a common fascination with jazz in general and cool jazz in particular. Just as Jobim and Gilberto claimed to have modeled their approach to samba on the relaxed style and tight arrangements of baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, Schifrin too had long been a fan of cool jazz. In 1951, he identified Miles Davis’s “Israel,” one of the recordings of the so-called Birth of the Cool sessions, as among the great works of modern jazz, featuring a “play of tonalities” every bit as sophisticated as Stravinsky or Hindemith.[40] For North American audiences, Schifrin’s national origins gave him a claim to an insider’s knowledge of all Latin American musical forms, but his aesthetic commitment to jazz meant that he tended to translate these forms into a familiar musical language.

Being Latin had opened doors for Schifrin in the United States, paving the way to a lucrative gig with Cugat and a prestigious one with Gillespie. He had emerged as a prominent interpreter and explicator of Latin rhythms for the North American audience, yet he moved rapidly to escape the limits of this role. His long-form compositions for Gillespie earned widespread critical acclaim, creating opportunities for Schifrin that were not defined by his newly forged Latin identity. Schifrin left the Gillespie Quintet in 1963 and embarked on a series of new and varied projects: an album of Asian exoticism with the vibraphonist Cal Tjader, a jazz mass composed for the flutist Paul Horn, a fugue written for Stan Kenton’s Neophonic Orchestra, and several “third stream” compositions that combined jazz with twelve-tone music and nontraditional instrumentation.[41]

While Schifrin was burnishing his reputation as an avant-garde composer, his career took a definitive turn: in November 1963 he was hired to compose the music for a film called Rhino! (dir. Ivan Tors, 1964). He moved to Hollywood and began a long and prolific career as a composer for film and television. Schifrin’s most famous television work is the theme song for Mission Impossible (1966), but he also composed the music for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1965), Planet of the Apes (1974), Starsky and Hutch (1975), and many other programs, as well as for dozens of films, including The Cincinnati Kid (dir. Norman Jewison, 1965) and four of the five films in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry series (1971, 1973, 1983, 1988).

Schifrin’s association with Latin music helped him enter the world of film and television soundtracks. As David Butler has demonstrated, jazz, and particularly the jazz style associated with Stan Kenton’s big band, was central to the film noir of the 1950s. Kenton’s sound, which the young Lalo Schifrin had criticized, featured dissonance, loud brass, and a generous dose of Cuban percussion. For Orson Welles’s 1958 film Touch of Evil, the composer Henry Mancini drew inspiration from Kenton’s recent Cuban Fire album. Despite the location of the film on the Mexican border, Mancini assembled a Cuban-tinged big band that included several musicians who had worked with Kenton. The resulting soundtrack, as well as the subsequent film work of Kenton arrangers Pete Rugolo and Shorty Rogers, helped cement an association between crime film and a jazz style infused with Cuban percussion if not authentic Cuban rhythms.[42] Given his experience with Cugat, Gillespie, and bossa nova, Schifrin was a logical choice for filmmakers seeking a composer who could work in this vaguely Latin idiom. In fact, it was one of his bossa nova albums that first sparked the interest of Arnold Maxim, the MGM board member who recommended him for Rhino![43]

Though Schifrin’s film and television music never sounds particularly Cuban or Brazilian, a “penchant for Latin percussion” became an identifiable element of his style.[44] Several of Schifrin’s soundtracks incorporate Cuban elements within musical compositions that are structurally quite distant from any recognizable Cuban form. Nowhere is this tactic more evident than in the “Mission Impossible” theme song. Not only are bongo drum rolls featured prominently throughout, but the song’s central theme contains a clear allusion to Cuban music. Although the unconventional 5/4 time signature recalls the jazz modernism of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five” (Desmond, 1959), Schifrin navigates the rhythm quite differently. The bass line is composed of two four-note phrases, of which the first two notes are dotted quarter notes. This simple syncopation makes each phrase sound as if it were the first measure of the clave, the rhythmic cell that is so central to Afro-Cuban dance music. Schifrin marks these notes with hits of the Cuban percussion instrument also known as the claves, thereby doubling the allusion: in both meter and timbre, the familiar bass line of “Mission Impossible” refers to Cuban music. Of course, by resolving the phrase within a five-beat measure, Schifrin short circuits the clave, producing something very different: an extremely original, off-kilter, yet propulsive theme.

In addition to percussion instruments and rhythmic allusions, many of Schifrin’s compositions for film and television contain other elements that seem drawn from Cuban music. For example, his theme song for the detective series Mannix (1967) is built on a repetitive, percussive piano figure reminiscent of the guajeos played by the pianists in son and salsa bands. Yet by using this piano style in a piece in 3/4 time, he achieves a unique effect. Having come to Cuban music as an outsider, Schifrin was able to push techniques like these in directions that likely never would have occurred to a Cuban musician. Cut free from their structural roles in Cuban music, these elements gave his music a Latin flavor that fit perfectly in the Hollywood crime film soundscape.

Nevertheless, Schifrin soon moved beyond this formula, achieving an impressive stylistic range. Recognizably Latin sounds grew less common in his work for television and film, and he became at least as well known for his use of electric jazz and funk in soundtracks like the one he composed for the crime thriller Bullitt (dir. Peter Yates, 1968). For the film Cool Hand Luke (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1967), Schifrin drew inspiration from Aaron Copland, composing a symphonic work that used banjos and harmonicas to evoke a backwoods, rural North American landscape. For the Bruce Lee vehicle, Enter the Dragon (dir. Robert Clouse, 1973), he combined a funk bass line and wah-wah guitar scratching with musical references to Asia.[45] Thanks to his ability to compose in such a wide variety of styles, Schifrin managed to shed the Latin label. Schifrin was one of a handful of jazz composers working in film, including most famously Quincy Jones and Henry Mancini, and his music was not seen as any more Latin American than theirs.[46] By the late 1960s, articles about Schifrin tended not to associate him with Latin music or ethnicity.

At the same time, Schifrin’s move to Hollywood had the effect of reducing his prominence in the jazz world. He continued to play, compose, and arrange jazz music, conducting a series of experiments in which he blended jazz with other genres. His 1976 jazz disco album, Black Widow, as well as his multiple efforts in the 1990s to mix jazz and symphonic music were the work of a restless musician who refused to limit himself stylistically. Nevertheless, despite or perhaps because of his commercial success, he was no longer on the cutting edge of jazz. As early as 1965, Schifrin expressed doubts about the latest trend in the genre, namely the free jazz movement: “The instinctive talent of people like Ornette Coleman is immense, but by relying on instinct they’re restricting themselves just as much as they were in the theme and variation form.”[47] By contrast, Schifrin’s old comrade from Buenos Aires, Gato Barbieri, would chart a very different path, embracing free jazz as a language through which to develop his own mode of expression. Moreover, the saxophonist’s trajectory differed in another way: unlike Schifrin, who moved away from the association with Latin-ness as soon as he could, Barbieri wholeheartedly and definitively embraced a Latin identity.

Embodying the Latin Other

Leandro “Gato” Barbieri was the son of a carpenter from the city of Rosario. He began his musical education on the requinto, a miniature clarinet, before moving on to the alto saxophone and finally the tenor, which would become his main instrument. When his brother Rubén, a trumpeter, got a job with a jazz band in Buenos Aires, the family moved to the capital. At the age of eighteen in 1950, Barbieri was hired by the Casablanca jazz band and began attending the weekly meetings of the Bop Club, where he met and played alongside Lalo Schifrin. By the time Schifrin returned from France in 1956, Barbieri was one of the most celebrated saxophonists in Buenos Aires. Although he attributed his own style to careful study of Charlie Parker records, critics often noted the influence of cool jazz.[48] In the 1956 Bop Club poll for favorite soloist, Barbieri came in second, just ahead of the recently returned Schifrin. That year, Barbieri joined Schifrin’s new big band. The pianist’s departure for the United States two years later left Barbieri feeling a bit confined by the limited jazz opportunities available in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, he remained in the city for four more years, playing an extremely busy schedule of gigs in the city’s jazz clubs. A visit in 1962 by Gene Lees, a critic for Down Beat, found Barbieri alternating sets at two clubs—the Mogador and Tucumán 676—performing almost without interruption from 8:00 PM to 4:00 AM. Although Barbieri professed only his debt to Parker, Lees, who was very impressed with the young Argentine, heard John Coltrane in his playing.[49]

At this point in his career, Barbieri shared Schifrin’s purism. In fact, his devotion to North American jazz styles could sometimes read as an aversion to innovation. Guillermo Gregorio, another budding Argentine jazz player, criticized Barbieri and other Bop Club musicians for slavishly imitating the latest trends: “If the wave was bebop, they played bebop. If the wave was cool, they played cool.”[50] In any case, mixing jazz with Latin American genres or rhythms was not at all on Barbieri’s agenda. At the Buenos Aires nightclub, Jamaica, Barbieri’s groups shared the stage with tango musicians Horacio Salgán and Ubaldo de Lío as well as a host of foreign luminaries. The nightclub Tucumán 676, where Lees heard Barbieri, was built as a performance space for Astor Piazzolla, who performed his New Tango there regularly, alternating with jazz bands including Barbieri’s. Yet despite this close exposure to what was probably the most exciting musical phenomenon in Argentina, Barbieri would not develop an interest in tango until he had spent nearly a decade outside the country. In Argentina, as he later told Leonard Feather, “I didn’t listen to or understand the tango.”[51] Likewise, by staying in Buenos Aires until 1962, Barbieri missed the bossa nova craze. In its early years, the new Brazilian music did not have the same impact in neighboring Argentina as it did in the United States. The singer Maysa Matarazzo did bring a bossa show to Buenos Aires in 1961, and João Gilberto performed in the city the following year, but the local press was more impressed with the simultaneous visit of the Modern Jazz Quintet.[52] More important, local jazz musicians like Barbieri were not drawn to the bossa nova the way U.S.-based performers like Stan Getz, Charlie Byrd, and Dizzy Gillespie were. As Oscar Alemán’s career indicates, Brazilian genres like choro, samba, and baião were quite popular in Argentina during the 1940s and 1950s, but the country’s jazz critics denigrated musicians who tried to mix jazz with Brazilian styles. Barbieri appears to have shared their attitude.

The Buenos Aires jazz scene of the early 1960s was limited in several ways. After the end of the swing era, jazz ceased to be dance music and thereby lost its commercial appeal. While New Tango drew the attention of Argentine intellectuals, the biggest-selling records of the day were those of the so-called Nueva Ola, or New Wave, young singers who offered a safe, local version of North American rock and roll. In comparison, modern jazz was a marginal genre with a devoted but small following. As a result, it was extremely difficult to make a living playing exclusively jazz. Horacio Malvicino, the country’s leading bebop guitarist, supported himself by recording commercial background music under a pseudonym.[53] For his part, Barbieri played in the backup band of Billy Cafaro, one of Argentina’s first successful rock and roll singers. Cafaro’s imitations of mainstream North American pop offered little to challenge an accomplished musician like Barbieri, but the gig must have helped him pay the bills.[54]

Barbieri also performed and recorded alongside jazz pianist, composer, and singer Sergio Mihanovich. Barbieri played with Mihanovich’s small groups in nightclubs like Jamaica, and he was also a member of the big band that Mihanovich assembled for the album B.A. Jazz in 1961. Composed largely of musicians who had previously played with Schifrin, the band recorded a mix of jazz standards and Mihanovich originals. The music, in the words of critic Diego Fischerman, was “elegant, with careful arrangements,” but while it may have been closer to Barbieri’s heart than Billy Cafaro’s rock and roll, it offered little room for experimentation.[55] The following year, Mihanovich’s big band, with Barbieri present once again, recorded a cool jazz soundtrack to Jóvenes viejos, a film by the young, avant-garde director Rodolfo Kuhn. Although Barbieri hardly stood out within the sophisticated arrangements, Jóvenes viejos is revealing for what it suggests about the place of jazz in Buenos Aires during the early 1960s. The film follows a group of bored, well-to-do young people with no sense of purpose in their lives. Not so much anti-Peronist as apolitical, they compare themselves unfavorably to “the kids in foreign films” who “live in the present.”[56] Music in the film underscores the protagonists’ failure to find meaning in their world. There is nothing identifiably Argentine on the soundtrack; instead the characters dance to Cuban drumming in a nightclub, and listen to a Brazilian carnival song through a radio at the beach. Mihanovich’s jazz soundtrack is omnipresent, both as diegetic and nondiegetic music. Cosmopolitan and contemporary, the music is well suited to accompany the adventures of young Argentines alienated from their own surroundings. But the music’s coolness also echoes the characters’ enervation and boredom. Jóvenes viejos suggests that jazz could sound hip in Buenos Aires but that it was often a distinctly vapid hipness.

In that context, it is hardly surprising that the restless Barbieri would decide to leave. Though he had little interest in bossa nova or tango, he was anxious to push his jazz in new directions. The fact that Gene Lees heard Coltrane in his saxophone playing suggests that the Argentine was following the latest developments in the jazz world. According to his wife, Michelle, Barbieri grew frustrated with the narrow traditionalism of Buenos Aires jazz musicians who resisted Coltrane and other jazz innovations.[57] Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come had launched the free jazz movement in 1959, causing a rift reminiscent of the bebop wars of the 1940s. Although it is not clear exactly when Barbieri was exposed to this radical new approach, he would soon get a chance to participate in it directly. Barbieri left Argentina in late 1962, stayed in Brazil for several months, and then, with the encouragement of Michelle, who was born in Italy, he moved to Rome. Barbieri’s European career took off slowly, but he did have the opportunity to hear and play with European and North American jazz musicians. In 1963, he met the trumpeter Don Cherry, who had played on Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking free jazz albums and who was now touring Europe with Sonny Rollins. Cherry would eventually play a similar role for Barbieri as Gillespie had for Schifrin. In 1965, the two musicians played together in Paris, and Cherry invited the Argentine to join his band. Barbieri played with Cherry for the next two years, touring Europe and accompanying him to New York in order to record two well-received free jazz albums: Complete Communion (1965) and Symphony for Improvisers (1966).

Like Gillespie, Cherry was extremely open to foreign musical styles and foreign musicians, but his approach was quite different. Whereas Gillespie sought to forge hybrids by incorporating Cuban or Brazilian rhythms into jazz, Cherry was attracted to what he heard as the universalist, genre-defying possibilities of free jazz. After his stint with Rollins, he had returned to the free jazz fold, playing with several of the leading practitioners of the new music, including Albert Ayler, John Tchicai, and Archie Shepp. Upon relocating to Europe, in 1964, Cherry seemed intent on broadening his musical horizons. He lived for two months in a Moroccan village, “listening to the music and sounds,” and later jammed with musicians as varied as the New Orleans clarinetist Albert Nicholas and the Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar. The band he built with Barbieri on tenor sax also featured German vibraphonist Karl Berger, French bassist Jean-Francois Jenny-Clark, and Italian drummer Aldo Romano, “a miniature musical United Nations,” in one critic’s words. For Cherry, the essence of jazz was improvisation, and he saw no reason to contain his own musical expression within preconceived boundaries. As he put it, “I want to absorb all the sounds I can and improvise around them.”[58]

In Complete Communion and Symphony for Improvisers, Cherry replaced the traditional song form with extended suites that occupy an entire side of an LP. Each suite contains several distinct, though related musical themes. Following the statement of the theme, passages of collective improvisation alternate with more clearly delineated solos. In both cases, Cherry, Barbieri, and the other musicians focused their improvisations not so much on scales or chord changes, but on the melodies of the musical themes themselves. This approach to free jazz, what Ekkehard Jost calls “thematic improvisation,” allowed Cherry to incorporate foreign musical material in a novel way.[59] Melodies, harmonies, and rhythms from musical genres outside of jazz could easily serve as the basis for improvisation. In a live set recorded in 1966 at the Café Montmartre in Copenhagen, the band plays the melody from Jobim’s bossa nova “A felicidade,” but they do not play the tune as a bossa. Instead, they use it as a “free jazz head,” a jumping-off point for improvisation that does not conform to any preconceived chord structure. The band moves from an embellished version of the melody to a quick quotation of Ornette Coleman’s “Focus on Sanity,” then launches into free improvisation, before ending with a restatement of the bossa nova. Improvisational freedom is not limited to Barbieri’s saxophone and Cherry’s pocket trumpet; drummer Aldo Romano begins with the basic bossa nova pulse, then transforms it, before eventually abandoning it altogether. Improvising against that Brazilian rhythm would have been the point for Gillespie. Cherry, by contrast, imported music from around the world in order to enrich his own personal expression. In later years, Cherry would further develop this vision of “world music,” incorporating Arabic, South African, and Indian material as the basis of his improvisatory musical explorations.[60]

For Barbieri, the association with Cherry meant instant credibility and an introduction to many of the most important figures in avant-garde jazz. In 1967, the New York–based ESP record label, the leading producer of free jazz, invited him to cut his first record as band leader. The album, called In Search of the Mystery, was recorded in one day with musicians Barbieri did not know. The music is a noisy version of free jazz, and Barbieri’s saxophone playing is, in general terms, reminiscent of the later work of John Coltrane. By 1964, Coltrane had largely abandoned the challenging, harmonic explorations for which he had been known in favor of a freer style of improvisation over modal vamps.[61] Barbieri, like such free jazz luminaries as Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, embraced Coltrane’s new approach. Freed of the harmonic constraints of bebop, Barbieri developed an intense, emotional style built on a distinctive, warm tone. At this point, there was nothing recognizably Latin in his music, and his ESP album was largely ignored. However, over the next few years, Barbieri performed and recorded alongside several of the most important musicians in the free jazz world. His tenor saxophone is featured on the composer Carla Bley’s two ambitious projects of the late 1960s: Genuine Tong Funeral and, alongside his former band mate Don Cherry, the jazz opera Escalator over the Hill. Barbieri’s inclusion in these projects reflected the free jazz credentials he had earned by playing with Cherry, rather than any cachet that attached to his ethnic or national identity. Karl Berger, the German vibraphonist who was also a member of Cherry’s European band and played on Symphony for Improvisers, earned the same opportunities as Barbieri: he recorded an album as leader for ESP, and he appeared on Escalator over the Hill. Still, one wonders whether the critical response to Barbieri’s saxophone playing was shaped by expectations of a “Latin” musical temperament. Reviewing a 1966 club date with Don Cherry, Down Beat’s critic described Barbieri as “a passionate and flamboyant musician.”[62]

Barbieri soon came to realize that his new, free-jazz style could have radical political implications and that those politics, in turn, could provide him with a way of distinguishing himself in the jazz world. He took a step in this direction in 1969 when he performed on the first Liberation Music Orchestra album, a work of “protest jazz” conceived by Charlie Haden, Ornette Coleman’s former bass player, and arranged by Bley. Dedicated, in Haden’s words, to “the end of all war, racism, poverty, and exploitation,” the album contained an homage to Che Guevara, a musical re-creation of the 1968 Democratic convention, as well as a medley of antifascist songs from the Spanish Civil War.[63] The Liberation Music Orchestra drew an explicit connection between revolutionary politics and the improvisational freedom of the “new thing” in jazz. In an intriguing moment at the end of the Spanish Civil War medley, Barbieri plays a soaring and occasionally shrieking solo over a piece of “found sound,” a recording of the original Spanish song from the 1930s.[64] In this way, Bley and Haden tether a moment of radically individualist self-expression to a specific historical moment and an overt political message. This particular way of politicizing free jazz aesthetics would serve as a model for Barbieri.

Of course, free jazz had already been politicized. In particular, the free jazz community had been deeply divided in the mid-1960s over issues of race. One sign of this division was the rapid demise of the Jazz Composers Guild, an organization founded by the trumpeter Bill Dixon in order to promote the new music. In addition to disagreements over scarce recording contracts and guild policy, the central conflict pitted Dixon’s inclusive, interracial vision against the black nationalism of LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and the nascent Black Arts movement.[65] For Jones, the work of African American free jazz musicians like Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp was an expression of black power. This vision could be alienating to the many white musicians who were part of the free jazz scene. Carla Bley, an original member of the Jazz Composers Guild, responded to the growing racial tensions in the movement: “I realized I had European roots, so why was I trying to find African roots? I’d been like a bastard—if you’re a bastard, you don’t inherit. I decided if they don’t want me, I don’t want them.”[66] Like Bley, Barbieri, who would certainly have considered himself a white person, began to question his own right to express himself through free jazz. If this was a music that represented African American experience and consciousness, what was his claim to it?

Barbieri would solve this crisis of confidence by embracing a new identity as a Latin American and a representative of the third world. As he explained in several interviews, his breakthrough came by way of a series of conversations he had with the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, one of the leading practitioners of the revolutionary brand of cinema known as Cinema Novo. As Barbieri put it,

I was in a bad way, in a time when I didn’t want to play any more. My friend, Glauber Rocha, whose films had impressed me so much, came to New York. He helped me find a way out.… [Black musicians] had accepted me right away because I came from an underdeveloped country, that is they did not consider me white. They thought I had problems similar to their own. But I could only understand that intellectually. And speaking with Glauber clarified things for me; he made me understand them. And this is what I understood: that I had to draw inspiration from the popular music of the Third World, that that was my source. The black musicians had realized it from the beginning, and it took me years to understand something so simple.[67]

Barbieri made it clear that by embracing the third world he was not just tapping a new source of musical inspiration; he was discovering his roots. As he told Nat Hentoff, he now realized that he could improve his jazz by infusing it with “all that I can also learn about my own background, my cultural background, in the Third World.” According to his wife Michelle, “Gato wanted very much to be a black jazz musician. But once he understood that he had strong cultural roots too and that he came from a part of the world where there is great oppression … then Gato was able to come into his own.”[68] Although at times Barbieri did refer to his specifically Argentine background—Michelle told the critic Robert Palmer that Gato was “not afraid any more of being Argentinian”[69]—he more often insisted on this broader identity as a representative of the third world.

As these accounts reveal, Barbieri’s new identity was the outcome of two mutually reinforcing, transnational dynamics. The first was produced by North American perceptions of Latin America. As the history of Latin music makes clear, the North American culture industries tended to lump all of Latin America together into one undifferentiated, exotic other. In the United States, Barbieri, like Schifrin before him, was Latin. Within the intensely politicized context of jazz in the late 1960s, this overgeneralizing could take on a distinct, left-wing valence. From this perspective, all Latin Americans occupied a subaltern social position parallel, in a general sense, to that of African Americans. This dynamic was reinforced by developments in Latin America, where the radicalization of youth following the Cuban Revolution had produced artistic movements premised on the adoption of a pan-Latin American identity. Glauber Rocha’s Cinema Novo was one example of this larger tendency. Ironically, the revolutionary, third-world identity promoted by anti-imperialist Latin Americans reinforced the ethnocentric North American tendency to collapse Latin American heterogeneity into a stereotyped “Latin-ness.”

These two dynamics intersected with Barbieri’s musical experience in the jazz world of the late 1960s. From Don Cherry, he had learned a method for incorporating foreign musical elements into thematic, free-jazz improvisations. Meanwhile, he had become a specialist in the free improvisational style typical of the later work of John Coltrane and of Coltrane disciples like Pharoah Sanders. Playing in Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, he had seen how this free jazz aesthetic could be harnessed to composed music that carried an overt, leftist political message. In 1969, Bob Thiele, the owner of Flying Dutchman Records, gave him the chance to put these lessons together in the service of a musical vision that expressed his new Latin identity. The album, appropriately titled The Third World, featured a lineup that included several major figures in the free jazz world—Charlie Haden, the trombonist Roswell Rudd, and Lonnie Liston Smith, the pianist in Pharoah Sanders’s band—playing a sampling of Argentine and Brazilian music. Although the album has its share of noisy, collective improvisations as well as the squeaks and squeals associated with the more strident versions of free jazz, it also has many straightforward and melodic passages. This musical formula, attached to a political message that fit the times, launched Barbieri’s successful career as a jazz bandleader.

For the most part, the music on The Third World is a free-jazz pastiche reminiscent of the music Barbieri made with Cherry and Haden. In Barbieri’s version of Sergio Ricardo’s bossa nova, “Zelao,” drummer Beaver Harris begins with a marchlike beat that clearly alludes to samba. Yet within a few minutes, the accompaniment offered by Harris, Haden, and Smith has come untethered from any recognizably Brazilian genre, leaving Barbieri to play the melody against a noisy background, while Rudd adds improvised ornamentation. Barbieri’s choice of “Zelao” was not incidental, since the song’s lyrics about an impoverished favela resident made it one of the very first socially conscious bossa novas. Musically, though, the band treats it as melodic and rhythmic raw material. A similar approach is evident on the album’s first track, which opens with a song by Anastasio Quiroga, a goatherd from the northwestern province of Jujuy discovered by Argentine folklorist Leda Valladares in the early 1960s.[70] Barbieri plays the simple melody—a llama herder’s call—on the flute and then sings it, before segueing into Astor Piazzolla’s tango, “Prepárense.” By fusing the urban and ultrasophisticated New Tango to a piece of naïve, rural folklore, Barbieri elaborates a homogenizing vision, in which all Latin American genres constitute folk music of the people. Similarly, the album’s last track fuses Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’s “Bachianas Brasileiras” to a song by the South African jazz pianist Dollar Brand.

Throughout The Third World, music from Latin America is treated as material for the band to use as the basis for its improvisations, or as folk music to be transformed into jazz. However, in at least one moment, Barbieri breaks from the album’s dominant aesthetic by deploying a style that North American audiences would have recognized as Latin. The moment occurs in the introduction to “Antonio das Mortes,” a piece Barbieri wrote in homage to Rocha’s film of the same name, which tells the story of a killer-turned-revolutionary outlaw. Given the centrality of Rocha in Barbieri’s account of his own transformation, the reference to the film can be taken as an indication of the saxophonist’s new political consciousness. The initial statement of the melody is set against a Cuban tumbao, or rhythmic pattern, played on conga drums by Richard Landrum. In this way, Barbieri uses the most prominent musical signifier of Latin identity in the North America context—Cuban percussion—in order to signal his embrace of a third-world identity. With Barbieri soloing over an identifiably Latin rhythm, this passage replicates the international division of labor that was so central to earlier versions of Latin jazz. The moment quickly passes, though, as the congas drop out and a much freer and noisier collective improvisation takes over. Nevertheless, the opening of “Antonio das Mortes” is a hint of the music that Barbieri would make in the future.

Over the next several years, Barbieri recorded five more albums for Flying Dutchman, in which he continued to pursue an amalgam of jazz and Latin popular music. His musical evolution during this period was shaped by the emergence and growing influence of jazz-fusion. Although fusion’s roots can be traced to the mid-1960s experiments of Gary Burton and Larry Coryell, the genre took off with Miles Davis’s albums of 1969 and 1970, In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Generally understood as a hybrid of rock and jazz, fusion is associated with the use of electric instruments and the preference for a rock-style backbeat over the swinging rhythm more typical of jazz. However, from the beginning, Latin music was an important element in the fusion mixture.[71] The Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira played on Bitches Brew and together with his wife, Flora Purim, was a founding member of Chick Corea’s influential fusion band, Return to Forever. Corea, who played with Moreira in Miles Davis’s band, had a serious Latin jazz pedigree, having begun his career as the pianist in Cuban conguero Mongo Santamaría’s band. Weather Report, another influential fusion band founded by Davis alumni, featured Moreira on its first album before he was replaced by another Brazilian percussionist, Dom Um Romão. The inclusion of Latin American percussionists in these fusion projects accompanied a marked openness to recognizably Latin rhythms and, occasionally, instrumental techniques.[72]

As Barbieri moved away from free jazz and toward a more fusion-influenced sound, he also tended to embrace a more conventional version of Latin jazz. On Barbieri’s album Fenix, recorded in 1971, Ron Carter’s electric bass replaced Charlie Haden’s acoustic one, and keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith played the Fender Rhodes electric piano on some tracks. On drums was the fusion specialist Lenny White, who had played on Bitches Brew and would later replace Airto Moreira as the drummer in Return to Forever. Also added to the lineup were two percussionists, the Afro-Cuban specialist Gene Golden and the Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, who played both congas and the Afro-Brazilian berimbau. Barbieri’s material remained much the same—Fenix contained two Brazilian tunes, a tango, a couple of Argentine folk songs, and one original composition named for a Latin American revolutionary icon (this time it was Tupac Amaru)—but his style had evolved. In particular, the collective approach of free jazz ensembles, premised on a blurring of the line between soloist and accompanist, gave way to a more traditional jazz band concept. Moreover, since Roswell Rudd’s trombone had not been replaced by another horn, the album basically offers Barbieri with an expanded and assertive rhythm section. Golden’s use of Cuban-derived patterns on Brazilian and Argentine material and Vasconcelos’s nontraditional approach to the berimbau gave the rhythm section a generically Latin feel. That is, the flurry of congas and bongos conformed to North American expectations of Latin rhythm. This effect is heightened by the fact that the album is filled with one- or two-chord vamps for Barbieri to solo over, thus replicating the harmonic stasis characteristic of Afro-Cuban music.[73] In this way, a song like “El Arriero,” by the Argentine folklorist Atahualpa Yupanqui, is transformed from wistful tune to intense Latin jam.

In the United States, the critical response to Barbieri’s new version of Latin Jazz was effusive. During his free jazz period, some critics applauded the saxophonist’s passion, but others had been less impressed. One review of Cherry’s Complete Communion dismissed Barbieri as “a ‘new thing’ player less from conviction than from despair.”[74] The mixed reviews he received in this period reflected the divided critical assessment of free jazz itself. Once Barbieri started to embrace Latin identity and revolutionary politics, North American critics responded with nearly unanimous praise. According to John Wilson, Barbieri had evolved from “an exponent of the avant-garde shriek and squeal school” to a more mature musician aware of “his personal roots in the music of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia.”[75] The idea of Barbieri’s supposed roots in popular Latin American music is hard to square with the biography of an Argentine jazz musician who until recently had never had any interest in tango, much less samba or Andean folk music. Nevertheless, this image was crucial to Barbieri’s appeal, at least to critics. By turning to Latin music, Nat Hentoff argued, the saxophonist was “plunging as deeply as he can into himself … creating as he returns to his source.”[76] Barbieri was here figured as the bearer of an authentic Latin self, a notion that shaped what critics heard when they listened to his music. Thus one reviewer described his improvisations as “bossa-tinged free flurries,” even though bossa nova is generally associated with a much lighter touch than Barbieri’s.[77] For Robert Palmer, probably Barbieri’s greatest champion in the U.S. press, “Gato’s passionate, sweeping statements and his shrieking punctuations impart a peculiarly Latin variety of soul.”[78] Even his free jazz mannerisms, learned from Coltrane and Sanders, now sounded Latin. Barbieri’s adoption of a Latin persona, evident in his choice of material, his extensive use of Latin American percussion, and his left-wing political pronouncements in liner notes and magazine interviews, profoundly influenced the critical reception of his music; Barbieri sounded Latin because he identified as Latin.

But if Barbieri’s self-presentation affected the way North American jazz critics heard him, this critical response also influenced his musical development, encouraging his shift from the noisy, adventurous free jazz of The Third World to the more accessible Latin workouts of Fenix. Jazz critics in the United States approached Barbieri’s music by assimilating it to earlier versions of Latin jazz. Particularly salient here were the Gillespie/Pozo collaborations of the 1940s as well as the big band innovations of Mario Bauzá and Machito. John Wilson, who celebrated Barbieri’s evolution away from free jazz as a sign of his growing maturity and self-knowledge, compared his group to “Machito’s band of 20 years ago.” According to Michael Cuscuna, “Gato has successfully assimilated the music of Black America and Latin America, a feat … accomplished only by Diz and Gato.”[79] This model of Latin jazz tended to replicate the association of Latin with Cuban rhythm. Barbieri, who was by his own account interested in attracting a wide audience, was giving the critics what they wanted. And the critics responded. For Robert Palmer, “the music became more and more powerful” in Fenix and subsequent albums.[80] Similarly, Michael Bourne’s review of Fenix in Down Beat praised the music’s “absolute passion,” as well as “the communion of black and Latin energy.”[81] With the Latin element neatly packaged in the form of Cuban and, to a lesser extent, Brazilian percussion instruments, critics could more easily understand and embrace Barbieri’s music as a Black/Latin hybrid.

Barbieri’s effort to reach a larger audience began to bear fruit when Bernardo Bertolucci invited him to compose and perform the soundtrack for The Last Tango in Paris (1972). The film was an international sensation, and Barbieri became famous, even earning a Grammy nomination. In the Argentine press, Astor Piazzolla criticized Bertolucci for choosing Barbieri, who, he argued, was no tango musician. Barbieri responded that the film really had nothing to do with tango and that his soundtrack was “purely and exclusively movie music.”[82] Indeed, Barbieri seems to have borrowed the melody for the film’s theme song not from a tango but from a tune by Brazilian composer Radamés Gnattali.[83] As he had demonstrated on The Third World and on Fenix, Barbieri was now committed to forging a personal mode of expression through the incorporation of South American material. In any case, Barbieri’s association with Latin music in general, as well as his recordings of tangos on his Flying Dutchman albums, had helped get him the Last Tango gig. Like Schifrin before him, Barbieri had discovered that identifying as a Latin jazz musician could be lucrative. On the basis of the stature he gained from Last Tango, Barbieri was signed by Impulse Records, the jazz division of ABC-Paramount. ABC lavishly funded four Barbieri albums, titled Chapter One through Four, financing recording sessions with South American musicians in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janerio and flying the whole band around the world for extended touring. Thanks to aggressive distribution, the albums—especially Chapter One: Latin America—achieved large sales figures by jazz standards.[84]

On his first two Impulse albums, Barbieri took advantage of the financial support he received from the record company in order to experiment with the possibilities afforded by the concept of Latin jazz. By this point, he had developed an instantly identifiable tone, a big, grainy sound that critics, relying on Latin stereotypes, often labeled “macho” or “passionate.”[85] This timbre lent itself both to intense, soaring solos in uptempo Latin numbers and to a lush, romantic style in slow tangos or on the Last Tango soundtrack. Both iterations of the Barbieri sound are in evidence on the Impulse records, but the musical context is quite different. On these albums, Barbieri foregoes the familiar accompaniment of a standard jazz group. On some tracks, the ensembles that accompany him include such Andean instruments as the charango, the quena, and the siku. On others, he plays with one of Rio’s famous samba schools. Moreover, a greater proportion of these albums are given over to original compositions, in which Barbieri experiments with folk rhythms that are quite distinct from the Cuban-derived beats that predominate on the Flying Dutchman albums. There are some elements of continuity with the earlier records—particularly the vamps based on repeating figures played by Argentine jazz bassist Adalberto Cevasco on electric bass. Still, the novel instrumentation and particularly the use of rhythms derived from Andean folk music represented a real challenge to familiar versions of Latin jazz.

Although Chapter One and Chapter Two were extremely well received, Barbieri’s new music seemed to defy the analytical capacities of North American jazz critics. Ray Townley gave Chapter One five stars, but his only substantive comment about the music was that it was “more international in scope” and achieved a “better-blending of Gato’s horn with the supporting South American rhythms.”[86] Chuck Mitchell raved about Barbieri’s “continuing confrontation with his South American roots” in Chapter Two but warned consumers that “the music’s relation to Afro-American jazz is much more subtle than on the Dutchman recordings.… Don’t buy expecting to hear Latin-jazz.”[87] For these critics, Barbieri seemed to have abandoned the essential formula of Cuban-derived rhythms plus jazz harmonies and improvisation.

Whether this challenge to North American expectations was too severe or whether Impulse simply refused to fund any more South American expeditions, Chapter Three represented a return to an earlier model. For this album, Barbieri assembled a traditional, New York Latin big band—jazz horn section, piano, bass, drums, and Cuban percussion—and hired the legendary Cuban arranger Chico O’Farrill. Having worked with Machito, Dizzy Gillespie, and Stan Kenton in the 1950s, O’Farrill had been a key player in the birth of Latin jazz. By bringing him in, Barbieri essentially embraced the most familiar version of Latin jazz. On the album’s final track, “Viva Emiliano Zapata”—yet another original composition named for a Latin American revolutionary—piano and bass lock into a simple, two-chord Cuban montuno. Bongos and conga enter, followed by O’Farrill’s densely arranged flute and horn parts, providing a comfortable backdrop for Barbieri’s solo. Down Beat’s critic seemed relieved by the familiarity and accessibility of the music: “Precise brass blasts ride along on waves of sweaty, happy Latin dance rhythms and Gato is given ample room to curse or coo as he pleases.… Viva Gato Barbieri y Chico O’Farrill!”[88]

FIGURE 2.2 • Gato Barbieri performs at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973 with many of the musicians from Chapter One: Latin America. Raul Mercado on the quena, Domingo Cura on the bombo, Amadeo Monges on Indian harp. Visible in the rear is Paul Motian on drums, while Adalberto Cevasco on bass is obscured. Getty Images.

Barbieri performed in Argentina on two separate trips during this period: the first in 1971 and the second in 1973 during the recording of Chapter One. By this time, he had profoundly transformed his image and personal style. In his Argentine period, Barbieri had worn his hair short and dressed in the conservative style of the porteño middle class of the 1950s. In the mid-1960s, he adopted the berets and turtle-neck sweaters of the jazz hipster. By the early 1970s, he wore his hair long, wore loose-fitting clothing, and had adopted his signature fedora. Moreover, he was as outspoken about his politics in Argentina as he was in the United States. In front of North American audiences, Barbieri often denounced U.S. imperialism in Latin America; on stage in Argentina, he repeatedly chanted the most politically explicit lines of Yupanqui’s “El arriero”: “The suffering is ours, but the cows belong to someone else.”[89] Although countercultural fashion and revolutionary politics were certainly visible in Argentina, they were more dangerous. Barbieri’s visits home coincided with the military dictatorships of Roberto Levingston and Alejandro Lanusse, a period of intense social conflict. Barbieri spoke of feeling uncomfortable walking the streets of Buenos Aires sporting the long hair and clothing of a hippie.[90]

Although many Argentine critics responded positively to Barbieri’s new music, some were unimpressed. Most Argentine artists who achieved success abroad were celebrated as heroes. Lalo Schifrin, for example, was described as a “genius” who had achieved fame and fortune in Hollywood.[91] Barbieri did receive his share of plaudits along these lines: local writers reported proudly that in the United States, he was widely seen as the most important saxophonist since Coltrane.[92] Moreover, many Argentine critics responded favorably to Barbieri’s Latin Americanist musical vision. As one put it, “The great originality of Gato Barbieri resides in two prodigious achievements: the insertion of jazz into popular Indoamerican music, achieving a freshness that spans the continent, and his unique capacity to take up, break apart and reassemble a melody.”[93] Still, there were indications that Barbieri’s pan-Latin, musical identity made less sense in Argentina than it did in the United States. One critic, for example, found the saxophonist’s style “rigid, monotonous,” dazzling only to those with “foreign ears.”[94] Another argued that Barbieri’s “limited creative capacity” was not capable of overcoming the mismatch between jazz and South American folk music.[95] Finally, one perceptive critic described the Chapter One project as “folklore in the blender.” He argued that Barbieri was essentially trying to invent a new music—not Argentine, Venezuelan, or Brazilian music, but rather a new, Latin American hybrid—and that he lacked the musical maturity to pull it off.[96] This critical ambivalence in Argentina reveals that Barbieri’s Latin music innovations were very much a product of the North American musical, ethnic, and political context. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Barbieri never returned to live in Argentina. As he recently commented, “I’m not Argentine, I’m international.”[97]

FIGURE 2.3 • Barbieri playing ca. 1970. Primera Plana (March 30, 1971), 49.

In 1976, Barbieri’s career took one more turn. Dissatisfied with the marketing efforts of Impulse and wanting, as always, to reach a larger audience, he signed with A&M records and, under the guidance of producer Herb Alpert, released Caliente![98] From the lush string arrangements to the choice of an apolitical stereotype for a title, everything about the album signaled the saxophonist’s embrace of a more mainstream musical idiom. The album was a commercial success, especially Barbieri’s cover of Carlos Santana’s “Europa,” which may be the saxophonist’s best-known recording. On this track and throughout the album, Barbieri indulged the romantic, sexy side of his Latin identity, while abandoning both his political radicalism and his aesthetic avant-gardism. By maintaining a Cuban percussion section and by covering Santana, he definitively embraced the conventional, North American understanding of Latin music. This new direction was highly profitable, but it alienated jazz critics. Leonard Feather declared that he had “hastily overestimated” Barbieri, Stephen Holden denounced him as a “caricature of a Hollywood hipster,” and even Robert Palmer waxed nostalgic for the music he made before the “pop-jazz albums” of his A&M phase.[99] Barbieri, like Schifrin before him, had moved beyond the specialized subculture of jazz.

Both Lalo Schifrin and Gato Barbieri were perceived as Latin in the United States, and both took advantage of the musical and commercial opportunities that perception created. In the process of engaging with such a constraining label, Schifrin and Barbieri produced new musical hybrids. Schifrin’s “Mission Impossible” theme used Cuban percussion to create a novel template for television and film music, while Barbieri expanded the category of “Latin jazz” beyond its original form. Critics understood these new hybrids to result from mixing North American jazz with distinct, Latin traditions. Yet neither Schifrin nor Barbieri was the bearer of a Latin musical tradition; in fact, neither had any interest or expertise in music from Latin America until after they left Argentina. Their musical innovations were the result of the agency they were able to exercise within an unequal global structure in which Latin America was associated with exotic, earthy rhythms and with values such as passion and sensuality.

Comparing their trajectories reveals how this global structure had changed between the late 1950s when Schifrin arrived in the United States and the mid-1960s when Barbieri did. Schifrin’s Parisian musical education and his self-presentation as an intellectual enabled him to prosper at a time when Latin rhythms like the bossa nova constituted seductive symbols of cosmopolitan sophistication. As a white Argentine, Schifrin was the perfect guide to the exotic rhythms of Latin America: he could claim natural expertise while remaining comfortingly familiar. By contrast, Barbieri arrived at a moment of political and cultural ferment. In the context of the free jazz movement and the rise of protest jazz, his persona was politicized. More than a guide to the exotic otherness of Latin America, Barbieri embodied that otherness. He did not present and repackage Latin rhythms for North American music fans, as Schifrin had. Rather, he articulated Latin-ness as an irreducible difference and an implicit critique of white, North American power and privilege.

Notwithstanding the achievements of Schifrin and Barbieri, both musicians were constrained by the preconceptions attached to the term Latin jazz. North American critics, audiences, musicians, and record label executives apprehended their music through a framework that maintained the purity of musical categories like Latin and jazz and articulated them to equally pure ethnic and national categories. This framework limited the musicians’ capacity to innovate. In neither Schifrin’s nor Barbieri’s case can the adoption of familiar models of Latin music be reduced to a straightforward case of selling out. Schifrin’s movie music remained aesthetically inventive even as it incorporated conventional Latin signifiers, and Barbieri’s adoption of less innovative versions of Latin jazz came before he starting playing overtly commercial smooth jazz. Instead, their stories exemplify the ideological processes that work to embed unequal power relationships within the popular music of the Americas. The fame and fortune that Schifrin and Barbieri achieved by specializing in Latin music or embodying a Latin persona reinscribed stereotypes. Despite the significant transformations of the 1960s, one could be forgiven for thinking that not much had changed in the twenty years between Stan Kenton’s Cuban Fire and Barbieri’s Caliente.

3

COSMOPOLITAN TANGO

Astor Piazzolla at Home and Abroad

Lalo Schifrin was not the only Argentine musician to relocate to Paris in 1954, return to Buenos Aires shortly thereafter, and then move to New York City in 1958. The legendary tango composer and bandleader Astor Piazzolla followed precisely the same itinerary, making each move within months of the jazz wunderkind. Eleven years older than Schifrin, Piazzolla’s motives for travel were similar: he too hoped to deepen his musical education in Paris and to discover new economic and artistic opportunities in New York. Like Schifrin, Piazzolla confronted a set of unanticipated musical and cultural expectations in the course of his travels, stereotypes that opened up certain opportunities even as they closed off others. In this sense, both musicians’ international experiences reflected Argentina’s position within the uneven structures of transnational musical culture as they existed in the 1950s. International travel allowed both Schifrin and Piazzolla to experiment and ultimately to escape the aesthetic limits imposed by those who policed the authenticity of their respective genres. Yet in other ways, Piazzolla’s experience was very different. As a tango musician, and especially as a practitioner of the bandoneón, a concertina that is the tango instrument par excellence, Piazzolla could not easily escape an identification with Argentina. As a result, he was not able to perform the role that Schifrin quickly mastered: that of interpreter of diverse Latin American musical forms for North American audiences. More important, Piazzolla’s association with tango meant that for Argentine audiences, national identity was always at stake in his performances. Schifrin, like other Argentines who earned international acclaim for their achievements in genres that were understood as foreign, could be celebrated straightforwardly as a source of national pride.[1] By contrast, Piazzolla specialized in a musical form that was seen by many as a symbol of the nation. Engaging with foreign musical genres in order to transform the tango, he trod on dangerous ground.

Piazzolla’s New Tango, as he named his musical innovations, reflected the intersection of two historical trajectories. On the one hand, many of the tensions and contradictions that characterized his music and the responses to it had been present within the tango world for decades. Since the 1920s, composers and bandleaders had looked for ways to “improve” the tango, to raise the music above its lowbrow associations while making it every bit as modern as jazz, its main competition on the dance floor. These efforts provoked controversy, as some tango fans embraced the innovations of New Guard composers while others held fast to more traditional styles. In a general sense, then, Piazzolla’s music represented a new version of an old, vanguardist project within tango, though major shifts in the transnational musical world changed how this vanguardism sounded and what it meant. On the other hand, Piazzolla elaborated his musical project in the context of a major rupture in Argentine political history. In September 1955, just five months after Piazzolla’s return from Paris, a military coup ended the regime of Juan Perón, provoking dramatic transformations in government policy, daily life, and public culture. Over the next few years, the New Tango would emerge as a potent symbol of a bourgeois project to build a modernized, cosmopolitan Argentina. To a certain extent, Piazzolla’s successes and failures—both commercial and artistic—reflected the ups and downs experienced by that project and its defenders.

This chapter will explore the ways Piazzolla navigated the shifting contours of both the transnational soundscape and the national milieu. As a young man, Piazzolla had hoped to revolutionize the tango by importing compositional techniques from classical music. But it was the cool jazz of the 1950s that provided him with a model for how to make an old-fashioned dance music sound sophisticated, serious, and up to date. Despite this debt to jazz, his most successful efforts avoided stylistic fusion; unlike Barbieri’s Latin jazz, Piazzolla’s New Tango of the 1960s was not made by welding together elements drawn from different genres. His music expressed a cosmopolitan nationalism that was attractive to the porteño middle class, but it did not conform to North American expectations and thus failed to capture a significant audience in the United States. By the early 1970s, new developments in jazz and rock made Piazzolla’s music sound old-fashioned, and he began to lose his audience in Argentina. He disbanded his quintet, pursued various, more commercial projects, moved to Europe, and dabbled in jazz fusion. In the 1980s, though, the international context shifted again in Piazzolla’s favor. The rise of the marketing category “world music” finally enabled him to attract North American listeners, which in turn reinforced a revival in his status at home. With the fall of the country’s most brutal dictatorship in 1983, many Argentines sought to rediscover an older version of national identity, untainted by decades of violence. Piazzolla’s New Tango, once heard as the epitome of progressive, avant-garde modernism, now induced a comforting nostalgia.

New York, Paris, and the Octeto Buenos Aires

Although internationally tango has often been seen as the quintessential music of Argentina, domestically it is more typically understood as the music of Buenos Aires. In the early decades of the twentieth century, porteño radio networks and record distributors facilitated its diffusion throughout the country, yet the genre never lost its symbolic association with the capital city. Astor Piazzolla, who was born in Mar del Plata, a seaside resort town located 250 miles south of Buenos Aires, would thus have been a bit of an outsider in the tango world. As it turned out, though, his birthplace hardly mattered; though born on the Argentine coast, Piazzolla grew up in New York City. Between the ages of four and sixteen, he lived with his family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. When he joined Aníbal Troilo’s band in 1939 and thereby launched his tango career, he had only been back in Argentina for a bit more than two years and likely spoke better English than he did Spanish. Piazzolla’s significant experience living outside of Argentina gave him a distinctive relationship to the tango. In particular, it helps account for his lack of orthodoxy, his aversion to any strict policing of the genre’s borders. His connection to New York would also inform the way he was seen by tango musicians and critics, lending him prestige even as it marked him as suspiciously foreign.

Piazzolla’s biographers have shed significant light on his formative years in New York. His father, a barber and a tango fan, gave him a bandoneón when he was eight and encouraged the boy to study the instrument. His musical training was idiosyncratic: he received some lessons in tango from an Argentine instructor, and a classically trained Hungarian pianist who lived next door taught him to play Bach on the bandoneón. Meanwhile, he and his friends snuck uptown to Harlem to hear jazz, and the young Piazzolla worked out Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” by himself. In 1933, he met Carlos Gardel, who had come to New York to make a series of radio programs. Gardel seems to have been impressed by Piazzolla’s bandoneón playing but thought his style sounded foreign; in a now legendary anecdote, he told the boy that he played tango “like a Spaniard [un gallego].” Piazzolla’s encounters with tango music and with Gardel himself reveal that his Argentine identity shaped his formative years even in faraway New York. Yet he was also able to pass as a North American, often claiming to be of Italian descent like many of his friends. When addressed in Spanish, the young Piazzolla would answer in English for fear of being labeled a Puerto Rican.[2] As Schifrin, Barbieri, and many other Argentine travelers later discovered, North Americans were not adept at distinguishing among Latin American nationalities.

In 1937, the family returned to Mar del Plata, and within two years, Piazzolla set off for Buenos Aires, intent on establishing himself as a professional tango musician. When he arrived in the capital, the tango world was divided between innovators and traditionalists. The composers and bandleaders of the New Guard, led since the late 1920s by Julio de Caro, called for an elevated, more sophisticated tango. In the opposite camp were traditionalist bandleaders like Francisco Canaro and their fans, who criticized De Caro and other innovators for adulterating the tango by mixing it with foreign elements. In the late 1930s, the advocates of innovation faced a new opponent: Juan D’Arienzo, the so-called King of the Beat, who performed a classic repertoire in a simple, rigid rhythm that reminded his many fans of an older, more masculine tango style. For the time being, D’Arienzo’s formula, seen by all as a rejection of De Caro’s efforts to elevate and modernize the tango, seemed to be winning: at the end of the 1930s, it was his band that filled the dance floors.[3]

At this point, the battle between innovators and traditionalists was understood to be fundamentally about rhythm. D’Arienzo’s fans attacked the New Guard composers for having lost track of the tango’s essential beat, ostensibly the source of its authenticity, while they focused on trying to improve its melodies and harmonies. Meanwhile, his critics lambasted him for what they heard as an overly aggressive, monomaniacal insistence on the beat. To the fans of the New Guard, rhythm was the most primitive aspect of music, since it appealed to the body rather than the mind. By sacrificing musical sophistication and emphasizing a simple dance beat, D’Arienzo was appealing to the most plebeian and uneducated in the tango audience. When a young bandoneonist name Aníbal Troilo launched his own band in 1937, many hoped that he would rectify the D’Arienzo-inspired overemphasis on rhythm. As one fan put it on the eve of the new band’s debut on Radio El Mundo, Troilo “will demonstrate that it is possible to make rhythm within strictly musical norms and without forgetting that no matter how danceable one makes the tango, it must have melody, which is its very essence.”[4] Troilo did not disappoint. More than any other bandleader of this period, he succeeded in reconciling sophistication and popular appeal, earning the approval of the followers of De Caro while leading one of the most sought after tango bands of the 1940s and beyond.[5] Piazzolla, a fan of De Caro and other tango innovators, joined Troilo’s band in December 1939.

Piazzolla began as one of five bandoneonists in Troilo’s big band, but he was too ambitious, both musically and professionally, to be content with such a minor role. Moreover, from the beginning, he did not seem to fit in particularly well among the other musicians, a difficulty that was partly due to his New York background. He was known as “el Yoni” (Argentine Spanish for “Johnny”) because of his accent, and when he played Gershwin on the bandoneón, his bandmates told him to “leave that stuff for the North Americans.” But more important, his aspirations were different. From 1941 to 1945, even as he performed regularly in the Troilo band, Piazzolla studied music with Alberto Ginastera, a young Argentine composer of a nationalist bent, who introduced his student to the work of Stravinsky, Ravel, and Bartok. In 1943, Piazzolla began to write arrangements for the Troilo band, thereby making professional use of the skills he acquired in his studies with Ginastera. Troilo seems to have appreciated his work, but he also sought to reign him in by excising elements that he found too experimental or unlikely to please the fans who came to dance. Piazzolla soon tired of these constraints on his creativity. He left the group in 1944 and two years later launched his own tango band.[6]

Although Piazzolla’s first band only lasted for three years, he remained a major presence as a composer and an arranger for Troilo’s band and others. A 1947 review in the newspaper Noticias Gráficas reveals that Piazzolla had earned a reputation as the most adventurous, young innovator in the tango scene: “Astor Piazzolla has an unusual background. He never experienced the stimulating and inevitable Buenos Aires scene of kerosene street lamps, and organ grinders, and everything else. He grew up among the skyscrapers. It is his fate to reconcile opposites, as we can see, which explains how he can offer us the most stubborn tango hits of the old days with chords that seem almost Stravinskian.”[7] For this reviewer, Piazzolla’s New York background accounted for his tendency to push the tango in a more sophisticated, modern, and cosmopolitan direction. But if some critics heard Stravinsky, Piazzolla later said that his musical interests at this time also included jazz, particularly Stan Kenton’s “progressive” concert orchestra. Piazzolla never mentioned Kenton’s use of Cuban percussion, the bongos that would later irritate Lalo Schifrin. Instead, he said that he wanted “to work similar harmonies but with a difference: in place of brass I had strings and bandoneons.”[8] As these comments suggest, jazz for Piazzolla was less a source of specific musical elements to be borrowed than a model of how to bring musical sophistication and innovation to bear on a popular dance music. Kenton had borrowed dissonant harmonies from modern classical music without thereby losing the essential rhythmic feel of jazz. Piazzolla began to imagine doing something similar with tango.

In the early 1950s, Piazzolla busied himself composing tangos, arranging for tango bands, and writing music for films, but at the same time he also began composing more ambitious symphonic works. With the encouragement of his teacher, Ginastera, he entered one of these in a competition sponsored by the Perón government and won. His submission, a three-movement piece entitled simply Buenos Aires, featured an orchestra with two bandoneons as well as a percussion instrument that Piazzolla devised, called a lija (Spanish for sandpaper), in order to produce the characteristic scratching sounds that tango violinists make by bowing below the bridge. In its incorporation of tango sonorities within a classical, European symphonic structure, the piece is broadly comparable to the many efforts of twentieth-century composers—from Gershwin and Copland to Bartok and Villa-Lobos—to adapt materials drawn from popular music. The gesture was not unprecedented within the tango world; Julio de Caro, himself, had created symphonic versions of tangos in the 1930s in an effort to ennoble and refine the genre.[9] Using terms reminiscent of those that had been applied to De Caro’s efforts, La Prensa’s critic described Piazzolla’s piece as “an important contribution to the elevation [jerarquización] of the tango,” while another local reviewer compared the young composer to Gershwin.[10] The recognition Piazzolla earned for this early effort at classical composition encouraged him to leave the tango behind. In 1954, he took the modest cash prize he won for Buenos Aires and moved to Paris in order to study with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger.

In many interviews, Piazzolla described experiencing two epiphanies in Paris. The first of these occurred in one of his meetings with his new teacher, Boulanger: upon hearing some of the tangos he had composed, she told him that the Argentine genre was his true calling. Boulanger’s enthusiasm, he later claimed, convinced him that he could achieve his artistic ambitions without turning his back on the tango.[11] While this anecdote may have been more of a literary flourish than an accurate memory, there is no doubt that Piazzolla’s six-month stay in Europe caused him to reassess the tango. The Parisian context had enabled and encouraged Lalo Schifrin to experiment with Latin jazz. But unlike Schifrin, Piazzolla already specialized in a specific Latin American genre; for him, France encouraged a return to his roots. From the moment he arrived, Piazzolla was pleasantly surprised to discover that the tango was alive and well in the French capital and that some of the local bands were even playing “Prepárense,” a tango he had composed in 1952. The French audience for the Argentine genre was big enough, in fact, that he secured a contract to record some sixteen new tangos with an orchestra made up primarily of musicians from the Paris Opera and including Schifrin on piano. Piazzolla’s second epiphany involved cool jazz. He claimed that he had seen a performance by an octet led by baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and that he had been so inspired by the interplay between the musicians and by their obvious sense of collective joy, that he immediately began planning his own octet. As Diego Fischerman and Abel Gilbert have shown, this story was certainly apocryphal. Mulligan did perform at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1954 but with a quartet not an octet and, more problematically, two months before Piazzolla arrived in France.[12] And yet, as I will describe below, the influence of Mulligan and of cool jazz more generally seems real enough. Piazzolla must have heard this music on records, records that he could just as easily have heard in Buenos Aires.[13]

In fact, Paris does not seem to have afforded Piazzolla anything that he could not have gotten at home. Not only had Buenos Aires already provided him the opportunity to compose and record tango, but the city also had a thriving jazz scene featuring musicians like Gato Barbieri who were hip to the latest styles from the United States. Moreover, Piazzolla already had an accomplished music teacher in Ginastera; his studies with Boulanger, which lasted for just four months, seem to have focused primarily on counterpoint, a technique he likely could have mastered without leaving Argentina. Nevertheless, Paris seemed to reshuffle the relationship between these elements and influences. First, for Piazzolla, as for many culturally aspiring Argentines before him, the French stamp of approval legitimized the tango as a worthwhile musical pursuit. Second, though Piazzolla had long been a jazz fan, the jazz and tango scenes in Buenos Aires were two entirely separate worlds, a situation that discouraged musical cross-pollination. Jazz and tango musicians simply did not play with each other in Buenos Aires, yet in Paris, Schifrin and Piazzolla recorded tango together. Schifrin later explained that he got the job because he was the only Argentine pianist in Paris, and it was reasonable to expect him to know how to play tango. But Piazzolla’s account was different: he explained that he invited Schifrin to record with him precisely because he was “a good jazz pianist, someone who knows what swing is.”[14] In Paris, Piazzolla was far away from the critics and fans who inspected every tango innovation for deviance from some imagined standard of authenticity. He could hear the relevance of both jazz and classical music to tango in a way that he could not in Buenos Aires. He was now ready to invent something new.

Piazzolla’s return to Buenos Aires in April 1955 coincided with the last days of the Perón regime. In June, air force and navy jets bombed the Plaza de Mayo; by September, anti-Peronist generals succeeded in engineering a coup and inaugurating the so-called Revolución Libertadora. The fall of Perón was traumatic for the regime’s followers among the working class and the poor, who not only stood to lose the concrete benefits they had won during the previous decade but also felt their particular vision of the nation under attack.[15] However, for many other Argentines, the experience truly was liberating. White-collar workers, intellectuals, and professionals had forged a middle-class identity in opposition to the plebeian masses whom the regime had empowered. For this middle class, the coup created the opportunity to “de-Peronize” society both by throwing Peronists out of positions of power and also by dislodging the regime’s populist and often anti-intellectual ideology from its hegemonic position. Perón had turned the nation’s universities and arts institutions over to Catholic traditionalists who tended to reject modernist influences. In the name of nationalism, the regime actively supported folk music and realist art, while rejecting abstraction and imported cultural forms. For many in the middle class, the fall of Peronism meant a more open environment in which the country could once again engage with cosmopolitan intellectual and artistic currents. In these heady days, intellectuals were deeply engaged in the project of imagining a new way to be in the world as Argentines, and music was one key site for this project.

Against this turbulent backdrop, Piazzolla launched the Octeto Buenos Aires, a new, avant-garde group with which he hoped to revolutionize the tango. Perhaps inspired by political events, Piazzolla published a manifesto in the form of a “Decalogue” in order to explain his project to the public. The document made the group’s vanguardist intentions clear. It promised to put artistic ambitions over commercial ones, to limit the use of singers, to incorporate new instruments, and to play music for listening rather than dancing. The goals of the octeto were

(a) To raise the quality of the tango. (b) To convince those who have moved away from the tango, and its detractors, of the unquestionable value of our music. (c) To attract those who exclusively love foreign music. (d) To conquer the mass public, a task we take for granted as arduous, but certain as soon as they have heard the themes played many times. (e) To take overseas, as an artistic embassy, this musical expression of the land where tango originated, to demonstrate its evolution and to further justify the appreciation in which it is held.[16]

The context of the Revolución Libertadora helps explain the Decalogue’s distinctive version of nationalism. After a decade of Perón’s assertive nativism, Argentina’s new leaders hoped that they could modernize the nation by reopening it to the world. Piazzolla’s desire to make music that would appeal both to foreign audiences and to Argentine listeners drawn to foreign genres resonated with the larger project of refashioning Argentine nationalism in a more modern and cosmopolitan vein.

At the same time, Piazzolla’s project also reflected the widespread perception that tango was in commercial decline. The economic hard times of the early 1950s had taken a toll on the tango big bands, many of which could no longer afford to stay in business. Moreover, the transnational musical context had shifted. Tango had thrived as an Argentine alternative to big-band swing from the United States, but as that version of jazz came to seem old-fashioned, so did tango. To many observers, tango was incapable of competing with the new musical styles from abroad as well as with Argentine folk music, which had received a big boost from the Perón government. As the writer and tangophile Tulio Carella bemoaned, “Film and folklore have made musical tastes more eclectic.”[17] In this context, Piazzolla hoped to reconcile artistic vanguardism with popular appeal. Even as he promised to make a serious art for listening and to avoid pandering to the tastes of tango dancers, he expressed confidence that with time, he could win over a “mass public.”

The music recorded by the Octeto Buenos Aires broke quite explicitly with the tango played by orquestas típicas. Unfamiliar harmonies and frequent changes in tempo made it clear that this was not music for dancing. To reinforce the point, Piazzolla wrote extensive liner notes that stressed the complexity and harmonic sophistication of each piece. The octeto’s version of Piazzolla’s own composition, “Lo que vendrá” (What Will Come) opens with a lengthy, dramatic melody on violin that sounds much more like Debussy than like tango.[18] In general, the recordings are largely free of arrangements in which a group of instruments plays a simple harmony to accompany the melody. Instead, in many passages several instruments seem to solo at once, with distinct melody lines carefully interwoven. This rich counterpoint likely reflects Piazzolla’s studies in classical composition, but for contemporary listeners, jazz was a more obvious influence. As one reviewer put it, “Piazzolla approaches and skillfully solves the problem of varying tango rhythm by means of jazz-style syncopation.”[19] Whether or not Piazzolla’s approach to rhythm was influenced by jazz, his choice of instrumentation certainly was. The octeto’s most direct challenge to tango tradition was its incorporation of electric guitar. Acoustic guitars had long been associated with the genre, although they did not feature in the big dance bands. Nevertheless, the electric guitar was entirely new. Not only were its amplifier and power cord a visible break with tradition, but the instrument was also clearly associated with North American popular music. Moreover, Piazzolla chose Horacio Malvicino, an accomplished jazz musician and a member of the Bop Club, to play the instrument in the octeto. Most shockingly, at the end of most of the Octeto’s pieces, Malvicino improvised freely. Here was a jazz guitarist bringing improvisation—the central aesthetic practice of jazz—to bear on a genre that had always stressed fidelity to a written score. In this context, it is not surprising that critics tended to focus on Piazzolla’s borrowings from jazz.

In certain respects, the Octeto Buenos Aires was reminiscent of Julio De Caro’s earlier efforts to “improve” the tango. Not only had De Caro invoked jazz as a model for how tango could be modernized, but his arguments often anticipated Piazzolla’s. Piazzolla’s claim that it was necessary “to elevate [jerarquizar]” the tango by stripping it of the “harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and aesthetic monotony in which it was wrapped” could easily have come from a member of the New Guard. However, the octeto emerged at a very different moment. In the late 1930s, De Caro and his followers were struggling to save tango from the threat of commercial success; they believed that D’Arienzo had dumbed the genre down in order to appeal to the base instincts of a mass public. By contrast, in the mid-1950s, tango was rapidly losing its audience. Piazzolla saw his modernist project as a way of restoring the genre’s commercial viability. In the immediate aftermath of Peronism, it made sense to align a sophisticated project of artistic renewal with a bid for mass appeal. As the Revolución Libertadora set about de-Peronizing the public sphere, burying any sign of the previous regime’s populism, middle-class anti-Peronists hoped to reassert their role as cultural leaders. Piazzolla’s Octeto Buenos Aires aptly symbolized that effort.

The octeto certainly struck a chord. In a history of tango written in 1957, Luis Villarroel celebrated the group as “an authentically revolutionary shock in the tango medium.”[20] Another critic celebrated the emergence of a new “New Guard” capable of burying the tango of the past and reinventing the genre in a way that would “respect the essences of the city, ‘the soul of the street,’ that imponderable something that the tango has, but know how to put it in music, know how to decipher it with the beauty and formal intensity that the new orchestral languages permit.” Although the article described other tango innovators, it singled out Piazzolla and the Octeto Buenos Aires as the movement’s leading edge. While the article emphasized Piazzolla’s modernity as well as his technical expertise, it also optimistically predicted that the octeto would win over a mass public. The author even quoted a taxi driver who claimed to be a big fan of “the kid” Piazzolla: “The tango has to be this way now.”[21] Critics like this one hoped that Piazzolla, like Troilo before him, could reconcile tango tradition with modernity, sophistication with popularity.

Because it symbolized the larger project of the Argentine middle class, Piazzolla’s new version of tango figured prominently in the pages of Rogelio Frigerio’s news magazine Qué. Frigerio was an economist who had founded the magazine in the wake of the 1955 coup in order to advocate for “developmentalism,” an ideology that would gain enormous influence when Radical party politician Arturo Frondizi made it the centerpiece of his successful campaign for the presidency in 1958. Fearing that Argentina’s military leaders would neglect the nation’s industrial development as they sought to return power to the oligarchy, Frigerio called for aggressive protectionism and state planning in order to promote heavy industry, and he argued that a class alliance could be built in support of the social progress that would ensue. Frigerio’s insistence that Argentina be self-sufficient in oil production reflected a staunch nationalism, yet he also called for the encouragement of foreign investment and the incorporation of advanced technology from abroad. In certain respects, developmentalism was reminiscent of Peronism: Frigerio advocated similar economic policies, recruited Peronist intellectuals like Arturo Jauretche, and attacked the Argentine oligarchy for its lack of nationalism. Yet he hoped to detach industrial policy and nationalism from Perón’s brand of populism. In particular, he hoped that developmentalism’s emphasis on technological modernization would appeal to the middle class, a sector that he envisioned as central to the movement’s attempt at forging a class alliance.[22]

The delicate balancing act implicit in developmentalism—in particular its attempt to harmonize Argentine nationalism with cosmopolitan modernization—was visible in Qué’s coverage of the Argentine music scene. In response to an article on the rock and roll of Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, one letter to the editor complained that the magazine was paying too much attention to “yankee” music and not enough to native genres like tango and folk. The magazine printed a response promising to dedicate the music section to Argentine genres. And in fact, during the next months, Qué did run a series of articles on the past and present of tango.[23] In these pieces, the magazine’s writers worked hard to strike a balance between respect for tradition and calls for innovation. A review of one Piazzolla concert argued that the innovative bandleader had taken experimentation too far. His tangos now sounded like dull “reports”; they risked “sterility.”[24] By contrast, the magazine celebrated Aníbal Troilo for adopting “the new vanguardist canons” while “filtering out excessive audacity.”[25] In other instances, Qué did welcome Piazzolla’s effort to raise tango up to the level of serious art. When the Octeto Buenos Aires performed at the University of Buenos Aires Law School, followed by a modern dance piece set to Piazzolla’s music, the magazine praised the composer for having taken the tango to such a prestigious space. Nevertheless, the reviewer hoped that Piazzolla would perform the same show in the plazas, barrios, and working-class suburbs of the city in order to assess whether this “artistic creation of popular roots” would actually appeal to the people.[26] Qué celebrated Piazzolla as a modernizer—the magazine described him as “el modernísimo Astor Piazzolla”[27]—but his music only resonated with developmentalist goals insofar as it retained tango’s national and popular authenticity.

Even if he did not always earn rave reviews, Piazzolla’s efforts to modernize the tango by assimilating influences from jazz and classical music made him a figure of symbolic power in the post-Perón moment. When Julio de Caro convoked the leading tango musicians of the day to a meeting to discuss the future of the genre, Qué dedicated much of its coverage to Piazzolla, despite the fact that he had chosen not to attend: “Piazzolla’s experience with European and North American publics makes him affirm that the tango has long since lost its appeal abroad because it is still played as it was twenty or thirty years ago. That interest will only be reawakened when someone confronts it with an attitude of renovation.”[28] Qué here made the reaction of first-world listeners the standard by which to judge tango’s modernization. And even though Piazzolla’s international experience as a professional musician was actually quite limited at this point, the article implicitly acknowledged his expertise in foreign musical tastes. His project fit the aspirations of the moment, and that gave him a level of authority that was surprising in someone at such an early stage of his career.

The Quinteto Nuevo Tango and the “Contemporary Music of Buenos Aires”

In 1958, Piazzolla’s financial and artistic ambitions impelled him to leave Buenos Aires once again and to return to New York. Although he had become a potent symbol of the effort to modernize Argentine national identity, he did not get a lot of gigs. With porteños increasingly drawn to the novel sound of rock and roll, the avant-garde modernism of the Octeto Buenos Aires could not attract a large enough audience to sustain itself. On the eve of his departure, Piazzolla told a reporter that he intended to play tango in New York and hoped that North American audiences would respond with as much enthusiasm as the French had.[29] Piazzolla’s two years in New York were shaped partly by the same forces that were then confronting Lalo Schifrin. Like Schifrin, Piazzolla struggled at first to find work, but he was seen as Latin, a perception that got him several jobs arranging for Latin dance bands, including those of Machito and Noro Morales. Unlike Schifrin, Piazzolla’s specialization in tango also opened doors for him: he collaborated with Argentine choreographers on tango shows and even performed tango on a U.S. television program.

Piazzolla’s most ambitious project during this New York period was the formation of a new quintet designed to play a tango-jazz hybrid. Piazzolla told an Argentine newspaper that he wanted to mix the two genres in order to secure a North American audience for “our music.”[30] His jazz intentions were clear: he named his quintet “J-T,” for jazz-tango (the name was a pun, since he intended for it to be pronounced yeite, a slang term for the special sound effects used by tango musicians). Moreover, the quintet included a vibraphone, an instrument with an unmistakable jazz provenance, and covered several jazz standards including “Lullaby of Birdland” and “Sophisticated Lady,” not to mention an original composition named for the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. Finally, the recordings of the Quinteto J-T feature improvisation on the rotating solo model associated with jazz. Even Piazzolla plays improvised solos on the bandoneón, something he would not repeat often in his career.

Yet the music of the New York quintet was more decisively shaped by the expectations produced by the North American idea of Latin music. At the very moment that Lalo Schifrin was putting his jazz aspirations on hold in order to join Xavier Cugat’s Latin band, Piazzolla was responding to similar pressures. The quinteto recorded for Tico Records, which specialized in mambo and other Latin dance genres by such stars as Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez, Machito, and Pete Terrace. For Tico, Piazzolla’s jazz-tango hybrid fit within its larger menu of Latin offerings. The title of the one album Tico released, Take Me Dancing: The Latin Rhythms of Astor Piazola [sic] & his Quintet, made this categorization explicit and thereby undercut Piazzolla’s earlier commitment to making music for listening. In place of the drum kit typical of jazz bands, the quintet played with a Latin percussion section composed of güiro and bongos and including Johnny Pacheco, the future salsa innovator. The inclusion of this rhythm section and the desire to attract Latin music fans necessitated several modifications in Piazzolla’s approach: in general, he avoided the rhythms and the techniques of articulation specific to tango, and he simplified the intricate counterpoint he had begun to explore in the Octeto Buenos Aires. In lengthy passages, particularly during improvised solos, piano, vibraphone, guitar, and bandoneón play simple accompaniment.

Piazzolla would later condemn his Quinteto J-T as a “capital sin,” “a monstrosity,” an aesthetic concession that he had made in order to feed his family.[31] Yet his letters home from New York speak proudly of the music, and Pacheco remembered him enjoying the sessions.[32] His subsequent disavowal of the project may reflect its commercial failure. Packaging tango as another form of Latin jazz failed to attract a mass audience. Illuminating in this regard was Billboard’s review of the album, which described the bandoneón as “an unusual instrument” and concluded that “all the selections sound the same.”[33] The Latin framing of the music provoked certain expectations in a North American audience primed by the mambo craze of the 1950s, expectations that Piazzolla frustrated by avoiding recognizable, Cuban beats. Piazzolla’s music-for-listening aesthetic was more compatible with cool jazz, but fans of the latter would have been put off by the prominence of the mysterious bandoneón and the overtly Latin bongos and güiro. Piazzolla’s commercial failure in New York contrasts with Schifrin’s success. The Argentine pianist had experimented in Paris with a form of Latin jazz built on a blend of Cuban rhythm and jazz improvisation. When he moved to New York, he was prepared to fulfill North American expectations about what Latin music sounded like. That was not a move that Piazzolla was either able or willing to make.

By the time Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires in 1960, he had begun to sour on his jazz-tango fusion: “It is an experience on which I do not wish to dwell. Its goal was to introduce the tango to the North American public tempering its rhythms and balancing them with jazz music. Even though it was well received, I believe that it is possible to impose the tango in its most authentic forms.… It is difficult to achieve acceptance [imponerse] without making concessions. But it is the only possible path.”[34] For a composer and musician who had long conceived of himself as a revolutionary, the sudden concern with authenticity was strange, but it seemed to reveal Piazzolla’s frustration with the constraints imposed by the North American category of Latin. Within a few months, his refusal to make “concessions” to North American tastes would evolve into a renewed focus on the Argentine market. Free from North American preconceptions about Latin jazz, Piazzolla could now innovate from within tango. His New York quintet had made a fusion music composed of elements drawn from distinct genres, elements that remained recognizable in the blend that resulted (bongos from Latin music, improvisation from jazz, the bandoneón from tango). In Argentina, he could borrow from jazz as he saw fit without trying to make music that conformed to expectations derived from jazz. The result was a “New Tango”—tango that was infused with a jazz sensibility without including any elements that were easily recognizable as jazz.

Piazzolla’s new group, the Quinteto Nuevo Tango, was the vehicle for his most influential and innovative music. Composed of piano, electric guitar, upright bass, and violin in addition to the leader’s bandoneón, the group remained active until the early 1970s, although not without several personnel changes. Through the first half of the 1960s, the quintet recorded a series of albums for RCA and CBS and maintained an active schedule of performing in Buenos Aires clubs and touring the Argentine interior. Along the way, Piazzolla produced a large number of original compositions and elaborated a distinctive and instantly recognizable style that he would maintain largely intact for the rest of his career. Crucially, this new style was developed in Argentina for an Argentine audience; gone were the Latin percussion and jazz-style improvisation of his New York quintet. Nevertheless, the New Tango Piazzolla invented in the early 1960s bore the traces of his engagement with jazz and with classical music. In fact, without those transnational musical encounters, he could not have made the music he did.

Although Piazzolla’s new music provoked resistance from tango fans who felt that he was corrupting the genre, many of the most recognizable elements of his musical style were in fact drawn from tango traditions. Many of the new compositions featured a distinctive rhythmic pattern, often labeled 3+3+2, which accented the first, fourth, and seventh eighth note of a measure. By emphasizing this pattern, Piazzolla was explicitly breaking from the tango’s reliance on a straight, four-beat rhythm. Yet what became known as the “Piazzolla beat” had an unimpeachable tango provenance. Known in Cuban music as the tresillo, the pattern had formed the basis of various forms of Afro-Atlantic dance music at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, one form of the tresillo, the Cuban dance known as the habanera, provided the rhythmic pulse for the earliest versions of Argentine tango.[35] Traditional tango bands still played the habanera rhythm when they performed the milonga, an up-tempo precursor to the tango that had enjoyed a renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s. In this sense, Piazzolla’s 3+3+2 represented his own personal take on Argentine tradition.[36] Likewise, New Tango pieces were filled with the percussive sound effects known as yeites, all of which were well-established features of tango music before Piazzolla. Many of these effects were produced by the violinist: the rhythmic scraping called lija, the tambor (snare drum) sound made by plucking a string muted by the fingernails of the left hand, the loud slaps to the body of the instrument, the dramatic glissando known as the látigo (whip). The quintet also made extensive use of arrastre, or “dragging,” a technique of articulation central to tango performance, in which bass, piano, or bandoneón begin to play a heavily accented note before the beat, sliding up to it in pitch or volume or both.[37] Yet another feature of Piazzolla’s style that has been traced to tango tradition is his distinctive phrasing on the bandoneón, his willingness to depart rhythmically from the written score in order to add tension and emotion to his playing. The musicologist Martín Kutnowski has described both this performance style as well as certain rhythmic maneuvers typical of Piazzolla’s written scores as “instrumental rubato” and traced it to the techniques of classic tango singers like Carlos Gardel.[38] In this account, even Piazzolla’s way of phrasing a melody recalls tango tradition.

But if so much of Piazzolla’s style derived from tradition, what made his music seem so revolutionary? In part, this effect was caused by the extremes to which he pushed all these traditional elements. Many of the violin yeites were invented by Julio De Caro, and yet Piazzolla used them far more intensively, making them almost omnipresent in some of his songs. Similarly, De Caro had used the 3+3+2 pattern sporadically in his arrangements for his sextet of the late 1920s, but Piazzolla made it emblematic of his style. Piazzolla’s use of tango sound effects constituted an overt break with proper, European technique. Performing these sounds in the context of an explicitly avant-garde musical project enacted a tension between the popular and the erudite. Moreover, insofar as Piazzolla’s music was influenced by foreign musical traditions, the yeites, the arrastre, the rubato, and the 3+3+2 functioned as sonic signifiers of the tango. By breaking with the tango big band, incorporating the electric guitar, and most of all, making music for listening rather than dancing, Piazzolla produced a radical rupture in tango history. In this context, his heavy use of tango mannerisms was a way of anchoring his music to that tradition.

At the same time, many of Piazzolla’s innovations had no precedent in tango. Borrowing from Bach and no doubt drawing on his studies with Boulanger, Piazzolla made much more extensive use of counterpoint than any previous tango composer. Interwoven melodic lines are present in almost all of his work, but this aspect of his style reaches its culmination in songs that contain fugue sections. He had dabbled with the idea of a tango fugue on “Counterpoint,” a song for his New York quintet, but his first fully worked out fugal work was “Calambre” (1961) on his first album with the Quinteto Nuevo Tango. In the opening section of this song, and in the many other fugues that he would go on to compose, Piazzolla uses an essentially baroque compositional technique to create a richly polyphonic texture unlike anything else in tango. Likewise, Piazzolla’s commitment to rhythmic complexity also goes beyond any precedent in tango. Long before Piazzolla, tango bassists played the marcato, a bass line of evenly accented quarter notes reminiscent of the “walking bass” in jazz. Piazzolla used the marcato extensively, but he adapted it in two ways. First, rather than having the bass “walk” through a set of chord changes, he often employed bass ostinati, short repeated melodies that form a backdrop against which the rest of the band play more complex patterns; “Buenos Aires hora cero” (1963) is a famous example. Second, Piazzolla often set the even, four-beat rhythm of the marcato against other rhythmic patterns. In the version of “Lo que vendrá” included on the quinteto’s first album, the up-tempo third section features a strict marcato on the bass while the violin, bandoneón, and guitar play a melody in a strongly accented 3+3+2 pattern. Here are two traditional tango rhythms superimposed to create a dense, polyrhythmic effect.[39]

Though the New Tango has been described as a fusion music in which tango was mixed with elements drawn from jazz, I would argue against this interpretation.[40] After the failure of his New York quintet, Piazzolla had in fact turned his back on the project to construct a jazz-tango hybrid. Some scholars identify a walking bass in Piazzolla’s New Tango compositions, but as I have noted, these bass lines were more likely modeled on the traditional marcato. His use of ostinati reminds some listeners of the riffs common to African American music, but it also has a clear precedent in the Baroque. More generally, Piazzolla’s heavy use of syncopation might be attributed to jazz influence, but as a dance music with roots in the African diaspora, tango was heavily syncopated at its inception. In fact, Piazzolla’s approach to rhythm bore no trace of the swing beat that has been characteristic of jazz since at least the 1930s. Likewise, the New Tango contained only limited space for improvisation, generally considered fundamental to jazz practice. Unlike the Quinteto J-T, the Quinteto Nuevo Tango never followed the rotating solos model of jazz. In short, with the single exception of the electric guitar, elements clearly derived from jazz are not identifiable in this music.

It is instructive to compare Piazzolla’s music with bossa nova, the samba-jazz hybrid being developed at precisely the same time. Bossa nova emerged in large part out of the jazz scene in Rio de Janeiro; it mixed a samba beat with cool-jazz improvisation and even used the blues scale to construct many of its melodies and harmonies.[41] In this sense, the bossa nova more closely approximated the international division of labor of Latin jazz than did the New Tango. Piazzolla himself claimed that his music was superior to bossa nova precisely because it avoided the Brazilian genre’s overreliance on jazz. He described bossa nova as “ten percent authentic in its rhythm, but harmonically speaking it is pure jazz,” and he criticized Antônio Carlos Jobim for catering too much to North American tastes.[42] Later, he directed a similar criticism at Gato Barbieri, who he claimed was following the dictates of “fashion” when he created his “mélange” of Latin American styles.[43] Piazzolla thus linked hybridity with cheap commercialism; he was no longer interested in fusion.

Nevertheless, Piazzolla’s encounters with jazz were crucial to his musical vision. Recycling the apocryphal tale of hearing Gerry Mulligan’s octet perform in Paris, Piazzolla told one North American journalist, “I thought of the changes jazz had undergone from New Orleans to the Benny Goodman of 1939 to Mulligan and the Modern Jazz Quartet. And I said to myself, ‘Why isn’t the tango ready for a similar evolution?’ ”[44] Piazzolla’s choice of Mulligan and the MJQ was not incidental. These were prominent practitioners of cool jazz who specialized in an intricate interplay reminiscent of chamber music. What drew him to them was not their improvisational prowess but the sophistication of their arrangements. Piazzolla had learned the compositional technique of counterpoint from his classical studies. Yet it was the prestige of North American jazz that sanctioned his use of this technique within a popular musical form. Similarly, Piazzolla’s use of the quintet format was itself likely modeled on the small groups typical of jazz since the advent of bebop in the 1940s. Within the quinteto, as in contemporary jazz groups, each musician functioned as a soloist, a unique, expressive voice rather than an anonymous source of accompaniment or support. The very idea of a small group of virtuosos making a sophisticated version of a popular genre was a jazz concept. By 1960, jazz was full of composer/bandleaders such as Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, or the MJQ’s John Lewis. Piazzolla’s ability to imagine himself simultaneously occupying the roles of avant-garde composer, instrumentalist, and bandleader resulted from his exposure to jazz. In response to the frequent complaints from traditionalists that the music of the Quinteto Nuevo Tango was not tango, Piazzolla typically stressed his contemporaneity. The traditionalists, he argued “play and feel like they did 30 years ago.… They close themselves up within the myth of the tango … they do not participate in the general movement that is occurring around them.” By contrast, his music had, in the words of one journalist, “a current, nervous, and cosmopolitan rhythm.”[45] Piazzolla frequently claimed that his music was “contemporary music of Buenos Aires.”[46] If his audible debt to tango enabled his music to represent Buenos Aires, it was his association with jazz that justified his claim to contemporaneity.

Piazzolla’s frequent use of the English word swing further illuminates the way jazz shaped his musical approach. In interviews, he often used the term to describe his debt to old tango masters like De Caro, Alfredo Gobbi, and even Troilo, referring, for example, to “the swing of tango, something very difficult to define.”[47] For Piazzolla, swing was linked not just to the tango of the past, but specifically to its rhythmic aspects. He explained that he attempted to preserve the rhythmic “flavor” of De Caro’s tango style because “the rhythmic [elements], the percussion, the accentuation … is the most important part of tango interpretation, that which gives it swing.”[48] His account of his own musical development as a tango arranger in the 1940s linked swing to rhythm and to jazz: “I discovered that the melodic elements also had a rhythmic foundation. I began to enjoy the swing in tango. In those days I had started to enjoy jazz again.”[49] Here, Piazzolla uses the term to explain how an appreciation for jazz made him focus on the rhythmic aspects of tango. However, as he often explained, “I wanted tango swing, not jazz swing.”[50] In other words, Piazzolla invoked swing not to refer to the lilting jazz rhythm composed of uneven eighth notes, but rather to any rhythmic essence or groove; jazz and tango each had their own version. In fact, Horacio Malvicino remembered that on the limited occasions when Piazzolla would ask his musicians to improvise, he always insisted that they avoid jazz and play in a “tangoesque” way: “Let the image be Buenos Aires and not New York.”[51] Similarly, he often claimed that only Argentines could capture the essence of tango; the Italian musicians he worked with in the 1970s “impregnated my works with the smell of pizza” instead of the “aroma of asado [Argentine barbecue].”[52] In an account of a 1986 rehearsal with Malvicino, Piazzolla interrupts the guitarist and tells him to replay a passage but this time, “Put a little more force in it, more swing … play something of your own, you’re more Argentine [criollo] than mate.”[53] Swing, then, indexes rhythm, roots, personal expression, the popular essence of tango, and even Argentine authenticity. The fact that Piazzolla tended to use not just an English word but a jazz term to describe those qualities, even when speaking in Spanish to an Argentine audience, suggests that jazz enabled him to think about tango in a certain way. In particular, jazz made it possible for him to envision a modernized, contemporary, sophisticated music that somehow remained true to the essence of tango.

Jazz also definitively shaped the reception of the New Tango. Most of the quinteto’s gigs in the early 1960s took place in small, Buenos Aires nightclubs that had been envisioned as jazz performance spaces. Most famously, the group played frequently at Jamaica, where they alternated with numerous national and international jazz acts. Even at Tucumán 676, a nightclub built for Piazzolla’s group, the quinteto alternated with Argentine and North American jazz stars, including Gato Barbieri, Enrique Villegas, and Stan Getz. Similarly, when the group toured the Argentine interior in 1961, they were always booked with jazz bands.[54] The New Tango paired well with modern jazz not just because it was music for listening, but also because its pleasures were best appreciated in live performance. Even though Piazzolla had largely abandoned jazz-style improvisation, he encouraged his musicians to express themselves by phrasing the melodies as they saw fit, injecting swing into their performance, as he urged Malvicino to do. The guitarist Oscar López Ruiz, who replaced Malvicino in the band in 1961, recalled that Piazzolla would glare at him anytime he played notes that did not appear in the score. Yet López Ruiz also insisted that the group’s live performances were far superior to their recordings.[55] The freedom that Piazzolla granted his band members, although extremely limited by jazz standards, lent the group’s live performances an urgency and intensity that was reminiscent of jazz. Audience members, including very often visiting jazz musicians, would make a point of looking at the sheet music on the quinteto’s music stands because they could not believe the music they heard was all written down.[56] Jazz even provided the members of the Quinteto Nuevo Tango with their sense of fashion. The band avoided the old fashioned suits worn by most tango musicians, opting instead for the skinny ties or dark sweaters favored by the cool jazz crowd.[57]

Piazzolla’s encounter with jazz enabled him to fashion a musical style that was at once steeped in tango tradition and engaged with cosmopolitan modernity, an achievement that gave him substantial symbolic power in the Argentina of the early 1960s. His brief sojourn in New York had amplified his stature at home. Upon his return, a local television station dedicated a program to him called, in English, “Welcome Mr. Piazzolla.”[58] Over the next few years, as he formed the quinteto and invented the New Tango, the press continued to pay attention. At times, the media constructed Piazzolla as a typical member of the Argentine middle class confronting the wider world. One interview from 1962, described Piazzolla, his wife, two kids, and family dog as a picture of domestic bliss: “the Piazzolas’ [sic] ‘little house’ of music is a home.” Whereas Piazzolla was often depicted as a musical revolutionary or iconoclast, this article cast him in a much more conventional light, the patriarch and breadwinner of a happy family. Conservative gender politics made Piazzolla familiar and unthreatening to middle-class readers.[59] Most of the interview was given over to stories about the family’s experiences abroad. Piazzolla’s wife, Dedé, for example, described being shocked by the tendency of Parisian couples to kiss in public.[60] Articles like this one invited middle-class Argentines to see Piazzolla as one of them and to experience European modernity vicariously through him.

FIGURE 3.1 • The Quinteto Nuevo Tango performs on Argentine television, 1962: Astor Piazzolla on bandoneón, Kicho Díaz on bass, Oscar López Ruiz on guitar, Antonio Agri on violin. Pianist Jaime Gosis is out of the frame on the left. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación.

By the mid-1960s, Piazzolla represented an ideal version of masculine, middle-class identity. The journalist and newscaster Bernardo Neustadt, who urged the middle class to assume the political and cultural leadership of the nation, made Piazzolla a frequent guest of his program.[61] On one occasion, Neustadt invited him along with several other figures from the worlds of politics, sports, and entertainment to identify Argentines of the past and present who deserved to be considered “idols.” All of the invited guests, as well as all of the celebrities nominated for idol status, were men. A still from the program published in the magazine Gente makes Piazzolla’s prominence clear: he sits at the center of the image, facing the camera with Neustadt and the other guests arrayed around him, and while all the other men wear suits and ties, Piazzolla sports his habitual dark sweater (see figure 3.2). His informal attire and assertive pose mark him as the quintessential modern, cosmopolitan, male intellectual. Piazzolla, who had been reticent to express his political views, was increasingly asked for his opinion of Peronism. He acknowledged that Perón had made some important advances in his first term and he disavowed the label gorila, reserved for the movement’s most hostile opponents. However, he now publicly identified himself as anti-Peronist.[62] Given his enthusiasm for engaging with foreign styles, his opposition to Peronism was no surprise, but it certainly reinforced his connection to the middle class. When, in the late 1960s, Neustadt made Piazzolla’s “Fuga y misterio” the theme music to his influential television news program, the New Tango became almost a soundtrack for the modernizing project of the Argentine middle class.[63]

FIGURE 3.2 • Piazzolla (second from left) on Bernardo Neustadt’s television show. Gente (January 27, 1966), 15.

This cosmopolitan, modernizing, middle-class worldview had its most prominent expression in Primera Plana, the magazine founded in 1962 by journalist Jacobo Timerman. In its coverage of politics as well as cultural and social trends, Primera Plana combined cosmopolitanism with nationalism, covering international fads and celebrating Argentine achievements with patriotic fervor. Modeled on Time, Newsweek, and Le Monde, it addressed readers as a hip community, informed of the latest trends in Europe and the United States. In its emphasis on economic modernization, it was reminiscent of Rogelio Frigerio’s developmentalist magazine, Qué. However, in the wake of President Frondizi’s failure to build a class alliance and to reintegrate Peronist workers into the political system, Primera Plana was less committed to democracy. In both its advertising, which encouraged well-heeled businessmen to pursue conspicuous consumption, and its famous best-seller lists, which packaged the literary tastes of its university-educated readers, the magazine was fundamentally elitist.[64]

In the early 1960s, Piazzolla appeared several times in Primera Plana, culminating in May 1965, when the magazine put him on its cover, illustrating a lengthy article on the innovative musicians redefining jazz, tango, and Argentine folk music in Buenos Aires nightclubs, “modifying them, improving them, with resources that the creators of these genres never imagined.”[65] Piazzolla was a logical choice for the cover; his insistence on the contemporaneity of his music matched Primera Plana’s emphasis on hipness. As a version of tango in dialogue with modern jazz, Piazzolla’s music perfectly symbolized the magazine’s brand of cosmopolitan nationalism. Insisting on the need for renovation, he spoke for many Argentines who hoped their nation could contribute to the international cutting edge. As Piazzolla put it, “The country has a very poor image abroad. Argentina means steak. And nothing else. They confuse us with Brazil.”[66] After the cover story on Piazzolla, Primera Plana’s letters-to-the-editor section became a forum for the controversy surrounding the New Tango. While some readers disapproved of his assault on tango tradition, others wrote to express their admiration for this “revolutionary” whose music was “in accordance with the epoch.”[67] Piazzolla’s vanguardism was enticing to readers who wanted to see themselves as sophisticated and up-to-date.

The Argentine media defined Piazzolla’s music by means of two contrasts. In order to establish his avant-garde credentials, many articles paired him with his former employer, Aníbal Troilo. In interviews, Piazzolla described Troilo as the “essence of the tango,” but he also accused him of stagnating musically.[68] While the contrast with Troilo underscored the novelty and hipness of the New Tango, other articles aimed to draw out the music’s artistic ambitions. Toward this end, Piazzolla’s project was often contrasted with the music of the so-called Nueva Ola, a group of singers who appealed to a young audience with local versions of rock and roll and other foreign genres. For sophisticated music critics, the Nueva Ola represented cheap commercialism and the degradation of popular tastes. Primera Plana fumed that Piazzolla and the other musical innovators of Buenos Aires appealed only to a small minority and earned very little money while “records, radio and television have their own idols: Nueva Ola singers who pivot on the collective psychosis and belong less to the field of music than to that of publicity.”[69] Although some of Piazzolla’s fans attributed his lack of mass appeal entirely to the fact that he was not promoted the way the Nueva Ola stars were, Primera Plana acknowledged that unlike the latest hits, New Tango songs were difficult to whistle. In short, Piazzolla was everything these pop stars were not: their music was easy, his was difficult; theirs was commercial, his was artistic; theirs was purely imitative, his was cosmopolitan yet still authentically Argentine. These contrasts helped the magazine imbue a taste for Piazzolla with cultural capital.

FIGURE 3.3 • Piazzolla on the cover of Primera Plana. Primera Plana (May 25, 1965).

As a sophisticated artistic practice in dialogue with the international vanguard, Piazzolla’s project was of a piece with the artistic flowering occurring at the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires. In the wake of the 1955 coup, the journalist, critic, and curator Jorge Romero Brest led a powerful movement to resurrect the abstract and modernist artistic styles disdained by the Perón regime and to establish Buenos Aires as a center of international art. During the 1960s, the symbolic center of this movement was the Instituto Di Tella, with its vast collection of modern art, its prize competitions, and its sponsorship of local avant-garde artists. Throughout the decade, porteños were increasingly able to attend cutting-edge exhibitions from abroad, even as local artists achieved a new level of recognition in Europe and the United States.[70] Up to a point, Piazzolla’s music offered an apt soundtrack to these developments in the visual arts. As the detailed liner notes to the Quinteto Nuevo Tango’s albums made clear, this was difficult, avant-garde music, inaccessible to the untrained ear and every bit as challenging as modernist art. Yet by playing tango, Piazzolla rooted his art in local, popular culture in a way that most artists exhibited at the Instituto Di Tella did not. Tellingly, when Piazzolla compared himself to visual artists, he chose not the most challenging avant-gardists, but the figurative painter Juan Carlos Castagnino and the socially conscious New Realist, Antonio Berni, whom he labeled “authentic national creators.”[71] Like Berni, whose work adorned the walls of Tucumán 676, Piazzolla aimed to produce an art that was in dialogue with contemporary trends even as it retained an insistent localism.

In addition to his works for the quintet, Piazzolla continued to compose art music for the concert hall. Nevertheless, he explained his music by analogy not to contemporary avant-garde composers but to jazz. Thus he justified his aversion to following the latest fads by citing the trumpeter Lee Morgan, and he argued that even popular musicians required musical training by insisting that “today, as occurs with jazz, it is absolutely necessary to know music, and well.”[72] Jazz provided the musical model for his effort to reconcile cosmopolitanism and nationalism, contemporaneity and tradition, avant-gardism and artistic populism. While he never achieved a mass audience, he did sell a substantial number of records, earning some 754,000 pesos in royalties in 1965.[73] His music—or imitations of his music—provided the soundtrack to television programs and commercials. His records were symbols of hip sophistication, conveying prestige on their consumers. Piazzolla’s engagement with jazz made the New Tango an essential part of the musical landscape in Buenos Aires.

Yet while the Quinteto Nuevo Tango was establishing itself in Argentina, Piazzolla had far less success in achieving his old dream of winning over a North American audience. In May 1965, the government of President Arturo Illia sent the quintet along with tango singer Edmundo Rivero and folk group Los Huanca Hua to perform twice in Washington, DC, and once at Philharmonic Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center. Piazzolla’s inclusion alongside two traditionalist acts reveals the extent to which he had come to represent the modern, cosmopolitan version of Argentine national identity. In the United States, though, these performances made very little impression. Despite earning a positive review from Robert Shelton in the New York Times, Piazzolla would not return to New York for over a decade. Shelton’s review suggests that North American listeners may have found it difficult to make sense of the New Tango: “Sometimes the quintet sounded like a 1920-ish ballroom dance band, then like a Chico Hamilton–Fred Katz modern jazz combo, then it suggested a classical quintet turning from chamber music to bossa nova.”[74] Piazzolla’s music did not obey the international division of labor—Latin rhythm plus jazz harmony, instrumentation, and improvisation—that had made bossa nova accessible to U.S. audiences. Nor did he embody a recognizable Latin persona in the way Gato Barbieri was soon to do. He was neither using Latin American aesthetics to ornament a North American genre, nor selling a recognizable form of cultural difference. As a result, Piazzolla would not develop a substantial following in the United States until the 1980s.

Rock, Jazz Fusion, World Music

For some observers, the late 1960s and early 1970s mark the beginning of a period of artistic stagnation for Piazzolla. Some have attributed this decline to a tendency to recycle old formulas, while others point to a series of personal struggles, including the breakup of his first marriage in 1966 and a heart attack in 1973. Without dismissing these factors, I would argue that the ups and downs of Piazzolla’s career also reflect deep changes in transnational, popular music markets. The invention of the New Tango was made possible by the existence in the United States of a certain style of jazz: a sophisticated, urbane, carefully arranged, and cosmopolitan music played by small groups of virtuosos for a knowledgeable audience in smoky nightclubs. By the late 1960s, though, cool jazz had been largely eclipsed by the politicized emotionalism of free jazz as well as by fusion, which aimed to appeal to the much larger rock audience. Once cutting edge, Piazzolla’s jazz allusions—musical, sartorial, and otherwise—seemed increasingly old-fashioned. At the same time, the advent of youth as a major marketing category reshaped popular music all over the world. In Argentina, this trend had been visible since the emergence of the Nueva Ola in the early 1960s. Piazzolla had thrived by offering an artistic alternative to those disillusioned with the crass commercialism of the new pop music. But in the wake of the Beatles, young Argentines began to find authentic forms of musical expression in new, domestic versions of rock music. As tastes shifted in response to transnational trends, Piazzolla found himself cut off from his audience. During the late 1960s, he disbanded the Quinteto Nuevo Tango and adopted a range of strategies aimed partly at attracting young Argentine fans. None of these were ultimately successful until new developments in transnational music markets created new opportunities.

Between 1968 and 1976, Piazzolla embarked on a series of new projects that pushed his music in several different directions. In partnership with the tango poet and lyricist Horacio Ferrer, Piazzolla wrote the “operita,” María de Buenos Aires. The work garnered only mixed reviews and failed to attract as big an audience as its creators had hoped, but Piazzolla and Ferrer followed it up with the song “Balada para un loco.” Sung by Piazzolla’s new muse and love interest, Amelita Baltar, the song became, in the words of one newspaper, “the great porteño musical boom of 1969.”[75] Having come as close as he ever would to a hit song, Piazzolla leveraged his celebrity to return to his avant-garde roots. In 1971, he formed a nonet—the Conjunto 9—and secured a contract from the Buenos Aires municipal government to subsidize a regular series of concerts. If his work with Ferrer had been aimed at a broader audience, the new pieces he wrote for the nonet were every bit as challenging as those he had written in the early 1960s. Yet the new work failed to capture a significant audience, and the municipality declined to renew the contract. In 1974, Piazzolla signed a deal with the Italian agent Aldo Pagani and moved to Rome. Based in Europe during the next few years, he was extremely productive, appearing frequently on television and in concert, writing music for films, as well as composing and recording more broadly accessible versions of New Tango.

To a significant extent, these diverse musical projects can all be understood as a reaction to two developments that had disrupted Piazzolla’s relationship with his Argentine audience: the emergence of rock nacional and the deepening of social conflict and political repression. The New Tango had acquired cultural capital in the early 1960s by steering a path between the old-fashioned tango of Aníbal Troilo and the imitative pop of the Nueva Ola. In this way, it aptly expressed the modernizing, cosmopolitan nationalism of the porteño middle class. However, by the late 1960s, Piazzolla’s music sounded different. Reviewers of María de Buenos Aires found the music familiar: “Piazzolla … continues an aesthetic line that does not depart from his well-known trajectory, with the inevitable rhythmic treatment that characterizes many of his songs and with the nostalgic note that connects directly with the porteño tango tradition.”[76] The composer’s tendency to replicate his own musical gestures might account for this sense of familiarity, but for the iconoclastic, revolutionary New Tango to evoke nostalgia something must have shifted in the context of reception. Piazzolla’s music alluded unmistakably to classic tango and to cool jazz. For Argentine listeners in the late 1960s, who were increasingly immersed in rock music, these two genres were deeply out of style. At the same time, the New Tango was also associated with the developmentalist projects of the Frondizi era. The middle-class dream of cosmopolitan modernization may well have survived the 1966 military coup that shuttered Argentine democracy. Yet social conflict and state violence were increasing, a trend that would culminate in 1969 with massive, popular uprisings in Córdoba, Rosario, and elsewhere. In the context of deepening polarization, those earlier political projects—premised on the optimistic pursuit of a class alliance—seemed to belong to a very different era, and Piazzolla’s music lost its capacity to represent contemporary Buenos Aires.

Piazzolla responded to this challenge by borrowing from rock. Impressed by the commitment of young Argentine rockers to artistic authenticity over commercialism, he applauded them for having “swept away” the Nueva Ola by offering music that was “an expression of spiritual necessities.”[77] Piazzolla was ambivalent about rock nacional: he criticized Argentine rockers like Charly García and insisted that they would only fulfill their potential when they studied the works of modern composers like Bartok and Schoenberg. Still, he believed that any contemporary music capable of appealing to young people needed to engage with “the noise … all of that crazy thing that all of us like.”[78] As Fischerman and Gilbert argue, the influence of post–Sgt. Pepper’s rock is apparent in the increasing length of Piazzolla’s new songs as well as their structure. In place of the elaborate counterpoint of his earlier work, many of his new pieces were built on a succession of solos. Piazzolla seemed to have turned away from the cool jazz of the early 1960s in order to engage with the progressive rock of groups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer. This influence was apparent in his choice of instrumentation as well: on his first Italian album, Libertango, from 1974, Piazzolla’s ensemble included drums, electric bass, and a Hammond organ.[79] At the same time, Piazzolla gave up skinny ties, grew a beard and affected a hippie look.[80]

Piazzolla’s effort to reconnect with young audiences in Argentina and elsewhere, as well as to place himself back on the cutting edge of popular music culminated in the formation of the Conjunto Electrónico in 1975. Explicitly modeled on such jazz fusion bands as Weather Report and Return to Forever, the new group included electric bass, synthesizer, and perhaps most strikingly, drums. In a sense, fusion provided an obvious model for Piazzolla. By incorporating electric instruments and rock rhythms, established jazz musicians like Miles Davis, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock were crafting a genre that could claim both the artistic seriousness of jazz and the mass appeal of rock. Fusion thus offered Piazzolla the possibility of connecting to a large transnational audience while continuing to make serious music for listening. The new band toured Brazil, played New York’s Carnegie Hall, disbanded and then reunited for one final performance in December 1976 at the Gran Rex Theatre in Buenos Aires. The concert was a major event, attracting a sellout crowd and a great deal of coverage from the media. For Argentine rock musicians and fans, the Conjunto Electrónico amounted to a gesture of support from an old master; it began to heal the generational rift between rock and tango and even encouraged some rockers to experiment with incorporating the bandoneón in their own music.[81]

FIGURE 3.4 • Piazzolla in the 1970s. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación.

Piazzolla’s experiment in fusion represented a major departure. For his European recordings of 1974, he had already incorporated drums and electric bass, and he had simplified his arrangements, opting for a standard string section instead of the rich, multipart counterpoint of the quinteto. But for the Conjunto Electrónico, he went much further. The changes are audible on the live recording of “500 Motivaciones,” an eleven-minute jam Piazzolla composed for the Grand Rex concert.[82] Instead of the tango yeites of his earlier work, the piece is filled with the electronic sounds of the synthesizer, drum rolls, and an electric guitar scratching out chords in funk style. Most notably though, the piece does away almost entirely with Piazzolla’s rhythmic signature, the 3+3+2, and in fact with any rhythmic allusion to tango tradition. With the exception of violinist Antonio Agri, all of the musicians in the Conjunto Electrónico came from jazz backgrounds (including Piazzolla’s son Daniel, who played the synthesizer), a sign of Piazzolla’s intent to move even further from tango tradition. Bassist Adalberto Cevasco, just a couple of years after his work on Gato Barbieri’s Impulse albums, avoids marcato and arrastre entirely in favor of a busy style reminiscent of other fusion bassists.

Poet and rock critic Miguel Grinberg criticized “500 Motivaciones” for its lack of originality: “It refries for an uninformed public the dominant sound (here with a bandoneón) of Euroamerican jazz-rock. In short, Astor Piazzolla, without wanting to, has become traditional.”[83] Piazzolla would soon reach the same conclusion. After playing a series of concerts in Paris in 1977 with a new version of the Conjunto Electrónico, Piazzolla abandoned the fusion experiment entirely. Asked later why he turned away from electric instruments and the drum set, he explained, “Because it sounds like American or English music, and for that there is Herbie Hancock. I prefer to be myself.”[84] The account he offered Natalio Gorín was even more illuminating:

The French, who know my work well, questioned me: “What’s up with you, Piazzolla? What are you doing with this group? The world is full of electric guitars and basses, synthesizers and organs. Doing this you are only one more in the bunch. But with the acoustic instruments you have one of the best groups in the world. Go back to the Quintet.” I thought about it and concluded, these people are right. I am Piazzolla. My music is related to tango.… The group sounded nice, true, but it was not true Piazzolla. In those days, Chick Corea’s electric band, Return to Forever, was in fashion, and I got carried away.[85]

Renouncing the Conjunto Electrónico as derivative, an attempt to copy international trends, Piazzolla grounded his own change of heart in the aesthetic judgment of French listeners. Just a few years earlier, his move to Europe led to Libertango, an effort to craft a more broadly accessible version of his music. Now, by contrast, appealing to European tastes entailed a return to the New Tango style he had invented in the early 1960s. In part, this about-face reflected the perennial difficulty of achieving popularity and cosmopolitan hipness without selling out or diluting his Argentine authenticity. But by abandoning fusion, Piazzolla was also responding to an important shift in the European and North American musical soundscape. This shift, which would culminate in the late 1980s with the advent of “world music” as a marketing category, entailed a new interest in exotic popular music genres from the underdeveloped world. By the late 1970s, Piazzolla began to recognize that he could successfully reach an international audience by “being myself,” that is, by offering the New Tango as an expression of his national identity.

Ironically, in order to satisfy the new Euro-American demand for musical difference, Piazzolla needed to reconfigure his music as an expression of Argentineness. This entailed both a return to the quintet format and a literal return to Buenos Aires. In an interview with the press, he stressed that he was coming home in order to renew his contact with “the nontransferable landscape of Buenos Aires,” to be closer to the memory of Troilo, who had died three years earlier, and “to experience a resurrection in the soul of what was the golden age of the 1940s.”[86] Piazzolla thus envisioned his move as a deliberate deepening of his connection to Argentina and its tango tradition. His new quintet included the jazz pianist Pablo Zeigler, but the violinist and bassist were both tango veterans, and the guitar chair was reserved for familiar faces: first, Oscar López Ruiz, who played in the Quinteto Nuevo Tango for most of the 1960s, and later Horacio Malvicino, a founding member of the Octeto Buenos Aires in 1955. Beginning in May 1978, the new quintet played eight shows per week at the Auditorio Buenos Aires and then launched an extended run of international touring. As the world music trend developed over the course of the 1980s, Piazzolla’s new music was well suited to European and North American tastes. As Thomas Turino has argued, the musicians who achieved commercial success in the world music market in the 1980s combined “foreign distinctiveness” with aesthetics that were accessible to cosmopolitan audiences.[87] Piazzolla’s bandoneón as well as the distinctive articulation and yeites played on the violin and bass satisfied the former requirement, while the New Tango’s deep engagement with 1950s-era jazz fulfilled the latter. As a result, it was in this period that Piazzolla finally achieved international stardom.

Whereas most world music appealed to fans of rock, Piazzolla’s music found a different niche. The new quintet’s first foreign gig was in Brazil at São Paulo’s First International Jazz Festival in September 1978. The festival was a collaboration with the Montreux Jazz Festival, and its lineup reflected the eclectic vision of Claude Nobs, the longtime director of the Swiss event. Almost since its inception in 1967, Montreux had featured American rock, blues, and soul musicians alongside performers from across the jazz spectrum. In 1978, Nobs created a “Brazil night,” including performances by Gilberto Gil, Airto Moreira, and choro band A Cor Do Som. The São Paulo Festival later that year was an extension of this effort. Among the performers were North American jazz icons Dizzy Gillespie, Chick Corea, and Benny Carter and local heroes Milton Nascimento, Egberto Gismondi, and Hermeto Pascoal. But the big attraction on opening night was none other than Astor Piazzolla. During the next decade, as the quintet toured extensively in Japan, Europe, and the Americas, it was frequently featured at jazz festivals. Although the presence of Piazzolla in these festivals struck some Argentine observers (and occasionally Piazzolla himself) as odd, it reflected the influence of world music on the international jazz scene. Following the quintet’s performance at the Montreal International Jazz Festival of 1984, one Canadian critic raved, “The compositions of the Argentine creator derive from the tango of his country, but they are modern, original, biting, overwhelming, and irresistible.”[88] Foreign listeners steeped in the vanguardism of modern jazz responded to Piazzolla’s music as a modernist take on a rich, national tradition.

At the Montreal festival, Piazzolla renewed contact with jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton (they had met in Buenos Aires in 1965, when Burton accompanied Stan Getz on a South American tour), and the two made plans to work together. Piazzolla composed new material for the collaboration, and Burton played with the quintet in the group’s swing through the European jazz festival circuit in 1985. Their performance at Montreux was recorded and released on Warner Brothers. In his memoir, Burton discusses the apprehension he felt about playing with the quintet: “Astor Piazzolla’s music is very complex and intrinsically modern—qualities I admire in jazz, as well, but tango is the national music of another country, and it took me a while to get over that.”[89] Here again is the combination of accessibility and difference that attracted jazz musicians and fans to the New Tango. In earlier periods, musicians achieved commercial success with hybrids of Latin American genres and jazz. The Afro-Cuban jazz of Machito, bossa nova, the third worldism of Gato Barbieri, and the Cuban- and Brazilian-influenced work of fusion groups like Return to Forever are all examples of this sort of hybrid. Piazzolla’s entrance into the international jazz scene of the 1980s was different. The pieces that Piazzolla wrote for his set with Burton were classic New Tango; the composer made no concessions to jazz rhythm, improvisation, or phrasing. By “being myself,” returning to his style of the early 1960s, Piazzolla appealed to the desire of jazz musicians and fans to experience music that was as complex and modern as jazz but arose from a different, even exotic tradition.

Piazzolla appealed to North American world-music sensibilities precisely because he now avoided any association with Latin music. As modern dance music built on Afro-Caribbean traditions, Latin genres like salsa and merengue would seem to have fit the world-music model. Yet even as they gained enormous audiences among U.S. Latinos and throughout Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, these genres were ignored by world music audiences and record labels. For these audiences, Latin music was tainted by its popularity among working-class, Latino communities; it sounded like crass commercialism rather than the expression of an exotic tradition. By contrast, when Cuban music began to trickle back into the United States with the slight easing of the trade embargo in the early 1990s, its overt Afro-Cuban aesthetic made it sound and look exotic, and the world music industry responded enthusiastically.[90] Piazzolla’s case is similar, even if he did not choose to highlight the tango’s African roots. Like salsa and merengue artists, successful world-music acts like the Nigerian King Sunny Adé, the Zimbabwean Thomas Mapfumo, or the Cuban Buena Vista Social Club offered hybrid musical forms that combined foreign musical traditions with modern aesthetics that were familiar to cosmopolitan audiences. But they were hybrids that presented themselves as irreducibly different. Having abandoned his fusion experiments of the 1970s, Piazzolla now appealed in precisely this way.

Thanks to this repackaging, Piazzolla finally gained a significant North American audience in the late 1980s, when he joined with producer Kip Hanrahan to make a series of albums for Hanrahan’s small American Clavé label. Piazzolla was introduced to Hanrahan by Horacio Malvicino, whose son worked as a sound engineer for American Clavé. Piazzolla had been frustrated by his inability to lure young audiences away from rock, and he was likely attracted to Hanrahan’s youth (Hanrahan was thirty-three years younger than the Argentine) as well as to his reputation as an avant-garde musician with big ears. On several albums released in the early 1980s, Hanrahan had assembled a diverse collective of musicians in order to produce a complex, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable blend of jazz, rock, and Cuban music. These albums were particularly well received in French publications like Le Monde, whose critic described Hanrahan as “the Jean-Luc Godard of music today.”[91] Still, Hanrahan grew up in the Bronx and had deep roots in Cuban-derived music. Thus, just as it had in 1958, Piazzolla’s effort to build a North American audience once again entailed collaborating with elements of the New York Latin jazz scene. Nevertheless, the results were very different this time around. Like Gary Burton, Hanrahan recognized Piazzolla first and foremost as a tango musician, and he heard tango as a distinctive musical tradition with a behind-the-beat rhythmic feel that contrasted sharply with that of Cuban music. Partly as a result, Hanrahan restrained his own impulse to experiment with Piazzolla, recording two albums—Tango Zero Hour (1986) and La Camorra: Solitude of a Passionate Provocation (1989)—that featured the current lineup of the quintet playing a mixture of recent compositions and classic pieces from Piazzolla’s oeuvre.[92] Tango Zero Hour opens with a cacophony of laughter and chatter as the band chants a sort of New Tango formula: “Tango, tango, tragedia, tragedia, comedia, comedia, quilombo, quilombo (a lunfardo word for ‘brothel’ or ‘mess’)”. This gesture, unprecedented for a Piazzolla album, had the effect of exoticizing the music, implying that its roots lay in a mysterious and alien culture, and thereby positioning the music within a world-music frame.

Hanrahan’s careful mastering and the individual styles of the players are noticeable throughout the two albums, yet the new versions of older material—“Milonga del Angel” from 1965, “Michelangelo ’70,” “Soledad” and “Fugata” from 1969, “Concierto para Quinteto” from 1971—differ only subtly from their originals. Piazzolla’s decision to revisit pieces from this particular period—when the New Tango had achieved its definitive form in the hands of the earlier quintet—reveals a strategic calculation: this was the musical style best suited to appeal to the new demand for world music. This is not to suggest that Piazzolla was no longer capable of producing anything new. On the contrary, the new pieces on the American Clavé albums are impressive, particularly the three-part “La Camorra” suite, which, as Omar García Brunelli has demonstrated, manages to combine a series of variations on the “Rain Chant” from Woodstock with clear stylistic allusions to the aggressive, or canyengue, sound of early tango.[93] “La Camorra” reveals that having returned to the quintet-based, New Tango of the 1960s, Piazzolla found that he had not yet exhausted its potential for original expression.

Before the 1980s, Piazzolla’s attempts to attract a North American audience had largely failed. After recording an album with the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan in 1974, he told the Argentine press that he hoped the collaboration would allow him to penetrate the U.S. market, even that it would achieve for the New Tango what Stan Getz’s recordings had for bossa nova.[94] Instead, Piazzolla was largely ignored in the United States. His 1976 Carnegie Hall performance was poorly attended and failed to impress the critics.[95] North American music writers dismissed his work as “predictable high-class kitsch” or complained that all of his pieces sounded the same.[96] In the early 1980s, though, conditions began to shift, particularly in New York. This period saw a flowering of Latin jazz in the city with the emergence of a new generation of Latino bandleaders like Jerry González and Jorge Dalto as well as a host of active performance spaces, including the famous Monday night “Salsa Meets Jazz” series at the Village Gate.[97] These collaborations and fusions helped bring the rhythms of salsa to a mainstream audience. In 1982, Larry Gold opened the downtown nightclub, Sounds of Brazil (S.O.B.’s), whose offerings quickly expanded from Brazilian music to world music more generally. In the context of this new receptiveness to music from Latin America, tango acquired new visibility in the city: 1981 saw the surprising commercial success of the first album by the Tango Project, a New York trio led by Juilliard-trained accordionist, Bill Schimmel. Then, in 1985, Tango Argentino, featuring the work of legendary dancer and choreographer Juan Carlos Copes, opened on Broadway, earning rave reviews and packed houses. The show, which included several Piazzolla pieces, reignited North American interest in the tango and paved the way for a series of triumphant New York performances by Piazzolla. Throughout the late 1980s, his U.S. performances and American Clavé albums inspired nothing but enthusiasm. By 1988, the Washington Post included Piazzolla in a survey of the new “world music” that was transforming the pop music scene.[98]

In his self-presentation to North American audiences, Piazzolla walked a fine line, stressing both his status as a musical innovator and his Argentine authenticity. In every interview he gave to North American critics, Piazzolla rehashed his own biography, emphasizing the extent to which the classic tango musicians had initially rejected the New Tango. This narrative positioned Piazzolla as a modernist revolutionary, an effect reinforced by the critics’ tendency to stress the cosmopolitan influences in his music. Jon Pareles, for example, noted a range of influences on Piazzolla, including Bach, Bartok, Ravel, and “boogie-woogie bass lines.” Yet after noting the music’s debt to classical music and jazz, Pareles concluded the article with a Piazzolla quotation that emphasized his identity: “In Buenos Aires you live this kind of music, and my music is a part of the city. No one can play a waltz like the Viennese or a bossa nova like the Brazilians; nobody can play a tango like us.”[99] In the context of the world music boom and the new American receptiveness to foreign music, Piazzolla described himself less as an iconoclastic innovator and more as the bearer of an authentic tradition.

Even though Piazzolla had reassembled the quintet with an eye toward the European and North American markets, the strategy also paid dividends in Argentina. To a certain extent, this was an instance of the familiar phenomenon whereby first world success translates into prestige at home. But there was more to it than that. In 1979, Miguel Grinberg, who just three years earlier had roundly dismissed the Conjunto Electrónico, raved about a Buenos Aires club date by the quinteto:

Not everything Piazzolla has done in these decades has been on target. But Tuesday in the Fantasy Cinema, the man and the musician stood up in a unique image of harmony, in one of those sounds that penetrates to the bones.… I remember one night 14 years ago, in the now-disappeared Altillo Theater, a performance of Astor Piazzolla’s Quinteto Nuevo Tango.… All of us were, of course, younger in our skin and in our dreams.… We are older now. And if the years have altered people’s paths and changed the face of the city, that music prevails and has grown. And it hits hard, how it hits, and it brings, in addition to its urban cadence and the pain that does not fade away, the gaze of those who died, the caress and the smile, infinite walks until dawn, children asleep in the garden of innocence.… Another decade ends and Piazzolla is more current than ever.[100]

Piazzolla’s music had already begun to provoke nostalgia in Argentine listeners during the late 1960s, and Grinberg’s account suggests that this effect persisted. But Grinberg was not simply describing a generic nostalgia. His use of the term disappeared and his references to “those who died” and to lost innocence were veiled allusions to the brutal repression then being carried out by Argentina’s military government. Just three days before Grinberg’s article was published, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had concluded a two-week visit to Argentina to investigate claims of human rights abuses, and for the first time the accusations of human rights organizations were now receiving substantial (if largely dismissive) coverage in the heavily censored Argentine media.[101] This context sharpened the nostalgic associations evoked by Piazzolla’s current music, based as it was on a model built in the period before the violent dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. Grinberg’s commentary suggests that the New Tango now reminded many Argentines of a period they associated with innocence and optimism.

In the aftermath of the transition to democracy in 1983, the capacity of Piazzolla’s music to provoke nostalgia was recognized and reinforced by filmmaker Fernando “Pino” Solanas. Solanas, a leftist activist and one of the founders of Argentina’s Cine Liberación, was forced to leave the country shortly after the 1976 coup. After the fall of the dictatorship, he began work on a film that would capture the experience of Argentines in exile. A French-Argentine coproduction, Tangos: El exilio de Gardel (1985) tells the story of a group of Argentine exiles in Paris who are trying to produce a work of music, theater, and dance—a “tanguedia”—based on messages sent to them from a compatriot still living in Buenos Aires. The film opens with an image of a bridge over the Seine. Next we see a bandoneonist in the shadows under the bridge and hear the first strains of “Duo de Amor,” one of several compositions Piazzolla wrote for the film. As the whole quintet joins in on the soundtrack, a couple appears on the bridge and dances a balletic tango. The opening image of the bridge and the explicit linkage of tango music and dance with recognizable images of Paris (including Notre Dame Cathedral) symbolize the feelings of “in-betweenness” and displacement characteristic of exile.[102] They also evoke the tension in Piazzolla’s music between cosmopolitan influences and tango tradition and between producing world music for European and North American audiences and tango for Argentines.

At first blush, Solanas’s decision to turn to Piazzolla for his film’s soundtrack seems strange. While Piazzolla’s politics had never been particularly coherent, his anti-Peronism and his failure to distance himself from the military government made him an unlikely ally for this militant of the Peronist left.[103] Yet Solanas wanted to avoid restricting the audience for Tangos to those Argentines who shared his political affiliation: “[In Tangos] I don’t speak from the political position of certain exile sectors. I speak from the position of a united Argentine people, faced with one overwhelming enemy—the military dictatorship and its foreign accomplices.”[104] Here, the tango—which the well-meaning French characters in the film do not quite understand—represents a unifying Argentine national identity. But why, then, Piazzolla, who had so famously broken with national tradition by incorporating foreign influences? As a young man, Solanas had worked as a music reporter for Frigerio’s developmentalist news magazine, Qué.[105] Years later, he reminisced about the powerful way Piazzolla’s New Tango spoke to his generation: “When we heard that Octeto Buenos Aires, we could not believe it. It filled an emptiness in us; it was something that we had never imagined but we needed.”[106] Solanas made his debut as a filmmaker in 1962, just as Piazzolla launched his tango revolution. For Solanas, as for Grinberg, who was just one year his junior, Piazzolla evoked the optimism of his youth. For the many Argentines who saw Solanas’s prize-winning film, Piazzolla’s music was now directly linked to this generationally specific nostalgia. Solanas deepened the association by employing another Piazzolla soundtrack in Sur (1988), a film that recounts the story of a young man released from prison at the end of the dictatorship.

Although Piazzolla never attracted a huge audience in Argentina—with self-deprecation, he referred to himself as “two Rexes,” meaning that he had enough local fans to sell out Buenos Aires’s Gran Rex Theatre two times but no more[107]—he did enjoy substantial prestige in the 1980s. In June 1983, a few months before the elections that would restore Argentine democracy, he performed with a nonet and a symphonic orchestra at the Colón Theatre, the nation’s most prestigious temple of high culture. Over the next several years, the press followed his movements closely, lavishing praise on every new performance and celebrating his triumphs abroad. To North American critics and collaborators like Jon Pareles, Gary Burton, and Kip Hanrahan, Piazzolla’s music sounded like an innovative, modernist take on a distinctive, national tradition. By contrast, for Argentine listeners, the music was comforting in its familiarity. As the critic Napoleón Cabrera put it in his review of a 1983 show, “Twenty years were nothing, because Astor’s journey was foreseeable then, and he is accomplishing it now.”[108] For René Vargas Vera, reviewing a performance three years later, the first song of the night was immediately recognizable: “In that first number is almost all the Piazzolla we recognize: the syncopated whirlwind, the lyrical intermission of slow, long notes and accelerated short ones.”[109] In the late 1960s, this sense of recognition brought accusations of staleness, but by the 1980s, familiarity was cause for celebration. As they confronted the multiple challenges of the democratic transition, many Argentines seemed to welcome what they heard as a musical reminder of an earlier time.

Astor Piazzolla’s music, as well as the meanings that attached to it, emerged from the complex interaction between transnational and national contexts. His studies in the European classical tradition gave him many of the compositional tools that he would bring to bear on the tango, while the cool jazz of the 1950s provided him a model of how to do so. Yet he was unable to fully satisfy North American expectations of Latin music and, as a result, he failed to capture a significant audience in the United States. This failure actually facilitated his musical innovations of the early 1960s, since it encouraged him to avoid the fusion strategy that characterized bossa nova and other styles of Latin jazz. In other words, the New Tango sounded the way it did partly because Piazzolla failed to gain access to the United States market. By innovating from within tango, he crafted a music that reconciled modernity and Argentine authenticity and perfectly expressed the cosmopolitan nationalism of the porteño middle class in the post-Perón era. In the 1980s, the world music boom transformed tastes in the United States, creating a belated opportunity for the New Tango to capture a North American audience. Piazzolla’s efforts to appeal to the exoticist impulses of North American audiences led him to revisit an earlier style at the very moment that nostalgic Argentine audiences hungered for a reminder of the era before military dictatorship and violent social conflict. Piazzolla’s route through these transnational structures was almost the mirror image of Gato Barbieri’s. Barbieri built a U.S. audience in the 1970s by adopting a Latin identity and appealing to conventional tastes for Latin music. Yet precisely because it embraced a long-standing, North American commercial aesthetic, Barbieri’s Latin jazz was not of interest to the world-music audiences of the 1980s and 1990s, who sought more exotic products. By contrast, Piazzolla never succeeded in attaching himself to Latin sounds or styles. At the time of his death in 1992, he remained, both at home and abroad, a powerful symbol of a cosmopolitan Argentine national identity.

4

THE SOUND OF LATIN AMERICA

Sandro and the Invention of Balada

In the 1960s, when Astor Piazzolla’s middle-class fans were reimagining their nation in a sophisticated, cosmopolitan key, another group of Argentines were beginning to elaborate a very different identity. Rather than aim for prestige and avant-garde sophistication, these Argentines developed a preference for a new, massively popular musical genre that would come to be known as balada. The Argentine heartthrob Sandro helped invent the new genre and personified the identity that it made possible. Sandro’s influence went well beyond Argentina. He became a star throughout the Spanish-speaking world, and his music represented a consumer preference through which a generation of Latin Americans identified themselves in opposition to North Americans. Ironically, this Latin American identity formation was made possible by the recording and marketing expertise of CBS, a multinational corporation based in the United States. Moreover, balada was not a musical form or style with deep roots in Argentine, or even Latin American tradition. On the contrary, Sandro and other artists created the genre by drawing on the diverse musical styles that had emerged throughout the Atlantic World in response to the diffusion of North American rock and roll. As a result, Sandro’s career offers an illuminating perspective on the globalization of rock and roll.

Given rock and roll’s origins in the United States, the role of U.S.-based multinational corporations in its diffusion, and its power to reshuffle the social order in a multitude of societies, it is tempting to see it as a paradigmatic instance of cultural imperialism. However, scholars from a range of disciplines have demonstrated that rock musicians and fans from outside the United States were not merely passive recipients of an alien cultural form. On the contrary, they produced their own meanings from their engagement with Elvis Presley and other North American stars, and eventually, they generated distinctive, hybrid forms of the music.[1] The sociologist Motti Regev has recently produced a synthetic account that theorizes this more complex story. For Regev, the global prominence of “pop-rock”—that is, rock and roll and all of the other musical genres that followed from it—has produced “aesthetic cosmopolitanism.”[2] In other words, people throughout the world increasingly express their own identities—both national and subcultural—through aesthetically similar forms and practices. Whereas musical nationalism once entailed the identification of unique properties in a society’s traditional music, it is now typically expressed through pop-rock, a “signifier of universal modernity.”[3] Regev arguably overstates the novelty of aesthetic cosmopolitanism, since many forms of popular music were in dialogue with North American jazz as early as the 1910s and 1920s. Still, his account reveals a crucial difference: in the early decades of the twentieth century, tango, for example, bore the unmistakable influence of jazz, but it remained a distinct genre understood to express Argentine national identity in a way that jazz never could. By contrast, many contemporary Argentines express their feelings of national belonging through local versions of rock.

Though Regev and others have debunked the cultural imperialism thesis, they tend to reproduce its basic logic of diffusion: rock music is exported from the United States or, once the impact of the Beatles is taken into consideration, from the English-speaking world, and is adopted in foreign societies. In other words, the global history of rock is still generally told as a series of parallel disseminations from core to periphery, even if the agency of the periphery in this process is now much more carefully analyzed. Although scholars have explored many instances of “South-South” musical exchange—for example, the influence of Cuban son in the Congo or of Colombian cumbia throughout Latin America[4]—these stories are generally segregated from the history of rock and roll. And yet from very early on, the diffusion of rock and roll was more broadly transnational than the standard narrative suggests. Throughout the world, listening to and embracing the new music entailed an engagement not only with North American and British musicians and styles but also with music generated in many other places. Regev recognizes that “pop-rock” did not become homogenous in the decades after Elvis, but the model of parallel disseminations enables only one explanation for this diversity: musicians in each country mixed rock with elements drawn from their own local traditions. That sort of hybridization undoubtedly occurred, but it was not the only, or even the dominant form. Rock and pop musicians from around the world had multiple models available to them. They borrowed liberally from these models in order to fashion their own music, and in so doing, they reshaped the transnational circuits that structured global mass culture.

Sandro’s career exemplifies this process. Sandro emerged in the early 1960s as an Elvis imitator who sang Spanish-language versions of American and British rock songs. At this point, he was part of the so-called Nueva Ola of youth-oriented pop music that was exploding in popularity throughout Latin America. Recorded and distributed primarily by RCA and Columbia, the Nueva Ola is often depicted narrowly as the means by which rock and roll from the United States was diffused in Latin America. Yet the movement was also shaped by Spanish, Italian, and French influences, and it entailed a great deal of musical interchange between Latin American countries. Attacked for its overt commercialism by a new generation of rock musicians and fans, the Nueva Ola disappeared in the late 1960s. Sandro, though, survived not by adopting the pose of the authentic rocker, but by developing a new musical persona as a singer of romantic ballads. He helped invent balada by appropriating elements from a diverse array of sources including Cuban and Mexican bolero, North American doo-wop, and European pop. Sandro’s version, infused with his distinctive brand of eroticism and his implicit lower-class affiliations, made him a huge star throughout the Spanish-speaking world, even if those class associations eventually limited his appeal at home. Sandro’s trajectory was undoubtedly shaped by global inequalities: his aesthetic choices were constrained by the preferences and strategies of his record company, and the cultural power of the United States was evident in his early embrace of rock and roll. Nevertheless, his career demonstrates that pop music in this period was a rich, transnational field that enabled a significant degree of musical heterogeneity as well as the emergence of new and unpredictable identity formations.

The Transnational Pop Field of the Early 1960s

Rock and roll arrived in Argentina in late 1955 when porteño moviegoers heard Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” during the opening credits of Blackboard Jungle (dir. Richard Brooks, 1955). Along with the spate of Hollywood teenpics that followed, the film inspired young Argentines to dance. And just as it did elsewhere, rock music’s appeal to teenagers provoked alarm among parents and authorities anxious to preserve patriarchal structures and prevent juvenile delinquency. Under pressure from the Catholic League of Mothers and Fathers, the mayor of Buenos Aires went so far as to prohibit dances with “exaggerated contortions” that “could affect morals.”[5] One magazine described “el rock” as a “new delirium” affecting Argentine youth and asked whether it represented “good music or collective hysteria.”[6] Another described the “licentiousness” and “frenzy” of the new dance moves and wondered whether the new fad was “dangerous.”[7]

Since the music was widely seen as a derivative of jazz, the magazine Mundo Argentino turned to Lalo Schifrin, the nation’s most esteemed jazz musician, for an explanation of the phenomenon. Schifrin criticized Bill Haley as a “bad jazz musician,” but he reassured readers that the fad did not prove the existence of a “generation of decadent youth.” Schifrin argued that the music was nothing more than African American rhythm and blues with a new name, and that its popularity was due to the same sort of “large publicity campaigns” that had disseminated such rhythms as the mambo and the chachachá.[8] By comparing rock to these other dances, Schifrin highlighted the music’s connection to transnational cultural trends. As the magazine’s reporter put it: “The United States, France, England, Italy, Brazil, Sweden, Turkey, Japan, in short, all the nations of the world are the scenes of this noisy controversy.”[9] No matter how tacky or troubling the music, the popularity of rock and roll was evidence that Argentina was a full participant in cosmopolitan modernity. Although this participation could sometimes threaten to destabilize the social order, it was very much in the spirit of post-Peronist Argentina. In this sense, rock and roll was another aspect of the middle-class aspiration to engage with the international cutting edge.

At the same time, Schifrin’s reference to “large publicity campaigns” implicitly attributed the popularity of rock and roll to the marketing efforts of North American companies. In a sense, he was not far off the mark; once the Hollywood studios had sparked consumers’ interest, rock music was disseminated in Argentina by a handful of large multinational corporations. This pattern was almost the exact opposite of what had happened in the United States, where small, independent record labels released the first and most innovative rock records while the large, established companies—the so-called majors—stuck to older forms of popular music. In the early 1950s, the four North American networks had largely abandoned radio for television, creating an opportunity for local, unaffiliated radio stations and small record labels to build audiences by appealing to specific market segments.[10] It was this opening that enabled the emergence of rock and roll, a music that represented a major break with the aesthetic norms of the dominant forms of pop music. After a few years of denial, the major labels recognized that the rock and roll fad had more staying power than they had originally thought and began trying to compete in the growing youth market.[11] By the late 1950s, these corporations—particularly the largest two, Columbia and RCA—turned their attention to foreign markets, including Latin America.[12]

While the dominant position of foreign record companies was a familiar part of the landscape in Argentina, the structure of the global record business was new. In the late 1950s, global record sales entered a period of dramatic expansion that would last until the 1980s. A product of postwar economic growth and the emergence of a youth market, this expansion was also facilitated by technological developments including the invention of the vinyl record, which was lightweight and sturdy enough to withstand long-distance shipping.[13] At the same time, the mid-1950s success of the independents had altered the popular music market. These small companies had been able to produce highly desirable music because they were deeply rooted in geographically specific, local cultures. Forced to compete on this new terrain, the majors embraced product differentiation and market segmentation and applied that new approach on a global scale. What emerged over the next few decades were huge multinational corporations that, in the words of economic historian Gerben Bakker, “linked dispersed, idiosyncratic A&R [artists and repertoire] units, creating portfolios of innovations (protected by temporary legal monopolies) within a global distribution system.”[14] In other words, to capitalize on the growth of the global market, the multinationals pursued both vertical integration and creative decentralization. They combined a vast array of locally rooted creative units with a massive distribution and promotion apparatus. Their ownership of copyrights would turn the creative innovations of their local units into a steady stream of revenue.

Argentina was at the forefront of this global process since it was one of the few countries where the major U.S. recording companies already owned local units. RCA Victor Argentina was one of six subsidiaries wholly owned by the corporation, while Columbia’s branch was one of only four.[15] As a result, in Argentina these two multinationals did not need to acquire existing A&R companies or to distribute their catalogues through licensing agreements, as they did elsewhere. Both companies operated recording studios and record pressing factories in Argentina, installations that in the case of Columbia were now updated and improved.[16] By the late 1950s, both corporations were greatly expanding their efforts to sell records in Argentina and to record local acts. The economic policies of the Frondizi administration, aimed at attracting foreign industrial investment while curbing nonessential imports, facilitated this expansion.[17]

The renewed prominence of foreign record companies did not necessarily decimate local musical genres. Just as RCA and Columbia had led the way during the golden age of tango, they now recorded Astor Piazzolla’s New Tango Quintet, and they participated in the boom in Argentine folk music, as I will discuss in the next chapter. Still, the new shape of the global record business did have a major impact. In earlier decades, U.S. companies recorded Argentine tango bands in order to produce records primarily for the local market. In the late 1950s, by contrast, Columbia and RCA Victor hoped to find multiple markets for the records they produced in Argentina. As early as 1956, Columbia sent its head of international repertoire to visit the company’s affiliates in Argentina and Brazil in order to identify artists and music that might sell in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the other markets where Columbia owned subsidiaries.[18] Similarly, RCA Victor brought all of its Latin American affiliates and licensees together in 1959 to consider new merchandise.[19] In a piece from 1962 on Columbia’s plan to market its records internationally on the new CBS label, Variety described the strategy: “[The company] is not only planning better worldwide distribution of its domestic product, but in the case of vital markets, it hopes to have greater involvement in the artists & repertoire production activities, creating product for the specific country itself as well as repertoire of value to the entire international area.”[20] In the rock and roll era, multinational companies envisioned a broad, transnational market for records produced in Argentina, a vision that inevitably influenced the sort of music they decided to record.

Although the recording companies operating in Argentina had previously focused primarily on the local market, the idea of selling Argentine popular music abroad was not entirely unprecedented. In the early 1930s, Carlos Gardel was enormously popular throughout Latin America as well as in Europe, though his celebrity owed less to the efforts of his recording companies, Odeon and Victor, than to those of the Hollywood film studio Paramount. Unlike the music multinationals, U.S. film companies competed in Latin American markets against local producers. Paramount signed Gardel precisely because the studio needed a Spanish-language movie star who was viable throughout the region; the international diffusion of tango music was something of a by-product. More recently, the bolero became a major seller throughout Latin America in the 1940s. Among the bolero singers who acquired continental fame in these years was Leo Marini, an Argentine who was drawn to the genre by the Mexican singers he heard on the radio and in films. Recognizing the commercial opportunity created by the transnational popularity of the bolero, Odeon recorded Marini in Buenos Aires and marketed his records throughout Latin America.[21] As these histories of the tango and the bolero indicate, film and record companies first envisioned a transnational, Latin American market for popular music as they contemplated genres that were indigenous to Latin America. They recognized that Colombians and Mexicans, for example, would buy tango and bolero from other Latin American countries. The rock and roll era was different, not only because of the dramatic expansion in the Latin American activities of the music multinationals, but also because the Latin American artists whose records sold throughout the region were performing a North American form of music.

Almost immediately after the first Hollywood teenpics had exposed them to the music of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, and other early rockers, young Argentines represented a potential audience for the music in live performance. In a process occurring simultaneously in many other countries, the first local rock bands emerged to respond to this demand. Playing primarily covers of North American hits, they quickly found their way onto the radio and into the dance halls. In 1957, Columbia moved to capitalize on the trend, recording a series of Bill Haley covers by Eddie Pequenino, an Argentine jazz trombonist who had recently formed his own rock and roll band. The following year, the label scored a major hit with Billy Cafaro’s cover of Paul Anka’s “Pity, Pity.” Though Pequenino had sung in English, Cafaro’s record was a Spanish-language version of the Anka tune, establishing a model that would be emulated over the next several years.[22] Pequenino and Cafaro enjoyed mainly local success, but Columbia soon found an act well suited to its transnational strategy.

Signed to the label in 1957, the Argentine group Los Cinco Latinos were a vocal quintet led by a female jazz singer named Estela Raval. Inspired by the doo-wop craze, their first single was a cover of the Platters’ 1955 hit “Only You,” with Spanish lyrics by Ben Molar. As a talent scout, music publisher, and prolific “translator” of English rock lyrics, Molar was a key figure in the Argentine popular music scene. He began his career writing the lyrics to boleros by the French composer Paul Misraki for Leo Marini and other Latin American stars.[23] To Molar and to the executives in Columbia’s Argentina office, rock and roll offered the same opportunity as bolero: with Spanish lyrics, it could be a viable commodity throughout Latin America. As their name suggests, Los Cinco Latinos were created with this transnational market in mind, and the strategy worked: Columbia’s parent company CBS boasted to its shareholders in 1959 that “for the first time, records from Columbia’s Argentine subsidiary were sold in other South American markets.”[24] That year, Los Cinco Latinos embarked on an extensive tour of Latin America, culminating in a six-month stay in Mexico.[25] On the basis of the group’s success throughout the region, Columbia used a Cinco Latinos album to inaugurate its new line of LPs “for the South American market.”[26] Although many of their first records were doo-wop tunes, the group recorded other material as well. In June 1962, their Spanish-language version of “Ballatta della tromba” by Italian trumpeter Nino Rosso reached number one in Argentina.[27] In both their commercial appeal and their repertoire, Los Cinco Latinos were a transnational phenomenon, and in this sense, they foreshadowed the popular music scene that would crystallize in Latin America during the next decade.

RCA Victor was slower to recognize the transformations of the marketplace, but the company eventually did begin to search for local talent that could compete with Columbia’s new stars. Tasked with this assignment was the new general manager of the company’s Argentine branch. Ricardo Mejía was an Ecuadoran who had lived for eighteen years in the United States where he worked as a disc jockey, a nightclub master of ceremonies, and a sales manager for Sears Roebuck in Hollywood. After a stint working for Sears in Colombia, Mejía arrived in Buenos Aires in November 1959 and immediately began holding auditions. His first big discovery was a trio of siblings from Uruguay, known as Los TNT. Their recording of an up-tempo swing tune called “Eso” helped Mejía launch a full lineup of young stars, which he quickly labeled the Nueva Ola.[28] Although “Eso” was neither rock nor doo-wop, Los TNT’s lineup of a female lead with male backup singers as well as its youthful image seemed designed to compete with Los Cinco Latinos. By October 1960, Variety reported that largely thanks to Los TNT, “RCA Victor is registering its biggest sales in its close to 40 years in Argentina.”[29] Seeking to tap into the larger regional market, Los TNT launched its own Latin American tour the following year.

Molar and Mejía were the perfect intermediaries to carry out the multinational record companies’ new strategy of developing product for the entire Latin American region. Molar’s focus on the bolero and his partnership with Misraki showed that his conception of the Argentine popular music market was not limited to the tango or to local folk genres. Transitioning from bolero to rock and roll, he was moving from one transnational genre to another. Similarly, RCA apparently believed that Mejía’s combination of North American sales expertise and Latin American ethnicity would give him special insight into the regional market. Particularly auspicious in this regard was Mejía’s experience with Sears, a company that had thrived in Latin America by reconciling itself to local culture and to import restrictions aimed at promoting domestic industry.[30] As a Latin American who lacked any previous connection to Argentina, Mejía embodied RCA’s vision of the market: the company aimed to sell records not specifically to Argentines but to Latin Americans as a whole. Along with a handful of others, Molar and Mejía helped make Argentina an important node within a continental network of musicians and composers producing a new style of music known increasingly throughout the region as the Nueva Ola. In light of the agglomeration effects of music production—the economic benefits that accrue from locating musicians, composers, recording studios, and other inputs in the same place—it made sense for Columbia and RCA Victor to concentrate its Latin American efforts principally in the three cities where they had the longest track record: Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro.[31]

By the early 1960s, the efforts of the multinational record companies had unleashed a continental “new wave,” as established artists and newcomers from throughout Latin America jumped on the rock and roll bandwagon. Typical of the former were the Chilean singer Antonio Prieto and the Puerto Rican Bobby Capó. Both had previously specialized in bolero but now scored big hits with romantic tunes that copied the piano triplets and I-vi-IV-V chord progression typical of doo-wop.[32] But it was the teen idols who made the biggest splash. Among the most successful of these was the Mexican singer, Enrique Guzmán. Guzmán began as the lead singer of Los Teen Tops, one of several Mexican bands that specialized in Spanish-language covers of U.S. rock and roll hits. In 1961, he embarked on a solo career for Columbia, scoring hits throughout Latin America, including in Argentina, with several new covers as well as his own original, “Dame felicidad.”[33]

Within Argentina, the Nueva Ola reached its apogee with El Club del Clan, a television program developed by Mejía in order to promote RCA Victor’s lineup of young stars. The show, which combined musical numbers and comedy sketches, earned high ratings by packaging the Nueva Ola as a youthful, modern musical movement that posed no threat to the social order. In Valeria Manzano’s words, El Club del Clan encouraged viewers to “conform to established gender roles and family values and ‘have fun’—in an orderly way.”[34] Mejía hoped that by removing rock and roll’s association with delinquency and disorder, the program could help RCA Victor sell more records. As he explained to one magazine reporter, his strategy was to market pop idols to teenage girls who in turn would convince their fathers to buy the records, but this could only work with the most unthreatening of idols.[35] Ramón “Palito” Ortega, easily the biggest star to emerge from El Club del Clan, fit the bill. As countless articles in the fan magazines explained, Ortega was a working-class kid from Tucumán province, who had succeeded in the big city thanks to hard work and musical talent.[36] Typical of his repertoire was his first top ten hit, an original composition called “Dejala, Dejala.”[37] In this bouncy, comic tune meant for dancing the twist, the singer laments the fact that his girlfriend always brings a family member along on their dates. Ortega’s rags-to-riches story combined with his ability to compose catchy, lighthearted songs in the latest pop styles made him the most commercially viable of the new teen idols.

Promoting clean-cut stars like Ortega was one way to make rock and roll seem unthreatening. Another was to treat the new music as just one more pop genre, comparable to all the dance-based musical forms that preceded it. Even before El Club del Clan, RCA Victor had included Nueva Ola stars like Los TNT on LPs that contained an international collection of the latest hits.[38] By featuring Argentine and North American rock and roll songs alongside Argentine tangos, Cuban mambos, and Brazilian sambas, these albums integrated rock and roll into a familiar musical menu. El Club del Clan deepened the strategy. Each cast member on the program tended to specialize in a particular type of music, with the result that rock and roll appeared as one of several contemporary forms of popular music. Lalo Fransen joined Ortega in performing songs for the twist, while Johny Tedesco specialized in Elvis Presley covers. But others performed Latin American genres. Chico Novarro and Perico Gómez performed cumbias, boleros, and other “tropical” rhythms, while Raúl Cobián sang tangos. Finally, Violeta Rivas specialized in Spanish-language covers of Italian pop songs.[39] Through this musical diversity, the program placed rock and roll in a transnational context that shaped the music’s reception.

In the early 1960s, then, Argentine consumers enthusiastically embraced a new wave of young performers and musical styles marketed to them by U.S.-based multinational corporations. However, this trend did not amount to a simple triumph for North American cultural influence. Doo-wop, the twist, and other versions of early rock and roll were extremely popular in Argentina, but as El Club del Clan indicates, they did not dislodge Latin American genres. Moreover, Argentines heard rock and roll performed by artists from both the United States and from elsewhere in Latin America and Europe. Foreign members of the Nueva Ola like Enrique Guzmán became huge stars in Argentina and starred in films alongside their Argentine counterparts.[40] Argentine consumers’ exposure to a diverse, transnational musical mix was visible on the country’s top ten lists. For the week of June 8, 1963, the top ten featured North American rock and roll singers Johnny Tillotson, Chubby Checker, and Dion. Paul Anka was also on the list, though his record, “Eso Beso,” was not rock and roll at all, but rather an attempt at bossa nova. There was also one tango—“Frente al Mar” performed by Mariano Mores and Susy Leiva—and one Argentine folk song—“Puente Pexoa” by The Trovadores del Norte. The rest of the list was given over to rock-influenced artists from other countries: there were two songs by the Mexican Enrique Guzmán, one by the Chilean Antonio Prieto, and one by the Italian Adriano Celentano.[41] Popular music in Argentina was a broadly transnational field shaped by the sales strategies of the multinational record companies in combination with a series of other factors, including linguistic affinities and existing cultural ties. In this context, local musicians were not limited to a choice between imported North American rock and traditional Argentine music; in fact, they had many more aesthetic options available to them.

Sandro: From Rock and Roll to Balada

Though every Argentine pop singer of the 1960s navigated this transnational terrain, some journeys were more consequential than others. During the second half of the decade, Sandro made a series of aesthetic choices that helped shape Argentine and, indeed, Latin American popular music for years to come. Born Roberto Sánchez, Sandro grew up in Valentín Alsina, an industrial suburb of Buenos Aires. The son of a meatpacking worker, he fell for rock and roll shortly after its introduction in Argentina. By 1962, at the age of seventeen, he and a group of friends from the neighborhood had formed a band called Los de fuego. Although they were inspired by Elvis, their most immediate model was a Latin American one. They hoped Los de fuego could follow the path opened by the Mexican group, Los Teen Tops, producing Spanish-language covers of rock and roll hits from the United States. In 1963, the group, renamed “Sandro y Los de fuego,” was signed by Los Teen Tops’ record company, Columbia, now operating in Latin America under the CBS label. Although the company’s representatives first insisted on recording Sandro with a professional orchestra, they eventually relented and began recording the whole band. Perhaps most important, CBS connected Sandro with Ben Molar, the music publisher and lyricist who had written the Spanish version of “Only You” for the Cinco Latinos as well as many other covers. Over the next couple of years, Sandro would record a string of Molar’s “translations” of rock and roll hits.[42]

With a recording contract and a recurring spot on the popular television variety program, Sábados Circulares, Sandro quickly became a prominent member of the Argentine Nueva Ola. Nevertheless, his image was quite different from the clean-cut presentation of Palito Ortega and the other stars of El Club del Clan. With shaggy hair and long sideburns and dressed often in black boots and leather pants, Sandro was described in the press as “eccentric” or “diabolical.” Most often, he was labeled an iracundo, which means an “angry” or “irate” person, but in this context probably comes closest to “bad boy.”[43] The image was loosely based on such cinematic models as Marlon Brando in The Wild One (dir. Laszlo Benedek, 1953) and James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1955). Sandro was known for his wild performances, which began with pelvic movements inspired by Elvis and often culminated with him writhing on the floor. In 1964, he was briefly suspended by Canal 13, the channel that carried Sábados Circulares, for “excess” in his performance. In his defense, the singer insisted that he did not mean to offend. “When I perform, I am completely sincere. I live the song; I feel it. There is nothing prefabricated and I let myself be taken away by the rhythm, by the atmosphere, by the audience, who—judging by how they applaud—must enjoy my way of performing.”[44] Sandro here defines his own authenticity in implicit contrast to his competitors on El Club del Clan, who were, if anything, “prefabricated.” His overt sexuality in performance becomes a sign of his honesty, his willingness to show his true self in response to the music. The article describing his suspension was accompanied by a large photograph of the singer wearing no shirt as well as a series of pictures showing him shooting guns, his favorite hobby according to the piece. Eroticism and potential violence were the twin components of his “bad boy” image.

Notwithstanding the singer’s claims of authenticity, Sandro’s image was, in fact, carefully managed. At the time, fan magazines were filled with gossip about the love lives of the Nueva Ola stars, gossip that celebrated the power of romantic love even as it reinforced conservative attitudes toward marriage. In one typical interview, Palito Ortega bemoaned a recent breakup but struck a positive note: “The day I fall in love with a woman, I am going to dive headfirst into marriage.”[45] As his fame grew, Sandro also found himself the subject of this sort of piece. One article described his romance with an innocent manicurist, a good girl who avoided nightclubs. She was originally frightened by Sandro until “she discovered the sensitive man hiding behind the iracundo.”[46] Here, the bad boy image was rendered inauthentic; underneath the mask, Sandro was as romantic as Palito Ortega and just as committed to propriety. In the photos of the couple that accompanied the article, Sandro appeared in a suit and tie. Swept away by love, he promised to marry the girl over the objections of her family. The article—with the support, presumably, of the singer’s managers—worked to make Sandro safe for consumption; his haircut and performance style made him exciting, but articles like this one made sure he was not too threatening.

FIGURE 4.1 • Sandro as an iracundo. Antena TV, December 22, 1964.

Sandro’s identity as a gitano, or gypsy, was another key aspect of his distinctive persona. The singer’s stage name, which sounded foreign to Argentine ears, signaled his ethnic affiliation. He claimed that his parents had originally wanted to name him Sandro, a Hispanicized version of Sandor, in homage to his Hungarian ancestors, opting for Roberto only when the authorities at the Civil Registry refused.[47] In later interviews, Sandro reported that his paternal grandfather was, in fact, a gypsy from Hungary.[48] In any case, he seems to have made the decision to take on a foreign-sounding name and to publicize his gypsy roots in order to market himself more effectively. This ethnic otherness gave him a certain exotic appeal, evident in the first articles that appeared about him in the fan magazines. One piece referred to his “strange appearance, a mixture of gypsy and European iracundo,” while another spoke of “his mysterious air of wandering gypsy.”[49] Although Argentina was home to a substantial Roma population, what distinguished them from other immigrant groups, including the Italians, Spanish, and Jews, was that they were perceived as unassimilated.[50] While Sandro practiced no elements of Roma culture, “el gitano” became his most enduring nickname, conjuring a vague but irreducible difference, a hint of wildness or savagery.

Just as the music press sought to manage Sandro’s dangerous image, CBS may have pressured him to tone down his performance style on his records.[51] In any case, Molar’s lyrics tended to undercut the sexual innuendo of the originals. For example, Sandro’s version of Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” called “Hay mucha agitación,” retained the English “Shake, baby, shake” chorus, but the Spanish verses replaced Lewis’s seductive and direct “Come on over, baby” with a description of a generic rock and roll dance: “Everyone is gathered, the dance is going to start soon / the atmosphere is tense, the band is about to take off / and when they shout ‘shake,’ the rhythm is about to begin.” By erasing the sexual innuendo of the original and employing conventional vocabulary, Molar’s lyrics avoided impropriety.[52]

Still, even if it was absent in the lyrics, eroticism was a big part of Sandro’s appeal. As on Lewis’s recording, Sandro’s version has a quiet passage in the middle, while the singer builds tension by repeating the chorus. But Sandro’s slight adjustment to the English lyrics—he sings “I gotta shake, baby, shake”—transforms the song from an insistent appeal to a woman, a request that she dance, into a display of his own physical possession by the rhythm. It is the musical equivalent of writhing on stage or appearing shirtless in teen magazines.[53] In this song and others, he used a range of vocal techniques to lend his versions rock and roll flavor: Elvis-style asides—“uh-huh” or “yeah”—as well as guttural growls and full-throated shouts. While Palito Ortega was singing comic originals like “Despeinada,” about a woman with unkempt hair, Sandro’s repertoire of covers made him a more authentic rocker. The advent of the British Invasion allowed him to maintain his rock and roll focus. Bands like the Beatles, the Animals, and Gerry and the Pacemakers were enamored of early rock and roll singers like Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Sandro covered both their original tunes—his versions of “Hard Day’s Night” and “Ticket to Ride” made the local top ten[54]—as well as several of the early rock tunes that the British bands had themselves covered. By 1965, he had carved out a niche for himself as the leading Argentine interpreter of rock and roll.

In the mid-1960s, Sandro briefly associated with a group of young musicians who were beginning to explore the creative potential of rock music. Inspired by the growing sophistication of the Beatles, these musicians—Lito Nebbia, Pajarito Zaguri, Billy Bond, and others—began to write and perform their own music in the style then known as “beat” and eventually described as “rock nacional.” Sandro was the only television star among the rather Bohemian group that frequented La Cueva, the now legendary club where the new music was gestating. He may even have helped pay to build the club’s stage.[55] But the association with the beat musicians was short lived; he soon began to move in a very different direction.

In the second half of the 1960s, Sandro evolved from a rock and roll singer to a romantic balladeer, a move that primarily reflected commercial calculations. In 1965, he had signed with a new manager, a former jazz singer named Oscar Anderle, who together with CBS, apparently pushed him to break away from Los de Fuego and from rock and roll. As he recalled years later, “One fine day, it occurred to the company—the producer—that I could be a soloist. They put me with an orchestra, then a natural metamorphosis came, I began to stop believing very much in what I had done with rock and roll. Times changed and I threw myself into melodic music.”[56] Over the course of a few years, Sandro not only switched from rock and roll to ballads, but he also went from singing primarily covers to performing his own original compositions (generally, he co-wrote both the lyrics and melody with Oscar Anderle). Whether the idea was first hatched by the record company, by Anderle, or by the singer himself, Sandro’s reinvention made him a massive, international star.

Sandro began to develop his new style partly by engaging with recent trends in pop music from the United States and Britain, a process that was evident on two LPs he recorded in 1966 and 1967. On these albums, he continued to record covers of up-tempo ravers like Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” but he also broadened his repertoire to include slower songs, such as “My Prayer,” which had been a hit for the Platters, the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody,” and Elvis Presley’s version of “Crying in the Chapel.” Perhaps inspired by the emotional delivery of the Platters’ lead singer Tony Williams, Sandro sang these tunes with a noticeable vibrato, the first indication of what would become a trademark of his mature style. His approach to this material also reflected the influence of the pop songwriters associated with the Brill Building, whose records featured distinctively syncopated rhythms. Neil Sedaka, one of the most influential of these songwriters, was enormously popular in Argentina during the early 1960s and may well have been a model for Sandro.[57] In addition, Sandro’s covers of songs like “Ticket to Ride” by the Beatles, themselves disciples of the Brill Building sound, had given him first-hand experience with this sort of pop syncopation.[58] In any case, his versions of slow rock and roll tunes tended to make the drums more prominent than they were in the originals and to rely more heavily on the sort of syncopated bass and guitar parts typical of Brill Building hits. Music historians have traced Brill Building rhythms back to Brazilian and Cuban roots, which suggests, ironically, that by copying North American and British models, Sandro was actually giving his music a Latin American feel.[59]

Regardless of its rhythmic provenance, English-language pop music was hardly the only influence on Sandro’s evolving style. In fact, Sandro’s transformation into a romantic balladeer was made possible by the deeply transnational nature of popular music in Argentina. This transformation took another step forward on his next album, Beat Latino, released in 1967. The name of the album, and the musical project it described, clearly served CBS’s goal of producing music for the entire Latin American market. Together, Beat Latino and its follow-up, Una muchacha y una guitarra, included fifteen covers. Of these, there were six U.S. tunes, three French, two British, one Italian, one Brazilian, one Argentine, and one Cuban/Mexican medley. But the influence of musicians and styles from outside of the United States was evident in more than just his repertoire. Sandro worked out his “Latin” version of pop music in dialogue with performers from around the globe, who were themselves working out a response to the challenge of rock and roll and the emergence of the youth market.

Particularly important for Sandro were European singers who provided useful models of cosmopolitan, modern pop music that fused rock aesthetics with a sweeping romanticism rooted in older styles. In Italy, the advent of rock and roll had transformed the canzone tradition celebrated at the annual Sanremo song competition. This transformation took off in 1958 when Domenico Modugno’s “Nel blu dipinto di blu,” better known as “Volare,” won the contest and went on to become a massive, international hit. Modugno’s success opened the doors to a whole generation of urlatori, or “yellers,” young performers who brought the influence of rock and roll directly to bear on the melodic tradition of Italian song.[60] Among the most influential of this generation were Adriano Celentano, Tony Dallara, Mina, and Rita Pavone, all of whom had hit records in Argentina.[61] Sandro’s cover of the Italian singer Michele’s “Quando parlo di te,” which combined rock vocal stylings and instrumentation with melodrama, showed his openness to the new, Italian singers. French singers may have been even more influential: as early as 1964, Sandro listed Charles Aznavour and the chanson singer Juliette Greco alongside Ray Charles as his major stylistic influences.[62] In 1967 and 1968, though, he was drawn to a less traditional French singer, covering three songs by Michel Polnareff. Influenced by hippy styles, Polnareff’s melodic approach to rock bore the traces of American groups like the Mamas and the Papas. Sandro, though, chose to cover two of Polnareff’s slower, more romantic tunes, “Mes regrets” and “Ame câline,” which the French singer had recorded with orchestral accompaniment rather than with a rock band. “Ame câline,” in particular, offered Sandro a dramatic tune based on wide intervals, allowing him to escape the narrow melodic constraints of most rock and roll.

Two other European singers were crucial influences on Sandro. The Welsh performer Tom Jones became a major star in the mid-1960s with a “Las Vegas, big-band version of rock and roll” built on an aggressive vocal delivery and generous doses of brass.[63] Sandro often told interviewers of his admiration for Jones.[64] His cover of “The Lonely One,” originally a hit for Cliff Richard and the Shadows, closely copied Jones’s take on the song. The popping horns and the larger-than-life vocal style that were Jones’s signature were one recipe for transcending the limitations of rock’s youth appeal. Although very different musically, the Spanish singer Raphael shared Jones’s ability to attract listeners of all ages. Rejecting the stripped-down, untrained, rock and roll aesthetics of Spain’s beat bands, Raphael combined “old-fashioned romanticism,” virtuosic vocal technique, and an intensely theatrical performance style featuring dramatic gestures.[65] Raphael’s prominence throughout the Spanish-speaking world—in July 1967, he had two songs simultaneously on the Argentine top ten—must have encouraged Sandro’s evolution away from rock music.[66]

Sandro’s engagement with the varied styles of this diverse, international group of popular singers culminated in the elaboration of his own distinctive sound. In October 1967, he won the first Buenos Aires Festival of Song, a competition modeled on European contests like the Sanremo festival, with his original composition, “Quiero llenarme de ti” (I want to fill myself up with you). By the end of the year, the song had reached number one on both the Brazilian and Argentine charts and established Sandro as a major star. Written in ¾ time, “Quiero llenarme de ti” combined the brassy orchestration typical of a Tom Jones record with Raphael’s direct romanticism. The lyrics were a florid declaration of love: “I want to write a song to your hair / Then draw your face in the sand / Hear your name sung by the wind / See your smile playing in the sea.” The vibrato that had crept into Sandro’s vocal performances in recent years now deepened into a theatrical mannerism, an aural signifier of both emotional honesty and erotic passion. He had hit on a winning formula.

Over the next two years, Sandro followed “Quiero llenarme de ti” with a series of top ten hits that generally fell into two categories: up-tempo numbers like “Una muchacha y una guitarra,” “Rosa, Rosa,” “Ave de Paso,” and “Tengo” and slow ballads like “Porque yo te amo,” “Así,” “Penumbras,” “Penas,” and “El maniquí.” The former combined sonic references to contemporary rock music, in the form of jangly guitar, organ and drums, with more traditional orchestration including, most prominently, a violin section. Often, they included a more melodic bridge, in which Sandro indulged his romanticism. In his slow ballads, Sandro departed further from rock aesthetics, but even these songs included hints of his musical past: the syncopated chop of an electric guitar, lower-register melismas reminiscent of Elvis. Sandro’s new songs, with their unabashed, poetic declarations of love and their lush orchestration, were a substantial departure from the rock and roll of Los de Fuego, yet the distinctiveness of his style owed a great deal to the persistence of certain elements from his earlier music.

Hints of Sandro’s rock and roll past were also visible in his stage choreography, enabling him to forge a powerfully seductive performance style. Reflecting his musical evolution, he now gave up leather ensembles in favor of formal attire, at first an austere smoking jacket and later, ruffled tuxedo shirts opened nearly to the waist and brightly colored, form-fitting suits. In a manner reminiscent of Raphael but also of Carlos Gardel and other classic tango singers, he accompanied his ballads with smoldering stares and theatrical hand gestures. But for the faster tunes, he danced suggestively and sometimes quite frenetically, turning his body into an object of erotic display much as he had during his rock and roll phase. A recurring routine during the performance of “Rosa, Rosa” made this display explicit. As the band played a repeating figure, Sandro would explain to the audience that his leg was a “thermometer” that registered the intensity of the music and the atmosphere in the concert hall. He would then direct the audience’s attention to his foot, which would start to shake, a quivering that would then proceed up his leg, until his whole body seemed possessed by the rhythm, and the band finally broke into the song’s opening chords.[67] This performance transformed the meaning of the song, from the banal romanticism of the lyrics—“Rosa, Rosa, ask for whatever you want / Just don’t ask for my love to die”—to a much more explicit eroticism.

The massive popularity of Sandro’s new style helped bring about a major transformation of the Latin American pop music market. By 1969, Sandro, Palito Ortega, and newcomer Leonardo Favio, dominated Argentine popular music and were gaining popularity throughout Latin America.[68] Although their new music was not generally seen as a distinct genre—they were referred to in Argentina simply as singers—it is now often identified as an early form of balada, a new style of Latin pop music. In any case, as the multinational record companies recognized, the field of Latin American popular music was changing. Billboard reported that the enormous popularity of Sandro, Ortega, and Favio as well as that of other baladistas from the Spanish-speaking world, such as Raphael and the Puerto Rican José Feliciano, meant that Argentine consumers were now less enthusiastic about records sung in English or other foreign languages.[69] Although the record companies hoped to respond to this new reality by convincing foreign stars to record Spanish versions of their hits, the rise of balada had begun to reshape the market. The eclectic, transnational musical field that had accompanied the rise of the Nueva Ola in the early 1960s had begun to give way to one in which consumers favored Spanish-speaking artists who performed a form of pop music unique to the Spanish-speaking world.

FIGURE 4.2 • Sandro performs at the Club San Lorenzo de Almagro, February 20, 1972. Courtesy of the Archivo General de la Nación.

Sandro de América

The rise of balada, which attracted enormous audiences from throughout Latin America even as it was denigrated by most critics, has been explained in various ways. According to one interpretation, the balada of the 1960s and 1970s represented a comeback for the bolero. The bolero, as I have described, originated in Cuba, but by the 1940s, it had become denationalized, performed by artists from various Latin American countries and enjoyed by audiences throughout the region. The advent of rock and roll displaced the bolero from its position of preeminence, as young people rejected the old-fashioned music of their parents in favor of the latest rhythms. Music historian Daniel Party argues that balada was a response to this challenge:

In order to compete against rock and roll, Latin American bolero composers and musicians, most notably Mexican Armando Manzanero, modernized bolero songwriting and arrangement. The new bolero incorporated elements of rock and roll (electric guitar, drum kit, use of 12/8 meter, emphasis on teenage love) as well as the elegant orchestrations of European ballads (e.g. Charles Aznavour’s collaborations with Paul Mauriat). This updating of the pop ballad occurred simultaneously in various Latin American countries, and the new genre came to be known as balada.[70]

Whereas Party emphasizes the agency of bolero musicians, other scholars have seen the popularity of balada as evidence of the power of the multinational music corporations. Peter Manuel argues that the genre’s lack of geographical roots made it a “common denominator,” a convenient way for recording companies, radio networks, and corporate sponsors to unify the Latin market across national divisions.[71] According to this view, balada outcompeted genres with stronger links to local communities because it enjoyed the backing of powerful, capitalist interests.

Both of these accounts contain illuminating insights, but Sandro’s trajectory suggests that they are incomplete. By connecting balada to the bolero, Party identifies important continuities in twentieth-century Latin American popular music. Musicians like Manzanero and the Cuban bolero singer Olga Guillot served as bridges between the romantic pop music of the 1940s and that of the 1960s and beyond. Yet most balada singers and composers had no roots in the bolero. Moreover, balada performers like Sandro were not simply hybridizing bolero and rock. They emerged from the transnational pop music field of the Nueva Ola and were in dialogue with an eclectic array of musicians from around the globe who were themselves confronting the challenge of rock music. Although Manuel exaggerates the extent to which U.S. companies could impose aesthetic preferences on Latin American consumers, he is right to point to their impact.[72] The distribution systems and marketing strategies of the multinationals created the circuits along which musical genres circulated. Thanks to the efforts of these companies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Latin American music markets became increasingly transnational and interconnected. As a result, new artists confronted a marketplace in which local genres competed with multiple versions of rock and roll from the United States, Europe, and throughout Latin America. Balada represented a response to this competitive environment. Sandro forged his version by drawing on elements from U.S. rock and roll as well as French, Italian, and British pop music.

Yet even if bolero was not an important source of musical ideas for Sandro, it was crucial in a different way. The long history of bolero had created a substantial Latin American audience for slow, romantic ballads sung in Spanish and identified as pan–Latin American. Sandro and the other baladistas built on that existing audience. Similarly, since the advent of mass culture in the early twentieth century, the genre of melodrama has enjoyed widespread popularity in the popular literature and film of the region.[73] Baladistas benefited from the existence of a substantial audience throughout Latin America for romantic love stories told in a style marked by emotional excess.

More than any other Argentine performer of the era, Sandro became a star throughout Latin America. Sandro de América, the title of an album he released in 1969 and from then on another recurring nickname, indicated the self-consciousness with which he pursued continental stardom. He had already performed in Brazil in 1967, but after winning the Buenos Aires Festival of Song, he dedicated himself to a rigorous schedule of international touring. Over the next five years, Sandro performed in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Ecuador, and multiple times each in New York, Miami, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, and Spain.[74] This extensive international touring supported the aggressive efforts of CBS to market him as a star throughout the Spanish-speaking world. In this sense, Sandro de América was made possible by the multinational corporations that dominated the global music business and by their strategy to expand the Latin American market.

One other globalized culture industry also proved vital to making Sandro a Latin American star: the film industry. In 1969, Sandro’s manager sought to translate the singer’s rising popularity to the screen: the result was Quiero llenarme de ti (dir. Emilio Vieyra), a light, romantic film whose flimsy plot afforded Sandro multiple opportunities to sing. The movie was a commercial success and was followed by a string of similar movie musicals produced at a rapid clip: La vida continúa (dir. Vieyra, 1969), Gitano (dir. Vieyra, 1970), Muchacho (dir. Leo Fleider, 1970), Siempre te amaré (dir. Fleider, 1971), Embrujo de amor (dir. Fleider, 1971), Destino de un capricho (dir. Fleider, 1972), El deseo de vivir (dir. Julio Saraceni, 1973), Operación Rosa Rosa (dir. Fleider, 1974), Tú me enloqueces (dir. Sandro, 1976). Crucially, Oscar Anderle did not sign Sandro with one of the more established Argentine film companies. Instead, the singer’s films were financed and distributed by Pel-Mex, a Mexican company that played an influential role in the Argentine film industry of the 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning in 1964, Pel-Mex contracted with small production companies that lacked the local distribution deals enjoyed by the big Argentine studios. This arrangement allowed these small independents to flourish, since Pel-Mex had a massive distribution system that covered all of Latin America as well as the Latino market in the United States.[75] Predictably, the films produced under this arrangement were made with this transnational market in mind. Emilio Vieyra, who directed Sandro’s first two movies, began his association with Pel-Mex when a friend told him that Puerto Ricans in New York loved erotic horror films. The Mexican company advanced him the modest sum he needed to make Placer sangriento, a film aimed specifically at that market.[76] Even though they were mostly set in Argentina, Sandro’s movies were likewise aimed at the broader, Latin American market. Quiero llenarme de ti actually opened in New York City before it did in Argentina.[77] Sandro’s association with Pel-Mex, like his connection with CBS, encouraged his evolution toward an artistic style that resonated with Latin American audiences outside Argentina.

Sandro’s appeal translated well across national borders. In his first foreign performance after winning the Buenos Aires Festival of Song, Sandro sang at the Chilean equivalent in Viña del Mar. Local reporters scoffed at his performance—“As a singer, he is an excellent dancer,” one declared—but grudgingly admitted that he was “the sensation” of the festival for the youth in attendance.[78] The following year, on a visit to Venezuela, he was given two awards previously won by the Italian pop star Mina and the French singer Charles Aznavour.[79] On a visit to Bogotá in 1970, the press reported that five thousand fans greeted him at the airport and another five thousand camped outside his hotel. A Colombian newspaper published a half-page photo of Sandro hanging out in his hotel room with Brazilian soccer star Pelé—nearly twice the size of the photo of Colombian president Misael Pastrana meeting with his Chilean counterpart Salvador Allende, who was also in town.[80] In Paraguay as in Colombia, the police needed to impose special measures in order to protect him from overly enthusiastic fans.[81] By 1970, his international success had led to several platinum and gold records and total record sales of 4,250,000.[82]

Sandro was particularly popular in Puerto Rico and among the largely Puerto Rican Latino community in New York City. This popularity was facilitated by the geographical reach of both CBS and Pel-Mex and the business acumen of Oscar Anderle, but it was also advanced by the singer’s own efforts at promotion. In April 1969, Sandro flew to New York City to be present for the opening of his film, Quiero llenarme de ti, in ten Latino theaters in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and New Jersey. Sandro made appearances in each, declaring himself moved by “the heat of Hispanic brotherhood.”[83] He then flew to Puerto Rico for a performance timed to coincide with the opening of the film in San Juan.[84] In September and October, he repeated the itinerary, headlining a series of shows in the Bronx that also featured Cuban salsa star Celia Cruz and then playing concerts in San Juan, Arecibo, Aguadilla, Mayaguez, and Ponce.[85] Reporters in both New York and Puerto Rico commented on the singer’s ability to attract female fans of all ages. Puerto Rican sales of his latest album so exceeded expectations that local dealers were forced to import extra copies from Venezuela.[86] Sandro carefully cultivated his Caribbean fan base by speaking of his respect for local culture and even using local slang; he told one Puerto Rican reporter that his reception on the island was “chévere.”[87]

Although reporters in New York and Puerto Rico did mention that Sandro was from Argentina, he was billed more prominently as a Latin American star: “the idol of America.” His performances alongside Celia Cruz reveal that his audience was expected to overlap substantially with the audience for salsa. In fact, over the next few years, he frequently shared the stage with performers of salsa, cumbia, and other so-called tropical dance musics in New York, the Caribbean, and Colombia, even though his music had little in common with those genres.[88] As a genre sung in Spanish and identified with Latin America, balada fit well with the more regional styles enjoyed by local audiences. Moreover, Puerto Ricans had been particularly enthusiastic consumers of the Nueva Ola of the early 1960s, embracing both foreign singers and local performers like Bobby Capó and Lucecita Benítez.[89] In this way, they were musically prepared for the turn to balada. Sandro’s popularity on the island received a further boost in 1970 when the New York–based Caytronics company secured the rights to distribute CBS’s Latin American catalogue in the United States and Puerto Rico. Although Caytronics largely ceded the salsa market to Fania Records, the company marketed virtually every other Latin American genre. Sandro now appeared prominently in advertisements alongside baladistas from other countries as well as cumbia and regional folk music acts.[90] In 1970, his transnational star power was demonstrated when his performance before a largely Puerto Rican audience at Madison Square Garden in New York was broadcast by satellite on television stations throughout the continent.[91]

Sandro’s identification as a Latin American singer, rather than an Argentine one, was also facilitated by the fact that he belonged to a musical movement that was emerging simultaneously in various countries throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Although he was occasionally compared to Tom Jones, he was more frequently associated with baladistas. In the early years of his career, Sandro’s main competition was the Spanish singer, Raphael, whose hits of the mid-1960s had helped inspire his conversion from rocker to baladista. Raphael and Sandro were in many ways part of the same transnational cultural phenomenon: Raphael’s musical arranger was the Argentine Waldo de los Ríos, who had orchestrated the Cinco Latinos’ early hits.[92] When the film director Emilio Vieyra needed help figuring out how to make a movie musical starring Sandro, he looked to Raphael’s most recent film as a model.[93] In July 1969, one Puerto Rican magazine dedicated its cover article to the question of whether Sandro had “dethroned” Raphael as the most popular singer on the island. According to the article, Sandro had emerged “from the south” to challenge the Spanish singer and quickly won over Puerto Rican fans thanks to his impressive “masculinity.”[94] Notwithstanding this vague allusion to Sandro’s Latin machismo, the magazine presented both singers as practitioners of a common genre. Moreover, despite the singers’ foreign origins, Puerto Rican music fans were expected to pass judgment between them; the genre itself was not foreign.

Sandro and Raphael did share some stylistic similarities, although Sandro’s debt to rock and roll also distinguished them. More important was the fact that they moved on the same promotional circuits. Raphael’s films were shown in the same theaters as Sandro’s, and the Spanish singer performed at Madison Square Garden just seven months before his Argentine counterpart.[95] Later, when Raphael’s popularity in the Americas began to decline, the Brazilian baladista Roberto Carlos emerged as Sandro’s primary competition in many countries. In any case, fans encountered Sandro as a Latin American baladista, one of a group of similar singers from throughout Latin America and Spain. Balada constructed its audience as Latin American and constituted an aesthetic preference that distinguished this audience from the North American one. This was particularly clear when Sandro performed in New York City; his concerts were advertised exclusively in the Spanish-language media, and even when they were held in mainstream venues like Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall, they attracted exclusively Latino audiences.

Sandro’s popularity throughout Latin America was a product of the hemispheric reach of CBS and Pel-Mex, his own savvy self-promotion, as well as his association with the emerging genre of balada, but these factors do not fully explain it. After all, other Argentine pop singers—Palito Ortega, Leonardo Favio, Leo Dan—sold records, toured, and appeared in films outside of Argentina, but none were as successful abroad as Sandro. Sandro’s ability to become “Sandro de América”—to embody a broad, Latin American persona—was enabled by the specific class and ethnic associations that attached to him. Thanks to Argentina’s history of European immigration as well as its enduring racial ideologies, most of the country’s popular performers were light-skinned; their whiteness marked them as different from the majority of Latin Americans. By contrast, Sandro’s black hair, dark eyes, olive skin, thick lips, bushy eyebrows and hairy chest read quite differently. Revealingly, one Puerto Rican newspaper described him as “trigueño,” or “wheat-colored.”[96] A capacious and flexible term applied to a broad range of skin colors, trigueño signifies an intermediate racial status; it lacks the upper-class associations of “white,” but also the negative connotations of “black.”[97] The fact that Sandro could be described this way suggests that many Puerto Ricans saw him as ethnically similar to themselves.

This way of reading Sandro’s race reflected not just his phenotype, but also the way he was marketed. Sandro’s films were fictional, yet because his character in the early ones was a singer named Roberto, they were also clearly about him. In the first two movies, he played a regular guy from a working- or middle-class neighborhood. But his third film, Gitano, evoked his nickname, an intertextuality that mobilized his specific, ethnic otherness. In the film, Sandro plays a gypsy who works at a circus and is the target of vicious bigotry. He is slandered as a “gypsy thief,” and his girlfriend’s parents oppose their relationship. Like his father, who died in jail, Roberto is falsely accused of murder and forced to go into hiding. Roberto gets a job singing at a circus, performing in a clown costume so that he will not be recognized by the police. The circus owner’s daughter, a lawyer, falls in love with him, but Roberto tells her that his lower-class background and lack of a university education mean that “I’ll never fit in your world.” She tries to get him to turn himself in, but he is sure the authorities will never believe his version of events since he is a gypsy. In the end, Roberto is arrested but then exonerated by a judge, who tells him that his one mistake was that he did not have faith in Justice. The happy ending is complete when he reunites with his original girlfriend. With its depiction of a benevolent, patriarchal state, this ending must have pleased the dictatorship in power in Argentina. But the movie’s dominant effect was to link Sandro with marginalization in both class and ethnic terms. Gitano packaged Sandro as a nonwhite person of humble origins; by removing any hint of European superiority that might have attached to him as an Argentine, the film helped enable his Latin American persona.

FIGURE 4.3 • Sandro marketed in Puerto Rico as “The Idol of America.” El Mundo (October 22, 1969), 1C.

Yet if these class and ethnic associations allowed Sandro to inhabit a generalized, Latin American identity—Sandro de América—within Argentina they particularized him in ways that were sometimes limiting. Virtually every article dedicated to Sandro in the local entertainment press described his “humble origins” in Valentín Alsina. In these, he both lamented his family’s poverty—his small, sad house, the fact that he had to give up his education and grow up too quickly—and celebrated the friendships and ordinary pleasures of barrio life.[98] These accounts were reminiscent of the press coverage of tango stars in the 1920s and 1930s. Since tango was understood to have emerged in the poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, artists emphasized their humble roots in order to establish their authenticity. They crafted rags-to-riches life stories that appealed to their working-class fans without alienating higher-class audiences.[99] Yet in the post-Perón era, Argentina was much more polarized along class lines, divisions that were reflected in popular music preferences. In this context, a taste for Sandro’s music implied lower-class status. Palito Ortega was also marketed as a poor boy who had achieved success, but since Ortega was from the remote province of Tucumán, his biography could be harnessed to a comforting message of national unity.[100] By contrast, Sandro was from greater Buenos Aires; local readers either knew Valentín Alsina or had a concrete idea of what it was like and who lived there. They inevitably associated Sandro with the residents of these areas, working-class people often insulted as grasas, gronchos, or cabecitas negras. By giving Sandro a racialized, subaltern identity, the movie Gitano reinforced this association.[101]

The very qualities that made Sandro so well suited to Latin American stardom—his apparent nonwhiteness; his humble origins; his commitment to the sentimental, overtly commercial genre of balada—marked him as an icon of lower-class taste in Argentina. The press often depicted a powerful bond between Sandro and the poorer elements in his audience; in one interview, the singer remarked that “the public makes, at times, great sacrifices in order to pay the cover at a club. So I have to give my best.”[102] Among these fans, Sandro served as a national symbol. His triumphs abroad were endlessly celebrated in fan magazines, and his ability to surpass singers like Tom Jones or Roberto Carlos was often taken as an occasion for patriotic gloating.[103] In a letter to the editor, one reader argued that Sandro was superior to Raphael and that the fact that an Argentine had become “one of the most important artists in the world” was a source of “pride.”[104] But this was a nationalism imbued with class connotations. In 1972, anthropologist Hugo Ratier noted that the cabecitas negras, or poor mestizos, who lived in Buenos Aires were “responsible for the majority of the things sold in the kiosks around the Retiro train station: Gardel dressed as a gaucho, Perón on horseback, the passionate life of Sandro. With them arrived in the city a refreshing Latin American air that impregnates everything.”[105] In this formulation, poor citizens of Buenos Aires were, both racially and culturally, more Latin American than other porteños, even as they consumed distinctively Argentine cultural products. And a preference for Sandro was one of the principal ways this class-specific, Latin Americanized form of national identity was expressed.

Given these class associations, many Argentines were anxious to distance themselves from Sandro. In more highbrow publications, the sorts of magazines that celebrated the prestigious cosmopolitanism of Astor Piazzolla, Sandro was often mocked for his intellectual pretensions: “He believes—seriously—that his song ‘Quiero llenarme de ti’ could appear in any anthology of the best universal poetry [and] that the morose melodies that accompany these lyrics are comparable to the fugues of Bach.”[106] At times, the criticism was more direct: “His vibrato might win him the applause of certain sectors who appreciate vulgarity, but it robs of him quality.”[107] For this reviewer, Sandro’s signature vocal mannerism was a sign of his low cultural status and that of his fans. Sandro became a frequent target of musicians and commentators who sought distinction for their own aesthetic preferences. The avant-garde singer Nacha Guevara argued that “Sandro is the representative in 1970 of what Libertad Lamarque was in 1930,” a “sentimental” performer successfully marketed to the masses.[108] Many of the most pointed critiques came from the rock nacional scene, in which authenticity and honesty were the highest values. The youth magazine La Bella Gente described Sandro’s songs as “conformist, sentimental, exaggeratedly passionate, obviously out of style.”[109] Rocker Luis Alberto Spinetta was particularly harsh: “I do not like Sandro because his songs are absolutely boring (musically and lyrically). His voice has nothing of value. It is a sweet-and-sour voice, and you never know where it is going. It is a voice that tires you. I do not know if Sandro studied music at all, but if he did, he hides it well.” Spinetta attributed Sandro’s popularity to Argentina’s cultural stagnation. With no great artists to challenge and teach them, he argued, Argentine audiences had lost their capacity for aesthetic judgment; as a result, they accepted “this mediocre music.”[110]

For middle-class Argentines who sought cultural uplift and sophistication, Sandro was anathema. And to the racial and class associations discussed, we could also add gender. As Manzano has shown, the “long-haired boys” who were inventing rock nacional in the late 1960s and early 1970s represented a new model of masculinity, one that prized romantic vulnerability, honesty, and an artistic temperament.[111] By contrast, Sandro, with his unbuttoned shirts and unceasing effort at seduction, offered a more old-fashioned, less challenging form of manliness. Sandro was a source of pride for some Argentines, but his popularity was an embarrassment to others. In this sense, his reception in Argentina was very similar to that of Roberto Carlos in Brazil. Carlos had also made the move from rock and roll to balada and had become a major star throughout Latin America. Yet he was dismissed by many middle-class Brazilians as brega, the musical preference of maids.[112] In both cases, the critique of the artist reflected a critique of his fans. Watching a group of hysterical young women fight each other in order to tear off a piece of Sandro’s clothing, one female student commented, “It seems to me that they are playing a very sad role. There are many ways to show that one likes an artist; but never trying to cut off his tie or pulling off his pants.”[113] Even as Sandro emerged as an international superstar, for some segments of his own country, he and his audience epitomized the backward and unsophisticated elements of Argentine culture.

Decline and Comeback

During the 1970s, Sandro helped make balada the pop soundtrack of Latin America. Many other Latin American genres thrived—salsa, merengue, cumbia, Mexican norteño, Brazilian MPB, folk musics of various kinds, national versions of rock, etc.—but the audience for each of these was geographically limited. Balada, by contrast, was entirely denationalized; it was Latin American music. As such, balada perfectly served the interests of the major multinational record companies, who, since the early 1960s, had pursued artists that they could market throughout the entire region. A music forged by artists in dialogue with a diverse array of styles from around the world, balada received the backing of corporations that saw Latin America as a single, undifferentiated market. With fans of Sandro and other singers spread all over the hemisphere, balada helped make this vision a reality; it helped produce a pan-Latin American musical identity. In 1975, CBS promoted Sandro and Roberto Carlos as its two biggest “Latin stars.”[114]

By the 1980s, though, balada was changing, and Sandro was increasingly left behind. Having unified the market, the multinationals now sought to concentrate production. Whereas balada albums had once been recorded in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid, as well as in Los Angeles and New York, production now increasingly centered in Miami. This change paralleled the emergence of Miami as the most desirable location for a range of multinational corporations doing business in Latin America.[115] The Spanish singer Julio Iglesias moved to Miami in 1979, followed soon after by Venezuelan superstar José Luis “el Puma” Rodríguez. Oscar Anderle tried to convince Sandro to follow suit, arguing that as with Iglesias, a move to Miami could allow him to make inroads in the U.S. market. But Sandro refused, preferring to maintain his home in Buenos Aires.[116] Although roughly the same age as Iglesias, Rodríguez, and Mexican balada star José José, Sandro now increasingly seemed old-fashioned. He released his last movie, Subí que te llevo (dir. Rubén Cavallotti) in 1980, and his pace of recording slowed dramatically. Whether because his musical persona still bore the traces of late 1950s rock and roll, because his local recordings could not match the modern production values of records made in Miami, or because he simply lost some of his earlier ambition, Sandro was no longer a Latin American superstar.

As late as 1980 or 1981, Sandro retained a significant audience in Argentina. Even though he was no longer selling millions of records, his live performances still regularly sold out.[117] But within a few years, his fan base had shifted geographically. In 1982, he relocated for six months to San Juan in order to star in a Puerto Rican telenovela opposite local star Gladys Rodríguez. The program, Fue sin querer, was a big hit on the island and in Venezuela, but it was not broadcast in Argentina until 1987, and then low ratings caused it to be cancelled within a few months. When he performed in Buenos Aires after a three-year hiatus in 1985, he did not sell out the Astros Theatre.[118] Sandro no longer fit the Argentine cultural scene.

Unfortunately for Sandro, he did not inspire the kind of nostalgia that might have sustained his career in the midst of Argentina’s transition to democracy. With the brief exception of the highly conflictive 1973–76 period, the country had been ruled by the military since 1966. In 1983, the violent dictatorship known as the Proceso finally came to an end. In this context, many Argentines felt nostalgic for the cosmopolitan and modernizing 1950s and early 1960s. As I argued in the previous chapter, some were drawn to Astor Piazzolla because his music evoked this optimistic period before the onset of military dictatorship. Many more Argentines embraced leftist artists like Mercedes Sosa who had been forced into exile during the dictatorship and now returned to the country in triumph. Similarly, rock nacional had served as an implicit soundtrack of resistance during the Proceso; it thrived in the new context of openness.[119] By contrast, since Sandro’s biggest hits and most of his movies came out during the Onganía dictatorship of 1966–73, he likely reminded audiences of a period they would prefer to forget. Even worse, some of his public statements during the more recent dictatorship suggested implicit support for the regime. After a performance in the province of Catamarca in 1980, he appeared to support the government’s crackdown on militant young people, declaring that “Argentine youth really don’t know what country they are living in. A privileged country.”[120]

Unlike Palito Ortega and others, Sandro was not generally seen as an outright supporter of the dictatorship. Yet he was associated with an intensely commercial, escapist brand of entertainment that now seemed problematic. For the most part, Sandro had always been self-consciously apolitical. Although his plebeian associations may have led some to identify him with Peronism, he had never, in fact, expressed any support for this or any other movement. As he declared in 1970: “I’m not interested in politics. I think that each person has the right to choose what best suits him or what he likes according to his own criterion … I maintain my attitude of trying to get the public’s vote for my songs, my performances, and everything related to my work.”[121] This apoliticism was in fact typical of balada and had allowed the genre to thrive in many repressive political environments, including Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile.[122] Yet in the context of democratic transitions, as societies sought to distance themselves from authoritarianism, the escapism of balada was something of an embarrassment. For Argentines who had just lived through the horrors of the Proceso, memories of Sandro no longer signified fun.

At the same time, the mid-1980s, like the late 1950s, was another period characterized by middle-class cosmopolitanism. With the end of dictatorship and censorship, young, middle-class Argentines embraced contemporary global culture. Alongside older rockers like Charly García and Luis Alberto Spinetta, a new generation of modern bands emerged, most notably Soda Stereo, who developed their style in dialogue with contemporary Anglo-American pop music. Sandro’s connection to balada and his popularity throughout Latin America was now a liability. Despite his roots in rock and roll, his music no longer tied him to the contemporary United States; he seemed un-hip, out of synch with the times. In this period, a preference for Sandro was labeled mersa, meaning that it was tacky or in poor taste.[123] This was merely a deepening of the lower-class associations that already attached to Sandro.[124] Critics and rock musicians had found him tacky in the 1970s; in the context of Argentina’s democratic transition, this sentiment spread.

Nevertheless, Sandro soon enjoyed a comeback. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, both León Gieco and Charly García, two of the most enduring musicians from the first wave of rock nacional, declared their admiration for Sandro and recorded songs with him. With the imprimatur of these musicians, Sandro now came to be recognized as an important precursor of Argentine rock music. This recognition culminated with the 1999 album, Tributo a Sandro: Un disco de rock, on which rock groups from Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America performed cover versions of his balada hits, reappropriating them for rock music history. Sandro’s origins with Los de fuego facilitated this resignification, but it was also made possible by an important ideological shift within the rock community. Whereas earlier rock nacional groups had looked primarily to the United States and Britain for their models, this was now changing. As I will explain in chapter 6, Argentine rock musicians increasingly saw themselves as part of a larger movement of “Rock en español” or “Rock latino.” As with balada before it, this movement was promoted by the multinational record companies, who saw a large, potential market throughout Latin America for records by Soda Stereo and other bands. This commercial strategy culminated with the establishment of the cable television network, MTV Latino, in 1993. Rock bands from throughout the region now listened to each other and considered themselves part of a Latin American musical field. Sandro’s pan-Latin American stardom—his identity as Sandro de América—was now an asset. This association enabled rock musicians to recontextualize him, to identify him as a part of a common musical heritage, and to downplay the troubling class and political associations that attached to him within Argentina.

The Sandro revival went beyond the rock scene. In 1993, he developed a new show called “30 Years of Magic.” After a series of performances throughout Greater Buenos Aires, he played eighteen sold-out shows at the Gran Rex in downtown Buenos Aires, four more than the previous record, held by Soda Stereo. He repeated this feat in 1996 and again in 1998–99, this time selling out the Gran Rex forty times.[125] Part of Sandro’s audience at these concerts were the so-called nenas, older women from the humbler neighborhoods of greater Buenos Aires, who had been fans of the singer since their youth. But Sandro clearly drew from other sectors as well. In part, Sandro’s renewed popularity may have reflected what Martín Caparrós described as the “vulgarization [plebeyización] of taste” that occurred during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989–99).[126] Menem’s neoliberal economic policies and populist political style produced fabulous wealth for a few even as it legitimized the cultural preferences of the masses, a phenomenon captured by the Menemista phrase “pizza and champagne.”

Yet Sandro’s comeback was also part of a transnational trend: as Daniel Party has described, Chile in the late 1990s also experienced “a revival of the classic balada genre of the 1970s and 1980s.” As in Argentina, a stigma attached to Chilean balada because of its association with lower-class maids and right-wing supporters of the Pinochet regime. According to Party, what made the revival possible was the detention of General Pinochet in London in 1998, which initiated a long-delayed process of coming to terms with the nation’s conflictive past. In this context, it was finally possible for opponents of the dictatorship to indulge in the “guilty pleasure” of balada.[127] Something similar may well have occurred in Argentina during the 1990s. A decade removed from the dictatorship, it was now possible for Argentines from various sectors of society to enjoy Sandro as a nostalgic pleasure or even as kitsch. In a positive review of one of Sandro’s concerts from 1998, the elitist newspaper La Nación described his familiar “melodramatic style” and “kitsch scenography” but emphasized his impressive ability to make women swoon. While the review dripped with condescension for Sandro’s female fans, married women who threw bras and panties at the aging object of their affections, it nevertheless celebrated Sandro as “an artist who knows all the secrets and resources of showmanship.” For his part, the singer seemed aware of the times. To great applause, Sandro dedicated one song to “those mothers who are still searching for their children and asking for justice,” a clear allusion to the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.[128] With one deft sentence, he erased the earlier set of associations that linked him to the dictatorship, repositioning his music to enable its consumption in a new era.

Quite apart from Sandro’s comeback as a rock precursor, object of nostalgia, and kitsch oddity, the musical style he elaborated in the late 1960s and early 1970s continues to have an impact on patterns of identity formation in Latin America in general and in Argentina in particular. He was a key member of a generation of performers who responded to the challenge of rock and roll and subsequent Anglo-American genres by producing a denationalized style of pop that unified its audience as Latin American. The Latin American character of his form of balada was not a result of hybridization with local tradition: Sandro did not bring the tango or any of Argentina’s folk rhythms to bear on rock. On the contrary, his music reflected a wide range of cosmopolitan influences: doo-wop and Brill-building pop, Latin American versions of rock and roll, as well as the multiple pop hybrids produced in France, Italy, and Spain. What made it Latin American was its reception. Sandro benefited from the existence of an audience throughout the region primed by the bolero and by Latin America’s long, multiple traditions of melodramatic popular culture to accept a hyper-romantic, accessible musical form as expressive of a distinctive Latin American aesthetic. His physical appearance, as well as a series of marketing strategies that highlighted the class and ethnic associations that appearance made possible, allowed him to overcome the Argentine identity that might have prevented him from becoming Sandro de América. Sandro’s Latin American stardom was a source of pride in Argentina, but it was also problematic. His success complicated the efforts of middle-class Argentines to distinguish themselves culturally from less-developed and darker-skinned Latin Americans as well as from the negros in their own country.

The business strategies and economic power of multinational record companies like CBS were crucial to the emergence of the Sandro phenomenon and balada in general. These companies brought rock and pop music from around the world to Argentine consumers in the early 1960s. Equally important, they sought to unify the Latin American market by promoting stars like Sandro throughout the region. Nevertheless, balada cannot be reduced to a story of cultural imperialism. Such an account would render invisible the agency of musicians like Sandro, who forged their own style on the basis of diverse models; local intermediaries like Ben Molar and Oscar Anderle, who helped translate foreign musical trends into locally meaningful versions; and fans throughout Latin America, who embraced balada stars as their own, despite their national origins. Sandro died in 2010 after a long struggle with emphysema, but his iconicity remains intact throughout Latin America. In 2014, the winner of the popular Colombian television program Yo me llamo, in which contestants compete by imitating famous Latin American performers, was a Sandro de América imitator.

5

INDIGENOUS ARGENTINA AND REVOLUTIONARY LATIN AMERICA

Mercedes Sosa and the Multiple Meanings of Folk Music

In 1972, the Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa scoffed when an interviewer asked about her income: “In this country you make a lot of money being Sandro or Palito Ortega, not Mercedes Sosa.”[1] Having recently performed at the Colón Theatre, the most prestigious concert hall in Buenos Aires, she drew a sharp distinction between herself and these ostensibly more commercial artists. And yet by the following decade, Sosa was a massive star who sold out huge arenas and whose albums set sales records. Moreover, much like Sandro, Sosa achieved impressive levels of fame outside of Argentina. Sandro’s manager had boasted that the singer surpassed Carlos Gardel in his capacity to sell movie and concert tickets throughout Latin America.[2] Two decades later, the reporter Víctor Pintos compared Sosa to the same standard, claiming that she was a bigger draw abroad than even Gardel.[3]

Sosa’s commercial success inside and outside of Argentina reflected her capacity to bridge two historic models of transnational engagement: one that looked toward Europe and the United States and another that forged connections with the rest of Latin America. She first achieved success by following the same path as Astor Piazzolla: she was a vanguardist performer whose music and image were in dialogue with current trends in Europe and the United States and who attracted an urban, middle-class audience interested in a cosmopolitan version of Argentine nationalism. However, in the 1970s, Sosa also emerged as an icon of revolutionary Latin Americanism, a politicized version of the Latin American identity Sandro was forging at the same time. She was now engaged with musicians and audiences throughout Latin America, and she began to appeal to a broader audience at home. She was as prestigious as Piazzolla, and yet her audience was not limited to intellectuals and connoisseurs. She was as popular as Sandro, and yet she was never denigrated as mersa.

What enabled Sosa to combine these two transnationalisms was the innovative persona that she created for herself in the mid-1960s. Sosa had been a conventional folksinger of only modest success. In the early 1960s, she became a founding member of the leftist Movimiento Nuevo Cancionero (New Songbook movement), which combined traditional song forms with sophisticated poetry and an emphasis on social themes. But this affiliation failed to win her large audiences. Sosa became a star by reinventing herself as an embodiment of indigeneity. She crafted this performance style by drawing on contemporary trends in North American folk music as well as on a tradition forged by earlier Argentine musicians who packaged their art to appeal to the primitivist sensibilities of European audiences. As an up-to-date image expressed through aesthetic vanguardism, her new persona appealed to the cosmopolitan middle class. The multinational record company, Philips, saw its commercial potential and gave Sosa the platform she needed to reach audiences in Argentina as well as in Europe and the United States. Yet by locating an essentialist indigeneity at the heart of Argentine national identity, Sosa had also connected the country to the rest of Latin America. In this way, she enabled Argentine young people to reimagine their nationality and their Latin American-ness.

Eventually, the revolutionary implications of Sosa’s art alarmed the country’s military rulers, who pushed her into exile in 1979. Three years later, as the dictatorship’s hold on power began to falter, she returned to Argentina and accomplished another self-transformation, expanding her repertoire and emerging as a broadly popular figure able to bring together disparate communities in the name of building a socially just, democratic society.

Refashioning Folk Nationalism

Mercedes Sosa was born in 1935 to a working-class family in the provincial capital of San Miguel de Tucumán. Her mother worked as a maid and laundress, while her father was a manual laborer in the sugar industry, the largest employer in the province. Although the family could not afford a radio, she grew up listening to music on the neighbors’ radios and developed a fondness and aptitude for singing. Her parents were avid Peronists, and on October 17, 1950, they traveled to Buenos Aires to participate in the official commemoration of the movement’s origin. Sosa took advantage of the freedom her parents’ absence afforded by visiting a local radio station that was hosting a competition for unknown singers. With the encouragement of her friends, she entered the contest, inventing the pseudonym Gladys Osorio in a vain attempt to hide her identity from her father whose idea of feminine decency did not include performing on the radio. Her victory in the contest launched her career as a singer. Once her father’s opposition was overcome, Sosa signed a contract with the radio station and also began performing at a circus and a local amusement park.[4]

Although she enjoyed listening to a range of popular music, Sosa identified herself as an Argentine folksinger from the very beginning of her career. Her winning song in the 1950 radio contest was “Estoy triste,” which had been a hit for her idol, Margarita Palacios, a folksinger from the neighboring province of Catamarca. In need of more songs to sing, she bought copies of the Buenos Aires music magazine El alma que canta and copied down the lyrics of the latest folk hits, focusing particularly on songs popularized by Antonio Tormo, at the time the genre’s biggest star.[5] Sosa’s early repertoire made her a typical singer in the folk music field of the early 1950s.

As a recognizable genre, Argentine folk music originated in the work of a group of intellectuals writing in the early twentieth century. Concerned by the massive waves of European immigrants flooding the country, Ricardo Rojas and others hoped that Argentina could maintain its national identity by preserving and inculcating rural folk culture. In the 1920s, Argentine scholars intrigued by this idea and by the growing, international discipline of folklore studies began to visit remote populations in order to collect songs and other pieces of rural culture.[6] Like their counterparts in the United States and Europe, Argentine folklorists such as Juan Alfonso Carrizo saw the material they collected as elements of an isolated, premodern tradition that needed to be preserved from the taint of urban, commercial culture. Thanks in part to the sponsorship of Tucumán’s sugar industrialists, Carrizo and his colleagues focused their efforts on Argentina’s northwestern provinces. Their collections depicted this region, far removed from the cosmopolitan modernity of Buenos Aires, as “the historic center of Argentine nationality.”[7]

Under the influence of these ideas about nation and region, the commercial genre of folk music first emerged on the country’s radio stations in the 1930s. Many of the most prominent artists were from the Northwest, but other regions were represented as well, including the Littoral in the northeast and Cuyo in the west. Despite this regional diversity, folk music was constituted as a single, national genre, so that cross-regional hybrids became increasingly common. The singer Antonio Tormo scored folk music’s first massive hit with “El rancho ‘e la Cambicha” in 1950, the same year that the fifteen-year-old Mercedes Sosa began her professional career. The song, suggested to Tormo by his record company, RCA Victor, was a rasguido doble, a version of the chamamé rhythm native to the Littoral. Yet Tormo replaced the accordion typical of that region with guitar accompaniment in the style of the tonada from his native Cuyo.[8] Nevertheless, the hybridity of “El rancho ‘e la Cambicha” was inaudible to most Argentine radio listeners, to whom Tormo was marketed in explicitly national terms. A typical ad described him as “What all Argentina was waiting for! The greatest singer of criollo feeling.”[9] Regardless of its specific provincial pedigree, folk music was the musical representation of the nation, valued in large part for its capacity to embody an Argentine national identity uncontaminated by modernization and foreign influence.

Although folk appealed to many urbanites who also enjoyed tango and jazz, Tormo’s unprecedented success revealed the emergence of a new audience shaped by major demographic and political shifts. In the 1930s and 1940s, the country underwent a significant process of import substitution industrialization, which in turn triggered substantial internal migration, as thousands of rural Argentines moved to Buenos Aires and other cities seeking jobs in the growing manufacturing sector. Disparaged by middle-class and elite porteños, these migrants may well have responded to folk music because it reminded them of their provincial homes. In the political arena, migrants and other working-class Argentines rallied to the cause of populist Colonel Juan Perón, electing him to the presidency in 1946. While actively promoting industrialization and dramatically improving the standard of living of Argentine workers, the Perón regime continued many of the cultural policies enacted by the previous military government. Under the influence of a group of Catholic nationalist intellectuals, that government promoted the dissemination of folk music in the schools and passed regulations limiting the amount of foreign music that radio stations could play. While Perón’s relationship with many of the Catholic nationalists was strained, he shared their enthusiasm for promoting national unity and moral virtue through folk music. His government subsidized folk music organizations, festivals, and peñas, and chose folk musicians to represent the nation abroad. The same cultural nationalism that could make life difficult for jazz musicians like Oscar Alemán or Lalo Schifrin was a boon to most folk artists. Typical was the case of Mercedes Sosa, who like many other folksingers in Tucumán, sang at official events organized by the Peronist provincial government.[10]

Despite Peronism’s support for the genre, folk songwriters avoided any explicit affiliation with the regime. Instead, nostalgia and melodrama dominated the lyrics of these years. As Claudio Díaz has demonstrated, folk lyricists composed in a language they copied largely from gauchesque literature, a genre that included such works as José Hernández’s Martín Fierro (1872, 1879), taught to generations of Argentine schoolchildren as the national poem. Folk lyricists used the informal contractions (pa’ instead of para, for example) and rural terminology typical of this literature in order to convey authenticity.[11] Among the recurring tropes in folk songs was that of the pago, or home village, figured as an idealized space representing values threatened by modernization. Folk lyrics expressed nostalgia for the bravery, generosity, and patriotism of the gaucho or provincial resident of the past, values that were ostensibly lacking in the urban present.[12] At the same time, folk lyrics betrayed the influence of the popular melodrama typical of other forms of mass culture. For example, Margarita Palacios’s “Estoy triste,” the song Mercedes Sosa sang in the radio contest of 1950, told a tale of unrequited love that would have fit in well on the radio melodramas of the period: “Ay, ay, ay / how sad is my life. / I have no more happiness / the one whom I loved so much has gone away.”

As Oscar Chamosa has argued, folk music’s particular relationship to Peronism allowed it to survive the Revolución Libertadora, the military coup that overthrew the regime in 1955. The regime’s support for peñas and for the use of folk in the schools had enabled the genre to grow. Young Argentines were now more familiar with folk music than they were with tango. However, since the genre was never explicitly Peronist, it was largely unaffected by the de-Peronization campaign that followed the coup. The only prominent folksinger whose career did not survive the transition was Antonio Tormo, who was so closely associated with his fan base of Peronist internal migrants that he was blacklisted under the new regime.[13] For the most part, though, folk music’s depoliticized, nostalgic nationalism was as well suited to the Revolución Libertadora as it had been to Peronism.

Yet folk music did more than survive; it became the nation’s fastest growing genre, easily eclipsing the tango. By the early 1960s, the largely anti-Peronist, urban middle classes had enthusiastically embraced it, producing a “folk boom.” In 1962, porteños heard an average of sixteen radio programs per day dedicated to folk music, and every television station featured folk music programs as well.[14] This impressive commercial success was enabled by transnational developments. As I have argued elsewhere, the tango’s immense popularity in the 1920s and 1930s had been due, in part, to the fact that it could be packaged as a domestic alternative to jazz, the sonic emblem of modernity. An urban dance music played by big bands, tango paired well with swing jazz. In Buenos Aires night spots and on the city’s radio stations, orquestas típicas playing tango alternated with jazz bands. But by the mid-1950s, jazz had given way to rock and roll and other genres in the United States. In this context, tango’s big-band orchestration and its jazz-era associations began to seem old fashioned.[15] Ironically, folk musicians, who had always prided themselves on their traditionalism, suddenly seemed much more up to date. After all, a folk revival had been under way in the United States since the 1940s. Originally associated with leftist supporters of the labor movement like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, North American folk music became a commercial phenomenon when Seeger’s group, The Weavers, recorded Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene” in 1950. Although the advent of McCarthyism drove leftist folk music underground, by the late 1950s, apolitical groups like the Kingston Trio became big stars. North American folk musicians never achieved the sort of popularity in Argentina that rockers like Bill Haley did, but they were heard there. Both the Weavers’ “Goodnight Irene” and the Kingston Trio’s big hit, “Tom Dooley” (1958) were released in Argentina, and a Spanish version of “Greenfields” by the Brothers Four went to number three on the Argentine top ten in 1961.[16] In this context, Argentine musicians strumming acoustic guitars and singing songs rooted in traditional, rural traditions fit comfortably in the soundscape of cosmopolitan modernity.

Argentine folk music was not an imitation of its North American counterpart. It had its own traditions, and it was based on local rhythms rather than on English ballads and the blues. Nevertheless, the music of the folk boom did betray some North American influence. The biggest folk acts in Argentina in the late 1950s and early 1960s were vocal groups. This style certainly had precedents within local folk music, but vocal groups underwent several changes during the boom years. In the 1940s, the Ábalos Brothers, from Santiago del Estero, played a wide range of traditional instruments from the Andean region, including the flute known as the quena and the charango, a small stringed instrument of the lute family. However, following the success of Los Chalchaleros, from Salta, most vocal groups adopted a more stripped-down instrumental lineup of two or three guitars and the drum known as the bombo legüero. Beginning with Los Fronterizos, another group from Salta who debuted in Buenos Aires in 1958, folk groups moved away from the simple two-part harmonies of the Ábalos Brothers and Los Chalchaleros, adopting more complex three- and four-part schemes.[17] This approach may have been modeled on the Kingston Trio, but it was just as likely inspired by Doo-Wop groups like the Platters, who, as we have seen, were enormously popular in Argentina. In any case, sophisticated vocal harmony was a signifier of cosmopolitan modernity in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Argentine folk groups were enthusiastic adopters. Groups like Los Cantores de Quilla Huasi and Los Huanca Hua also abandoned the gaucho performance attire typical of many folk musicians in favor of jackets and ties. Dressed in this way and playing acoustic guitars, Argentine folk groups looked quite similar to North American folk acts.

These aesthetic transformations helped make folk music appealing to the urban middle classes. In addition to multipart harmony and modern performance attire, lyricists like Jaime Dávalos and Manuel Castilla brought a more abstract, literary style to the genre, while classically trained musicians and composers like Eduardo Falú and Ariel Ramírez introduced musical complexity. This new generation of artists retained folk music’s explicit celebration of national tradition even as they embraced ostensibly universal standards of quality.[18] Even less ambitious songs like Roberto Cambaré’s “Angélica,” one of the biggest folk hits of the period, pointed in this direction. A relatively simple love song, “Angélica” deployed poetic images that contrasted with the direct, popular melodrama of Tormo’s hits: “If your love was an eagle, my poor soul was a dove.” This was a folk music purged of lowbrow associations and thus available for adoption by the anti-Peronist middle classes. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Astor Piazzolla had emerged as a symbol of a cosmopolitan, modernizing nationalism. The new folk music spoke to this same impulse. Rogelio Frigerio’s developmentalist magazine Qué, which had paid such close attention to Piazzolla’s tango innovations, celebrated the guitarist and composer Eduardo Falú for overcoming “routine” and for his “clear, polished, and brilliant technique … a lesson of what is necessary to do in the field of popular music.”[19] Falú and others demonstrated that an elevated folk music could reconcile nationalism with progress and modernization.

The complexity that ambitious folk musicians like Falú brought to the genre was, for the most part, melodic and harmonic. Folk music could only function as a recognizable expression of national tradition to the extent that it preserved traditional rhythms. Yet here too there were changes. In particular, the genre began to lose its regional and rhythmic diversity. During the boom years, the zamba, a northwestern music and dance form derived from the Peruvian zamacueca, gained prominence not only over rhythms from other regions, such as the chamamé, but also over other Northwestern forms like the chacarera. As Pablo Vila has argued, the zamba lacked the festive tone of these other forms. Its seriousness made it a better fit with the poetry of the new generation of lyricists and responded to the aesthetic tastes of middle-class listeners who preferred a more sophisticated version of folk music.[20] Much like Piazzolla’s New Tango, the zambas written and produced during the boom were folk songs for listening rather than dancing.[21]

Despite this increasing standardization, the field of folk music was not homogenous. On the contrary, a class-based hierarchy separated groups like Los Chalchaleros, who attracted a popular audience, from more vanguardist groups like Los Cantores de Quilla Huasi and Los Huanca Hua, who aimed at more educated, elite listeners.[22] The magazine Folklore, edited by the radio and television host and impresario Julio Márbiz, sought to unify these various ideological positions by means of a patriotic discourse that identified all forms of folk music with national authenticity. The magazine celebrated the commercial success of folk, particularly among young record buyers, as a victory over the Nueva Ola and other foreign musical styles: “The cycle of the pachanga, the cha-cha-chá, and rock—of blue jeans, sideburns and violence—is over. We believe that our people have made contact, for the first time, with something they carry within: the love of their fatherland.”[23] Nevertheless, the tensions between nationalism and authenticity on the one hand and cosmopolitanism and commercialism on the other were frequently visible in the magazine. Folklore celebrated Los Huanca Hua for crafting sophisticated, modern arrangements, even as it reported that the group rejected the label “nueva ola of folk music” because their music was not a passing, commercial fad but deeply rooted in “ancient” tradition.[24] Artists like these carefully negotiated the competing pressures to be both old and new, authentic and commercial.

Mercedes Sosa was already a professional folksinger when the boom began, but it took her several years to develop a distinctive persona and to acquire a national audience. She took her first step in that direction in 1957 when she moved with her new husband, a guitarist and songwriter named Oscar Matus, to his home province of Mendoza. There, she joined a circle of intellectuals and artists, including the guitarist Tito Francia and the poet Armando Tejada Gómez, with whom Matus had been composing songs for several years. Together, they forged a tight-knit artistic community and began to imagine a new approach to folk music that would culminate with the founding of the Movimiento Nuevo Cancionero in 1963. In broad strokes, they pursued the same goal as the other folk innovators of these years: they aimed to elevate folk music by adding complexity and sophistication to both the music and the lyrics.

Despite being based in a provincial capital some seven hundred miles from Buenos Aires, these musicians and poets were a self-consciously cosmopolitan bunch. By 1950, there were four radio stations broadcasting in Mendoza, providing performance opportunities for local musicians but also bringing the latest trends from Buenos Aires and beyond to the Mendocino audience. Both Francia and Tejada Gómez worked for one of these stations, the former as the principal guitarist in the house band and the latter as an announcer. Francia’s position, which he had held since the late 1940s, made him fluent in all of the popular genres of the day. In addition to providing accompaniment to folksingers such as Antonio Tormo and Hilario Cuadros, Francia played tango and bolero, formed his own “hot jazz” band, and played classical music.[25] According to Tejada Gómez, it was Francia’s harmonic knowledge—a knowledge the guitarist acquired primarily through jazz—that made the group’s musical innovations possible. As María Inés García has demonstrated, Francia’s compositions featured chords that were much more typical of jazz than they were of Argentine folk music: ninths and elevenths, as well as augmented fifths and sixths.[26] And as the group’s most accomplished musician, Francia exerted a significant influence on the other composers. By his own account, he gave Oscar Matus guitar lessons, teaching him how to “insert avant-garde chords.”[27]

More than just a source of harmonic sophistication, jazz provided a model of musical innovation and a means to achieve it. As Sosa later described it, “We based ourselves on jazz so that our music would be new.”[28] Recalling his own experience at the radio station, Tejada Gómez emphasized the cosmopolitan diversity of the music he and his compatriots listened to:

We were youth who liked jazz, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, la tonada, la cueca: we never made a boundary for music.… I got a musical education from [radio station] LV10, as much in jazz as in folk and classical music. I educated myself in the station’s record collection, which had thousands of records. My job was to transmit the concerts that closed the late-night broadcast. It was an hour of symphonic music. In that way, I tuned my ear, and I fell for jazz. I found a phrase from Duke Ellington that I stuck on the wall of the studio, which said: “jazz is not a rigid concept, it’s life.” Even then, I already thought that folk music was also not a paleontological concept, it was life in movement.[29]

Tejada Goméz’s comments suggest that jazz may have played a similar role for the Mendoza musicians as it did for Astor Piazzolla. In both cases, jazz sanctioned an effort to bring sophistication and innovation to a traditional musical form.

After trying and failing to break into the commercial folk music circuit for several years, Sosa finally secured a recording contract. Her debut album, La voz de la zafra (The Voice of the Harvest), was released on RCA Victor in 1962. The album represented something of a compromise between the aesthetic and ideological principles of the Mendoza group and those of the multinational record company. Since eight of the twelve songs were Matus/Tejada Gómez compositions, La voz de la zafra did feature many of the musical and lyrical hallmarks of what would become the Movimiento Nuevo Cancionero. Nevertheless, in an effort to make the music more commercial, RCA Victor paired Sosa with a band and backup singers, thereby placing her voice in a highly conventional setting. The title of the album was a reference to the sugar harvest and, thus, to Sosa’s origins in Tucumán, a biographical detail underlined in the liner notes in order to establish her provincial authenticity. Strangely, though, a majority of the songs (including several of those by Matus and Tejada Gómez) were based on themes and rhythms not from Sosa’s Northwest but from the Littoral.[30] In 1960 and 1961, when the album was recorded, the triumph of the zamba was not yet definitive. At the time, the biggest new female star in folk music was Ramona Galarza, a singer from the province of Corrientes who was strongly identified with the Littoral. Galarza produced a series of top-selling albums for Odeon, featuring music from her home region with full band arrangements.[31] RCA Victor likely hoped that Sosa could emulate the success of Galarza and other singers, a calculation that is evident in the photograph featured on the cover of La voz de la zafra. Sosa’s makeup and carefully arranged hairstyle—vaguely reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy’s bouffant—amounted to an image of modern, cosmopolitan femininity that closely matched Galarza’s look.[32]

In a broader sense, La voz de la zafra reflected the business strategy of Ricardo Mejía, the producer who was at this very moment in the process of assembling the Club del Clan on behalf of RCA Victor. Although his focus was on the pop styles of the Nueva Ola, Mejía was open to recording other genres of music if he thought he could make them commercially viable. For example, he agreed to record Piazzolla’s first album with the Quinteto Nuevo Tango in 1961, so long as the group also recorded a dance record that might sell more copies.[33] Like the Piazzolla dance album, La voz de la zafra represented an attempt to place an innovative artist in an aesthetic context drawn from more commercial versions of his or her genre. In both cases, the strategy failed. The Piazzolla dance album sold fewer copies than its ostensibly more artistic counterpart, Sosa’s debut album made very little impression, and RCA Victor moved away from this sort of experiment. Piazzolla’s next couple of albums came out on Columbia, and by 1963, Mejía was being criticized by tango fans for ignoring the genre.[34] Within folk music, other multinationals including Odeon and, especially, Philips would take the leadership role. Sosa later commented that RCA Victor had deemed her album “uncommercial” and therefore refused to promote it.[35]

FIGURE 5.1 • Mercedes Sosa in RCA Victor publicity photo from circa 1962. Folklore Extra: Vida y éxito de Mercedes Sosa (circa 1967).

The vanguardism of Piazzolla and Sosa posed a challenge for RCA Victor, but in Sosa’s case the difficulty was compounded by her politics. Sosa’s repertoire betrayed the leftist orientation of her Mendoza circle and, in particular, that of lyricist Armando Tejada Gómez. In the late 1950s, Tejada Gómez was one of many young leftists who embraced the progressive anti-imperialism of Arturo Frondizi’s presidential campaign. He joined the candidate’s party and was elected to serve in the provincial legislature. But after the election of 1958, Frondizi quickly turned to the right. Under the influence of developmentalist guru Rogelio Frigerio, the new president signed a series of agreements with foreign oil companies; embraced the free-market policies of his minister of economics, Alvaro Alsogaray; and enacted a controversial educational reform that favored private and Catholic schools. Frondizi’s leftist supporters, including Tejada Gómez, reacted with horror. Frondizi’s betrayal of the left, together with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959, radicalized many young Argentines, some of whom embraced the idea that the country required a revolution of its own.[36] For his part, Tejada Gómez joined the Communist Party, an affiliation that soon extended to others in his artistic circle, including Mercedes Sosa. Matus and Sosa, who had been frustrated by their inability to penetrate the Buenos Aires folk scene, relocated to Montevideo in late 1962. There, they were warmly welcomed by leftist intellectuals including the poet Mario Benedetti and the journalist Carlos Núñez, and they performed at Communist Party events.[37] The failure of La voz de la zafra combined with their modest success among the small, leftist audience in Uruguay convinced them to change directions. They wrote to Tejada Gómez and returned to Mendoza, prepared to launch a movement.

In 1963, eight years after Piazzolla had issued his “Decalogue,” Tejada Gómez, Matus, and Sosa, along with other members of their Mendoza circle, published their own manifesto calling for a “New Songbook.” The two documents had much in common. Like Piazzolla, the Movimiento Nuevo Cancionero warned of the danger posed by foreign pop music—what the folk musicians called “the invasion of decadent and distorted forms of foreign hybrids.” And both movements were deeply vanguardist, promising to elevate the quality of Argentine popular music. Yet while Piazzolla offered his innovations as a way of halting the commercial decline of tango, the Mendoza group confronted a folk boom. As a result, the Nuevo Cancionero musicians identified commercialism as the main threat to quality and promised to denounce all “crude” folk music produced for “commercial ends.” They criticized “postcard” songs that expressed nostalgia for the landscape but had nothing to say about the daily struggles of the people who lived and worked in it. Like other folk innovators, they sought to reconcile tradition and progress, singling out Buenaventura Luna and Atahualpa Yupanqui as two earlier folk musicians who had initiated “a reformist impulse that broadens its content without resenting its autochthonous roots.” Finally, the Movimiento Nuevo Cancionero rejected “closed regionalism” in favor of national and even international ambitions. The movement sought to create music that could “express the whole country” and pledged itself to “communication, dialogue, and exchange with all of the similar artists and movements in the rest of America.”[38]

Although the Nuevo Cancionero movement’s musical ambitions did not distinguish the group from other musicians who were trying to make a more sophisticated and cosmopolitan form of folk music, the social content of its lyrics did. The poetry that Tejada Gómez wrote for many of the songs in Sosa’s early repertoire went beyond the nostalgia and melodrama typical of folk music in order to describe the exploitation and suffering of Argentina’s contemporary, rural population. “Zamba del riego (Irrigation Zamba)” is typical in its focus on a poor peasant engaged in specific tasks and forced to bear the weight of an oppressive social system. Tejada Gómez’s lyrics celebrated the songs themselves, and by extension the composers and performers, for their capacity to lift the spirits of the poor. As he put it in “La de los humildes,” a song included on La voz de la zafra, “One has to sing this zamba / Sister of the humble / sower of hopes.” The early songs of the Movimiento Nuevo Cancionero stopped short of an explicit call for revolution, but they did imply that folk singers might serve as intellectual guides for the poor, supporting them and helping to awaken them to consciousness.[39]

Matus and Sosa returned to Buenos Aires in the year following the publication of the manifesto, but they continued to struggle professionally. As Sosa later recalled, “We wanted to create a show that was serious and different, in which the lyrics could be clearly heard, etc. We refused to sing in peñas for people to dance and nothing more.”[40] This attitude, so reminiscent of Piazzolla’s insistence on playing music for listening, limited them to a small audience of young leftists: “Our movement was for a minority … we had a very loyal public, a politicized public.”[41] To a certain extent, Sosa’s vanguardism militated against her attempts to gain popularity. In an interview in a Córdoba newspaper, she was not shy about criticizing folk musicians she considered crudely commercial: “I hate vulgarity. I do not believe in the cleverness of those who out of snobbery or to make money quickly, produce all kinds of vulgarity, of absurdity. I deny that pieces like those made by [Rodolfo] Zapata are an expression of the people, and I also reject those who consider it ‘popular’ to express themselves in coarse and crude language.”[42] Rodolfo Zapata, Sosa’s target here, had scored a hit in 1961 with “La gorda,” a comic chacarera in which the singer poked fun at his overweight girlfriend.[43] Sosa claimed to be making music that was more truly popular, but her criticism of Zapata, very much in keeping with the Nuevo Cancionero manifesto, was frankly elitist. Given this attitude, as well as the sophisticated jazz harmonies and highbrow poetry of her songs, it is no wonder that Sosa’s audience—like Piazzolla’s—was limited to a small group of connoisseurs. And yet, in 1965 Sosa would suddenly emerge as a major star, and by the end of the decade, she was a national icon.

Inventing Indigeneity

According to every account of Mercedes Sosa’s career, the dramatic turning point came in January 1965 at the annual folk festival held in the small town of Cosquín, Córdoba. The Cosquín festival, created in 1961 with the support of the national and local governments as well as the financial backing of the state-owned oil company, was the biggest stage in folk music. Beginning in 1963, Julio Márbiz, the editor of Folklore magazine, served as the festival’s master of ceremonies. Despite Márbiz’s reputation for playing favorites, Cosquín, like the magazine, was a neutral arena in which all of the various styles of folk music, from the most traditional to the most avant-garde, were represented.[44] As a relatively minor folksinger, Sosa was not even on the official program in 1965.[45] The singer Jorge Cafrune, who had been named the “revelation” of the festival three years earlier, invited her onstage and introduced her to the crowd. Accompanying herself on the bombo, Sosa sang “Canción del derrumbe indio.” The performance made such an impact that within a year, it was already legendary. By 1966, she had a contract with Philips and was well on her way to stardom.

Sosa achieved this dramatic reversal in her career trajectory by designing a new mode of self-presentation that emphasized her indigeneity. According to one account, when she took the stage at Cosquín a shocked Márbiz asked, “Who is that woman who looks like a servant?”[46] A description of Sosa’s early performance style reveals the visual cues that helped produce this snap judgment: “A face of severe indigenous reminiscences, expressive and without makeup.… Almost always dressed in a black outfit partly covered by a poncho, both garments that give her such a strange personality that in her first performances people would ask each other: ‘did you hear that Indian sing?’ ”[47] Having abandoned the carefully coiffed look favored by RCA Victor, Sosa now wore her straight, black hair long and unstyled. Her hair, her lack of makeup, her poncho, her angular facial features, and her skin tone all read as Indian. In this context, Márbiz’s assessment reflected a common interarticulation of class and ethnicity: she looked like a servant to the extent that she looked like an Indian. But whereas she clearly was not trying to pose as a servant, Sosa’s indigenous image was intentional. “Canción del derrumbe indio,” the song she chose for her impromptu debut at Cosquín, bemoaned the fall of the Inca empire from an Indian’s perspective: “I had an Empire of the Sun / great and happy / The white man took it away from me.” In her breakthrough performance, she not only looked like an Indian. She spoke as one too.

FIGURE 5.2 • Sosa’s new look. La Nación (February 12, 1967).

Sosa’s new persona built on an indigenista tendency in Argentine folk music that had begun to challenge dominant nationalist ideologies. Unlike many other Latin American countries, which officially embraced ideologies that celebrated mestizaje, or race-mixing, most Argentine intellectuals had long clung to an image of the nation as white. Confronted by massive waves of immigration, they celebrated the criollo, or native, population as the essence of the nation, but they emphasized the Spanish origins of this group rather than their indigenous or mestizo identities. Thus the folklorist Juan Alfonso Carrizo described the rural people of Tucumán as “white of the Spanish type” and argued that their music constituted a local version of the folk culture brought by the Spanish conquistadors.[48] For nationalist intellectuals and popular authors, Indians figured mainly as the savage enemies against whom the gaucho—the true national prototype—proved his valor. But while this sort of racism dominated the depiction of Indians in Argentine folk music, other messages were also apparent. Despite their barbarity, Indians constituted an authentic part of the rural, premodern landscape for which folk musicians expressed nostalgia.[49] In the late 1930s, Buenaventura Luna gave his group the partly indigenous name, “La Tropilla de Huachi-Pampa,” and in 1940 when the Ábalos Brothers opened a peña in Buenos Aires, they named it Achalay, a Quechua expression of satisfaction.[50] Although these early examples were relatively isolated, indigenous stage names were common among the folk acts that emerged in the 1950s, including Horacio Guarany, Los Cantores de Quilla Huasi, and Los Huanca Hua. These names implicitly acknowledged the indigenous as a fundamental element within Argentine national identity.

The key figure in the valorization of indigeneity within folk music was Atahualpa Yupanqui. Born Héctor Roberto Chavero in 1908, Yupanqui formulated his pseudonym by combining the names of two Inca kings. Although he was born in Buenos Aires Province, Yupanqui spent part of his youth in Tucumán and traveled extensively throughout the Argentine Northwest, learning the music of the region. As a lyricist, he broke decisively with the racism that dominated depictions of Indians in folk music. One of his first compositions, “Caminito del indio,” recorded in 1936 and likely written in the late 1920s, uses the image of the ruins of the Inca road system to link the contemporary indigenous population of the Northwest to the majestic Inca civilization of the pre-Columbian past. Sung from the perspective of an Indian, the lyrics describe the hardships suffered by “my old race.” In songs like this one, Indians emerge as a suffering people but also as a source of wisdom. In his essays, Yupanqui rejected the opposition between gaucho and Indian. He described the highland regions of Jujuy and Tucumán, inhabited by Kolla and Calchaquí communities, as “indocriollo,” positioning the indigenous as a fundamental contributor to native Argentine culture.[51] For Yupanqui, who joined the Communist Party in 1945, these positive depictions of Indians were intimately connected to his denunciations of the exploitation of the poor. His social consciousness, most famously expressed in a line from the song “El arriero”—“The suffering is ours but the cows belong to someone else”—was a major source of inspiration for the lyricists of the Nuevo Cancionero movement.

In the 1950s, the exoticizing gaze of European audiences reinforced the idea that Argentine folk music was built on indigenous foundations. Persecuted by the Perón regime, Yupanqui traveled to Europe in 1949. In Paris, he was enthusiastically received by Communist Party members and fellow travelers, as well as by the singer Edith Piaf. Despite Yupanqui’s obvious professionalism and the fact that his French performances and recordings included a cosmopolitan mix of Caribbean, Brazilian, and Chilean songs as well as Argentine ones, Parisian reviewers saw him as an embodiment of indigeneity: “Behind Atahualpa Yupanqui, large, powerful, with bronzed skin and slightly slanted eyes, a great countryside extended, with the solitude of its open spaces and its Indian people. For us, he opened up ‘the vein of the Indian’s ancient suffering … Indian sounds, Indian silence, Indian sweat.’ ”[52] Yupanqui’s performances in 1949 and 1950 ignited a fad for South American folk music in the French capital, and Parisians tended to respond most enthusiastically to music they heard as indigenous. Traveling and performing in Europe in 1950, folk composer Ariel Ramírez found that “the Europeans are interested in what is most pure and simple, the elemental and indigenous.”[53] Based in Paris from 1952 to 1956, the Argentine folk duo formed by Leda Valladares and María Elena Walsh also recognized this preference: “Of all of our repertoire, they always liked the bagualas and vidalas, the most purely indigenous songs, most.”[54] Valladares noted the irony that while Europhile Latin American elites often disdained their own folk music, Europeans were themselves amazed and attracted by the power of the primitive, folk cultures of the Americas.[55]

As a result, when Mercedes Sosa was developing her persona in the early 1960s, the range of ideas about indigeneity in Argentine folk music had expanded. As the growing number of groups with indigenous names indicates, a cosmopolitan audience in Buenos Aires was ready to embrace the idea of an indigenous contribution to national identity. It was this worldview—one forged in encounters between Argentines and Europeans—to which Sosa appealed. She developed her indigenous persona not by studying the musical cultures of actual Indians but by leveraging her own mestizo features, performing songs on Indian themes composed by non-Indians, and in general, drawing on stereotypical ideas about Indians as long suffering and wise. Hardly traditional, the image she created—that of an opinionated, politicized, and proud indigenous woman, playing a bombo, and singing songs with avant-garde melodies and challenging lyrics—amounted to a strategic and thoroughly transnational essentialism.

Sosa had engineered a remarkable self-transformation in the years since La voz de la zafra. She looked so different now that when Folklore ran an old photograph of her, the magazine had to print an explanatory caption: “Do you recognize her? It is Mercedes Sosa. What happens is that when Mercedes sings, the whole soul of the earth comes down on her. Here, she is calm and photogenic.”[56] Folklore described her new, more indigenous self-presentation as a product of her musical passion. As she emerged on the national stage in the years following her Cosquín performance, much of the press coverage of Sosa remarked on her indigenous appearance and typically connected that indigeneity to her authenticity and to the intensity of her mode of expression. Describing her “native timbre and gestures,” one article concluded that “Mercedes Sosa is an Indian voice who in each song leaves a piece of her soul waving on the microphones.”[57] According to another, she had a “face of Indian-like (aindiadas) features without the shadow nor hint of makeup, a penetrating look and an authentic simplicity that was not prepared by any promoter.”[58] For the radio and television host Blackie, Sosa appeared almost as a force of nature: “Her particular custom of not wearing makeup or doing her hair strengthens the impression that we are before a telluric phenomenon.”[59] These accounts emphasized the distance between Sosa’s appearance and that of whiter, more packaged, and less powerful folksingers. Her indigeneity indicated not lower-class status but sincerity, passion, and authenticity. At the same time, Sosa’s indigenous persona explained her lack of makeup and plain hairstyle, thereby enabling her to deviate from dominant notions of femininity.

Since Sosa’s ability to perform indigeneity relied on the evidence of her body, commentators now obsessed over her physicality. After reporting that Sosa described her ancestry as a blend of Indian and European elements—one of her grandmothers spoke Quechua, while the other spoke French—a writer for Primera Plana insisted on emphasizing the physical evidence of her indigeneity: “In this curious mixture the aboriginal undoubtedly predominates; and Mercedes—high cheekbones, very black, straight hair—is proud of them.” In a not-too-subtle reference to Sosa’s weight, the same article described her as a “robust and Indian-like woman.”[60] As a woman who was, according to another article, “too fat to make a physical impact,” Sosa was gendered in particular ways.[61] Most notably, many accounts constructed her as an asexual figure by emphasizing her maternal role. Typical was an article about the 1969 edition of the Cosquín festival that featured a photo of Sosa smiling with her son and referred to her as “the Mother of the Festival.” According to the caption, “All the dramatic ferocity, the savage blood that Mercedes Sosa puts into her singing, disappears when she is accompanied by her son.”[62] Maternity humanized her, reducing the danger implicit in her exotic indigeneity. Eventually, these gender and ethnic essentialisms would be interarticulated in the label, “the Pachamama of folklore,” which assimilated her to the Inca earth goddess.[63]

An article on the 1968 Cosquín festival in the women’s magazine Para Ti suggests the way that the gendered and racialized aspects of Sosa’s persona worked together. The article documented “the woman’s presence” at the festival, describing the main female performers as well as the anonymous women who worked in other capacities. The caption to a photograph of Sosa on stage connected her to female indigenous labor: “Calchaquí hands wove Mercedes Sosa’s poncho.” This connection was made even more explicit by the other photographs on the page: beneath the image of Sosa were two photographs of indigenous women, a Kolla and a Toba, engaged in craftwork at the festival’s artisan fair. Sosa was not exactly figured as an Indian here since the layout implied that real Indian women—Calchaquies, Kollas, and Tobas—did not perform on stage, but neither was she merely an artist or performer. Instead, she embodied and expressed a more abstract or generic indigeneity. As a woman, she was the bearer of racialized tradition. When asked what Cosquín meant for women folksingers, she responded, “It is not professional performance. It is giving and receiving the purest and most legitimate aspect of the passion of Argentine song which unites us (nos hermana) in one undeniable (irrenunciable) race.”[64] Here, she explicitly disavowed her professional identity and embraced her function as a preserver and transmitter of an essentialist identity.

FIGURE 5.3 • Folklore Extra: Vida y éxito de Mercedes Sosa (circa 1967).

Sosa’s indigenous persona enabled her to overcome the limits that her aesthetic vanguardism and leftist politics imposed on her commercial viability. As Illa Carrillo-Rodríguez has shown, her performance identity reconciled two distinct models of authenticity. Whereas for traditionalists, authenticity required “fidelity to practices understood as folkloric,” folk music innovators stressed “creative originality.” As the most visible member of the Nuevo Cancionero movement, Sosa was firmly in the innovators’ camp. Nevertheless, the intensity of her performance seemed to tether these original songs to lived experience. In other words, her persona implied a deep connection between her own life and the subjects she sang about, giving her songs the appearance of testimony. Moreover, her roots in Tucumán were often leveraged to grant her a measure of traditionalist authenticity. At Cosquín, Jorge Cafrune had been careful to introduce her as “a tucumana,” and many magazine profiles of her followed suit, thereby linking her to the region that folklorists had long ago identified as the geographical center and symbolic wellspring of national culture.[65] But, of course, many other folksingers were from Tucumán. What made Sosa stand out to so many observers was her visible connection to indigeneity. It was this aspect of her persona that allowed her to maintain an essentialist form of authenticity even as she championed a vanguardist musical project. Her indigeneity guaranteed her folkloric legitimacy, enabling her to avoid the censure of traditionalists even as she was embraced by the most progressive, cosmopolitan elements.

Comparing Sosa’s persona to that of Chilean folksinger Violeta Parra helps underline its novelty and explain its impact. Eighteen years older than Sosa, Parra also began her career as a conventional folksinger, eventually specializing in the collection and performance of folk songs written by amateur musicians from rural Chile. Later, she began to write her own material, which she performed alongside the songs she collected. In the mid-1950s and again in the early 1960s, Parra traveled to Paris, where she achieved a level of commercial success that she was unable to replicate at home. As Ericka Verba has argued, Parra performed the role of an authentic exotic in Paris, but not in Chile, where audiences continued to see her as a professional musician who “interpreted” the culture of rural folk.[66] Although Parra would later be celebrated as a sort of founding mother by the Chilean, leftist folk movement known as Nueva Canción, she was struggling to make a living at the time of her suicide in 1967. The fact that she did not perform indigeneity in the way that Sosa did might be attributable to her personal inclinations. Or perhaps the attitudes of middle-class Chileans, who tended to think of their country as a homogenous nation of Europeanized mestizos, left no room for such a performance.[67] In any case, Sosa’s success demonstrated that Argentine audiences would respond to an indigenous persona in much the same way as Europeans did. They too wanted to see a representation of authenticity, albeit one that was articulated with a highbrow aesthetic. Sosa’s impressive commercial success was a testament to the power of that image.

By 1966, Sosa was an emerging star in Buenos Aires, but she reported that she had not yet won over audiences everywhere: “Even today, when I travel to the interior, I feel the resistance of people to something that is trying to break with what many performers have managed to establish as traditional even if it is not authentic or profound. Moreover, I always feel this before I begin to sing, because not everyone is ready to accept a woman who plays the drum, a woman who does not style her hair, who does not wear makeup, who is not overly romantic and syrupy.”[68] Sosa’s comment is a useful reminder of the extent to which she challenged established gender norms. Her embrace of a more natural, less coiffed appearance predated by at least two years the emergence of hippies as a visible presence in Argentina.[69] Perhaps equally novel within the sphere of folk music, Sosa presented herself as an opinionated, assertive, and self-possessed woman, criticizing more commercial folk musicians and describing the exacting criteria by which she selected her repertoire. But Sosa’s comment also reveals that the reinvented version of herself was a bigger hit in Buenos Aires than it was in the provinces. She attributed this disparity to the more conservative gender politics of rural people as well as their attachment to more traditional forms of folk music.

Yet from a broader perspective, Sosa’s greater initial success in Buenos Aires reflected the fact that her image—in its gender characteristics, its artistic vanguardism, and most importantly, its indigeneity—was deeply cosmopolitan. Sosa, whose nearest indigenous relative was a grandparent, and who had no direct experience of Indian lifestyles or culture, had not simply stripped away artifice in order to allow a true essence to express itself. On the contrary, her new persona was a strategic essentialism developed through an engagement with images and ideas that circulated transnationally. Not only was her indigeneity shaped by European responses to South American music, but her persona also reflected more recent trends in the United States. In interviews, she noted that the members of the Nuevo Cancionero movement listened avidly to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.[70] Baez, who would later befriend Sosa and perform with her in Argentina and elsewhere, seems like an obvious inspiration. Her politicized traditionalism made her extremely prominent in the early 1960s, even landing her on the cover of Time magazine in 1962. And as the Time article makes clear, Baez’s image contained many of the same elements that would feature in Sosa’s: “She wears no makeup, and her long black hair hangs like a drapery … [her voice] is haunted and plaintive, a mother’s voice, and it has in it distant reminders of black women wailing in the night, of detached madrigal singers performing calmly at court, and of saddened gypsies trying to charm death into leaving their Spanish caves.”[71] This description of a “natural” feminine look and a sound that was somehow maternal, even as it was exotic and ambiguously racialized, prefigures the responses to Sosa that appeared a few years later. Whether or not Sosa consciously borrowed elements from Baez’s style, it was an image that undoubtedly circulated in Buenos Aires. Sosa was embraced in Buenos Aires first, because the capital was home to a cosmopolitan audience whose aesthetic preferences had been formed in dialogue with European attitudes and North American cultural commodities.

Cosmopolitan Nationalism

Sosa’s new persona led to her affiliation with the Dutch multinational, Philips Records, a relationship that would have a significant effect on her career. Unlike RCA Victor, whose dominance in the pop field encouraged it to focus on selling to the domestic and Latin American markets, Philips’s strategy for folk music was aimed at appealing to higher-class record buyers at home as well as in Europe and North America. Toward that end, the company became the primary outlet for recordings by the most prestigious and innovative artists, developing a reputation for sophistication. Philips’s biggest success was Ariel Ramírez’s Misa Criolla, a Catholic Mass based on Argentine folk genres, which became an international bestseller after its release in 1964. Like other Philips folk albums, this one included lengthy, pedagogical liner notes and cover art that broke with the criollista tradition of singers in gaucho attire. As the company’s artistic director, Américo Belloto, put it, “The public demands quality. And quality is also good business.”[72] Sosa came to Philips shortly after her performance at Cosquín, when Ernesto Sábato and Eduardo Falú invited her to perform a song on an album they were recording for the company. Based on a section of Sobre héroes y tumbas, Sábato’s prize-winning novel of 1961, Romance de la muerte de Juan Lavalle was released to great acclaim in May 1965. The company was impressed with Sosa’s performance and agreed to record a solo album.

In June 1966, Philips released what some in the press mistakenly referred to as Sosa’s debut LP, Yo no canto por cantar.[73] Two more albums followed over the next year. These albums avoided the over-orchestration and backup singers that RCA Victor had imposed. With a few exceptions, Sosa is accompanied only by guitar and occasional percussion. Following the lead of other folk innovators, her guitarists, Tito Francia and later, Kelo Palacios (Margarita’s son), alternate between brief, strummed passages that indicate the traditional rhythm and more virtuosic sections that sound almost improvised. While Tejada Gómez and Matus are represented on the albums, Sosa also included works by other avant-garde folk poets, such as Horacio Lima Quintana and Manuel Castilla. The sparser instrumentation enabled Sosa to develop a more dramatic singing style. She sang in a rich, precise contralto, avoiding melisma. Keenly aware of the power of dynamics to express emotion, she moved from a quiet whisper to a loud, almost declamatory call. In these louder passages, the commanding authority of her singing voice resonated with the Pachamama imagery that now attached to her: her voice suggested wisdom and power rather than flirtatiousness or girlish innocence.

Sosa’s affiliation with Philips identified her with the most prestigious and cosmopolitan segment of the folk scene. Reviewers were impressed by her high standards and commitment to artistic quality. La Prensa praised her accurate pitch and argued that her fast rise was “no mere phenomenon of popularity” since she avoided appealing to “easy tastes.”[74] Similarly, the magazine Confirmado complimented her for singing exclusively “songs with high artistic value.” At the same time, though, this reviewer hinted that Sosa’s power was due to something other than polished technique and an impressive repertoire: she was, according to the review, “the most interesting and visceral woman’s voice that has appeared in folk music these last years.”[75] Though more confident, dramatic, and unadorned, Sosa’s voice was not, in fact, radically different from the one that appeared on La voz de la zafra. What gave it so much power now—what made it so “interesting and visceral”—was her embodiment of Argentine indigeneity. This persona, based as it was on an engagement with European sensibilities, was perfectly compatible with Philips’s highbrow marketing strategy. It certainly appealed to European audiences. In 1966, she was invited to join a package tour assembled by Lippmann + Rau, the concert agency famous for bringing African American blues artists to Europe. The tour, which included Ariel Ramírez, Los Fronterizos, and on some stops, Astor Piazzolla, took place the following year, visiting some ten countries in Europe.[76] In a promotional film from the German leg of the tour, Sosa can be seen singing “Canción del derrumbe indio,” dressed in her customary poncho and accompanying herself on the bombo.[77] Her performance of indigeneity was perfectly calibrated to appeal to the European taste for the passionate exotic.

As an artist who recorded on the prestigious Philips label and performed in Europe, Sosa appealed to the same cosmopolitan nationalism as Piazzolla did: she too performed an authentic Argentine musical genre in a sophisticated style that impressed Europeans. Sosa, though, was also linked to a specific version of nationalist history, a link first established by her participation in the Sábato/Falú project, Romance de la muerte de Juan Lavalle. In the mid-1960s, Sábato was the prototypical writer of Argentina’s cosmopolitan, urban middle class. Although solidly anti-Peronist, he presented himself as a proponent of ideological balance. Unlike so many other Argentine intellectuals, Sábato intended to avoid a polarizing account of the nation’s history, and toward that end, he treated the independence-era general, Lavalle, as a tragically flawed hero whose struggle could be appreciated by all Argentines regardless of political affiliation.[78] By choosing Falú to compose the music for the piece, Sábato selected an ambitious artist who appealed to an audience with self-consciously cultivated tastes.[79] This was an ostensibly nonpartisan, patriotic version of Argentine history expressed through a highbrow aesthetic project.

Several years later, Sosa would lend her voice to a series of similar folkloric interpretations of nationalist history composed by Ariel Ramírez and Félix Luna and also released on Philips. Luna was a journalist, historian, and folk music fan who, like Sábato, had been an ardent supporter of Frondizi in the late 1950s. In 1964, Ramírez asked him to write the lyrics for Navidad nuestra, a piece to be included on the B-side of the Misa criolla album. They continued the partnership two years later with Los caudillos, a folk cantata dedicated to eight legendary, popular leaders of the nineteenth century.[80] These caudillos were divisive figures, attacked by liberals and celebrated by revisionists. Yet Luna, like Sábato before him, personalized them, telling their stories as epic tragedies while refusing to take sides in historiographical debates. Ramírez even boasted in interviews that he and Luna were careful to make sure “that no compatriot would feel offended in his legitimate feelings for the respect that all the figures of our history deserve.”[81] In 1969, Luna and Ramírez followed up Los caudillos with Mujeres argentinas, eight folk songs about specific women in Argentine history—some famous, some obscure, and some fictional—and they invited Mercedes Sosa to sing them. The result was another work that combined aesthetic sophistication with an inclusive nationalism. A typical review described “the high artistic quality (jerarquía artistica) of ‘Mujeres Argentinas,’ enhanced by the warm and eloquent voice of Mercedes Sosa … a notably successful attempt at stylizing through the magic of music and poetry characters and elements that were formative of the national being.”[82] As this description suggests, listeners heard the work as a demonstration of “quality” but also as an exploration of the historical roots of the national essence. Sosa’s persona fit the project well on both scores.

The two major hits from Mujeres argentinas leveraged Sosa’s persona in different ways. “Alfonsina y el mar,” about the suicide of modernist poet Alfonsina Storni, drew on Sosa’s authenticity as a creative, original artist, untainted by commercialism. Meanwhile, “Juana Azurduy,” about a legendary, female soldier who fought against the Spanish in the Wars of Independence, resonated with Sosa’s image as a powerful, assertive woman but also with her embodiment of an essentialist version of national identity. As the lyrics indicate, the mixed-race Azurduy was born in “Alto Peru,” present-day Bolivia but at the end of the colonial period part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, whose capital was Buenos Aires. The song firmly situates Azurduy in the indigenous world of the Andes by alluding to Tupac Amaru, the indigenous leader who led a massive rebellion in Peru in the 1780s. Yet it also ties her to the origins of Argentine patriotism: “I love the fatherland before its time.” Sosa’s performance of indigeneity made her uniquely well suited to deliver this message. The result was a powerful intertextuality: together, Luna’s lyrics and Sosa’s voice located the roots of national identity in a distant, quasi-indigenous past.

Whereas Sosa’s involvement in historical projects initially deepened her association with prestigious folk innovators and cosmopolitan intellectuals, it eventually expanded her appeal beyond these elite sectors. In 1970, Ariel Ramírez invited Sosa to contribute to the soundtrack he was composing for a new film by Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. Based loosely on a book by Ricardo Rojas, El santo de la espada (1970) was a biopic about Argentine independence hero José de San Martín. Torre Nilsson followed it with an historical epic about another military leader in the war against Spain, Martín Miguel de Güemes. Ramírez again created the soundtrack and invited Sosa to sing two songs. Moreover, the screenplay for Güemes, la tierra en armas (1971) included a depiction of Juana Azurduy, and since Sosa was now identified with her, Torre Nilsson cast her in the part. These films represented a radical change in style for Torre Nilsson, who had achieved critical acclaim in Argentina and abroad for intimate films featuring psychological character studies. By contrast, the new films were epic in tone, depicting heroes generally devoid of psychological nuance. Although they are now critically derided, both films were major box office hits. Yet it was not primarily a commercial calculation that led Torre Nilsson to adopt this new cinematic style. Instead, the director’s turn to the patriotic, historical epic was a response to the heavy-handed censorship imposed by the military government that had taken power in 1966. Not wanting to leave the country, Torre Nilsson decided that patriotic films set in the distant past would least antagonize the regime. In order to satisfy General Onganía, the de facto president, the director depicted patriotic, military heroes who disdained political intrigue. The result so perfectly suited Onganía’s project that thousands of schoolchildren were required to see it.[83] Mercedes Sosa, member of the Communist Party and the voice of the leftist Nuevo Cancionero movement, was now involved in officially sanctioned, patriotic projects of massive, commercial appeal.

Icon of Revolutionary Latin America

In the first few years after her breakthrough in 1965, Sosa’s career had remained within the confines established by the Philips strategy: her domestic audience was primarily cosmopolitan, middle-class Argentines, and her international touring was primarily limited to Europe. Nevertheless, there were hints of a broader, Latin Americanist agenda. The manifesto of the Nuevo Cancionero had called for collaboration with like-minded musicians from throughout the Americas, and Sosa acted on this impulse almost from the beginning. Her first album for Philips included not only “Canción del derrumbe indio,” whose composer, Fernando Figueredo Iramain, was Ecuadoran, but also “Canción para mi América” by the young Uruguayan singer Daniel Viglietti and “Tonada de Manuel Rodríguez,” based on a poem by the Chilean Pablo Neruda.[84] While the former placed the figure of the Indian at the center of a vaguely revolutionary project, the latter celebrated a Chilean hero of the independence wars against Spain. This early juxtaposition of songs valorizing indigeneity with a song celebrating the patriots of the independence era begins to suggest the Latin Americanist implications of Sosa’s nationalism. Sosa’s embodiment of indigeneity meant that her version of Argentine national identity turned away from European Buenos Aires and toward the Andes, home to pre-Columbian civilizations. Similarly, attending to the history of the independence wars meant remembering a period before national identity, when patriots from throughout the continent were united in their struggle against Spain. Her performance of the role of Juana Azurduy—identifying a mixed-race, Argentine national hero from “Alto Peru”—enacted both of these impulses. In the early 1970s, even as she was solidifying her status as a mainstream symbol of Argentine national identity, Sosa helped forge a revolutionary vision of Latin American unity.

The musical basis of this new Latin Americanism developed in Paris. French audiences had learned to associate authentic South American indigeneity with Atahualpa Yupanqui and other Argentine folk musicians, who thanks to decades of folklore studies emphasizing the centrality of the Northwest, tended to specialize in rhythms derived from the musical genres of the Andes. By the early 1960s, as musicologist Fernando Rios has demonstrated, the Latin American folk scene in Paris was dominated by Los Incas, a group composed of two Argentines and two Venezuelans. Heavily influenced by the Ábalos Brothers, Los Incas adopted an Andean repertoire and an instrumental lineup that included the quena and charango, Andean instruments that the Ábalos Brothers had played in Buenos Aires in the 1940s. Violeta Parra and her children, Angel and Isabel, heard this music in Paris, enthusiastically adopted it, and brought it back to Chile, where it became the basis of that country’s Nueva Canción (New Song) movement.[85] Andean music had a leftist association in Paris, thanks partly to Yupanqui’s influence and the role of Chant du Monde, the record label of the French Communist Party, which released several records by Yupanqui in the early 1950s. This undoubtedly made it more appealing to the Parras and to the Chilean bands that followed their lead. Before the mid-1960s, Andean music was extremely uncommon in Chile, but now, thanks to these encounters with Argentine folk musicians in Paris, groups like Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún made it the soundtrack to Salvador Allende’s socialist movement. The music of the Ábalos Brothers, Los Incas, and Inti-Illimani was aimed at cosmopolitan, urban audiences and therefore was only distantly related to the music played by indigenous communities in the Andes.[86] Nevertheless, the Nueva Canción groups used sonic and visual allusions to Andean indigeneity—Andean rhythms and instruments, ponchos—in order to express a revolutionary Latin Americanism.

Andean folk genres and leftist politics represented common ground between Mercedes Sosa and the Chilean Nueva Canción movement. Yet even though Sosa was becoming a star in Argentina just as Inti-Illimani and Quilapayún were emerging, she did not forge a connection with her Chilean counterparts until the early 1970s. The groundwork for a Latin American folk music movement was laid at the first Encuentro de la Canción Protesta, held in Havana in 1967, which brought together leftist musicians from throughout the Americas. However, the Argentine delegation to the Encuentro included Oscar Matus, but not Sosa, who had divorced Matus the previous year.[87] Fittingly, Sosa was in the middle of the Lippmann + Rau European package tour at the time of the Encuentro. She spent the late 1960s building her audience in Europe and among the cosmopolitan middle class in Buenos Aires, becoming in the process a much bigger star than Matus ever would. It was only once she had achieved commercial success and cemented her status as an artist of prestige and a symbol of national identity that Sosa began to embrace her Latin American counterparts. This chronology helps account for Sosa’s ability to hold on to an elite and middle-class audience in Argentina even after she became identified with revolutionary Latin Americanism.

Sosa finally became aware of the new Chilean folk music in 1968 when some Argentine friends gave her a copy of Violeta Parra’s final album.[88] The following year, she performed in Chile for the first time and recorded a single for Philips with Parra’s “Gracias a la vida” on one side and “Te recuerdo, Amanda” by the leftist Chilean singer Víctor Jara, on the other. In 1971, she recorded an entire album of songs by Parra. The album included paeans to Latin American solidarity, such as “Los pueblos americanos” as well as political songs like “La carta,” about a young man murdered for joining a strike, which Sosa recorded with the Chilean group Quilapayún. By covering Parra’s songs and collaborating with leading figures in Chile’s Nueva Canción movement just months after Salvador Allende took power, Sosa performed her own act of revolutionary solidarity. Parra’s “Gracias a la vida,” “Volver a los 17,” and “La carta” became fixtures in Sosa’s performance repertoire. Through her adhesion to the revolutionary cause in Chile, Sosa had deepened her commitment to building an anti-imperialist, Latin American unity. She began to tour extensively in Latin America, returning to Chile in 1971 and performing in Uruguay, Mexico, and Venezuela in 1972.[89]

As she engaged with Latin American audiences outside Argentina, Sosa’s persona underwent a transformation that soon reshaped her image at home. Argentines and Europeans tended to see Sosa as indigenous, yet in much of Latin America, official ideologies of mestizaje and indigenismo meant that allusions to indigeneity were far less novel. In this context, Sosa’s poncho, black hair, and mestizo features did not conjure an essentialist primitivism so much as they seemed generically and proudly Latin American. In interviews on these tours, she emphasized a leftist version of Latin American solidarity. In Venezuela, she declared simply that “my commitment is with the people.”[90] In Mexico, she explained that she developed her role as the voice of “the oppressed” precisely by recognizing herself as Latin American. As the reporter paraphrased her, “She discovered America and before her appeared a Latin America burdened with problems, with similar cultural patterns and ideas.”[91] In another Mexican interview, she denounced “colonizing music” from the United States (making an exception for “artists like Bob Dylan”) and claimed to represent “a new music, inspired by traditional rhythms and by popular revolutionary poetry.”[92] As she toured Latin America, Sosa was less a symbol of the indigenous roots of Argentine national identity than an icon of revolutionary Latin Americanism. She brought this message back home both by incorporating more radical songs in her repertoire, including many by Chilean and Uruguayan composers, and by performing alongside Nueva Canción musicians in Argentina. In 1971, for example, she sang with Quilapayún and the Uruguayan group Los Olimareños at the Gran Rex Theatre in Buenos Aires.[93] For many young Argentines, Sosa’s Latin Americanism was an important element in their process of radicalization. For example, student activist Horacio Ungaro “locked himself in his room for hours to read Lenin … [and] listen to [rock group] Sui Generis and to Mercedes Sosa. Latin America invaded his spirit not only through the popular mobilizations in Chile and Uruguay but also through the songs of Quilapayún and Daniel Viglietti.”[94] For Ungaro and many others like him, Sosa connected Argentina to the revolution that seemed to be sweeping through Latin America.

Although Sosa’s growing radicalism did occasionally attract unwanted attention from the Argentine dictatorship, she managed to retain her stature in the country. In 1968, after she performed alongside Horacio Guarany at a concert in la Plata in support of striking oil workers, she found it difficult to book concerts for the better part of a year.[95] She seems to have dealt with this official harassment partly by adopting a self-conscious political naiveté: “In truth, I do not know if my songs are political or not, since I don’t understand anything about politics.”[96] Sosa also had influential friends, including a multinational recording company and prominent, mainstream intellectuals. Finally, her vanguardism—in particular, her preference for poetry over slogans—probably helped as well. She often remarked on her refusal to sing protest songs whose lyrics lacked literary value.[97] This tendency infuriated the Peronist militants Eduardo Duhalde and Rodolfo Ortega Peña, who criticized her for avoiding any concrete reference to the specific problems facing the country. They described her recording of Viglietti’s “Canción para mi América,” and its refrain, “Lend your hand to the Indian. It will be good for you,” as “a sort of indigenista pepsi-cola.”[98] But the same vagueness and universalism that irritated Peronist militants probably helped Sosa avoid incurring official persecution. Since her protest songs made no reference to specific political actors or policies, they could be embraced by listeners from across the political spectrum. As a result, she continued to receive rave reviews in elite newspapers, whose reporters generally ignored the political content of her songs and stressed either her technical prowess or her artistic integrity and sincerity: “It is the triumph of the authentic. Of someone who only sings or interprets when she completely identifies with the song.”[99]

Nevertheless, as social conflict continued to deepen, it became increasingly difficult for Sosa to hold on to both the mainstream and the radical segments of her audience. In 1969, Peronist workers and militant students united in a series of massive mobilizations that shook the dictatorship. The following year, the Peronist guerrilla group Montoneros kidnapped and killed Pedro Aramburu, the general who led the coup that overthrew Perón in 1955. Faced with deepening polarization and increasing violence, General Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, who had taken over the presidency in 1971, actively sought to engineer a return to civilian rule, even as he continued to pursue a hard line against the guerrillas. In this context, there were hints that certain elite sectors were becoming uncomfortable with Sosa’s politics. In a review of the concert featuring Sosa alongside Chilean and Uruguayan Nueva Canción acts, the magazine Panorama described her as “the most proud and perfect of the night,” but criticized the “confused and trivial poetry” of her current repertoire. Moreover, the reporter alleged that the lyrics inspired many fans to invade the theater without paying.[100] Similarly, the magazine Primera Plana spoke of a contradiction between Sosa’s politics and her pursuit of “quality,” asking why she continued to perform “some songs of shaky artistic value by Armando Tejada Gómez.”[101] These critiques revealed a growing tension between her status as a symbol of apolitical Argentine nationalism on the one hand and her status as an icon of a politicized, revolutionary Latin Americanism on the other.

In the early 1970s, though, there was still space available for Mercedes Sosa in the Argentine public sphere. In fact, 1972 represented a high-water mark for her performance of both officially sanctioned Argentinidad and revolutionary Latin Americanism. That year, Héctor Olivera and Fernando Ayala directed Argentinísima, a documentary film featuring musical performances by the biggest stars in folk music. A follow-up to Julio Márbiz’s radio and television programs and an enormously popular LP of the same name, the film depicted folk music as a symbol of Argentine national identity. Sosa performed “Alfonsina y el mar” in the film’s penultimate scene, followed immediately by Piazzolla’s Conjunto 9, the only nonfolk act included. Both her choice of material as well as her position in the film’s lineup emphasized Sosa’s vanguardism. Nevertheless, the cinematography—a tight close-up on Sosa’s straight, black hair and then on the emotive features of her face bathed in bluish light—highlighted her iconic, aestheticized indigeneity. Sosa had now been involved in three of the four highest grossing Argentine films of the 1970–72 period.[102] Yet even as her participation in these films demonstrated her acceptance into the mainstream, 1972 also saw the release of her most political album to date, Hasta la victoria, including revolutionary songs by Víctor Jara and the Uruguayan Aníbal Sampayo.[103] In August, she headlined a folk concert in the Colón Theater, the most prestigious performance space in Buenos Aires. Despite the fact that President Lanusse was in attendance, Sosa did not alter her repertoire for the occasion, including several protest songs alongside what she described as “poetically valid” material without an explicit political message.[104] At one point during her set, the audience chanted “Down with the dictatorship!” apparently undeterred by the presence of the dictator himself.[105] The Colón performance suggested that even as she reached the highest rung on the ladder of artistic prestige, the political implications of her revolutionary persona could no longer be ignored.

Sosa’s final project of 1972, the Cantata Sudamericana, was a further installment in her work with Ariel Ramírez and Félix Luna. With songs representing various South American genres, including bossa nova and cumbia, the album went beyond the Argentine folk of their earlier projects. Luna and Ramírez were hardly radicals. Within the music world, they represented the most prestigious, sophisticated branch of folk. Still, describing the Cantata, Luna sounded almost revolutionary: “The cantata proposes to exalt, to dignify the elements of Latin American reality … in order to arrive, in this way, at something that some call liberation.”[106] Whereas Mujeres argentinas had drawn on Sosa’s embodiment of an essentialist national identity, the new project resonated with her revolutionary Latin Americanism. Within a month of its release, the album was among the best-selling LPs in Argentina.[107] Sebastián Carassai has recently argued against accounts that depict a general trend toward the radicalization of middle-class, Argentine youth in the 1970s. Even in the midst of polarization and violence, he claims, most young people rejected political militancy.[108] But Mercedes Sosa’s prestige and prominence is a reminder that as late as 1972, there was a substantial, mainstream constituency in Argentina for nonviolent expressions of revolutionary Latin Americanism, that such expressions, in other words, were not so radical. Many people who would never join the guerrillas, sang along with Mercedes Sosa’s version of Tejada Gómez’s “Canción con todos”: “Sing with me, sing / American brother / Liberate your hope / with a shout in your throat!”

Over the next few years, the space available for these expressions began to close. Unable to control the country, the military regime finally stepped down and allowed Perón to return from exile. After another landslide electoral victory, the aging leader began his third term as president in October 1973. Nevertheless, the return to democracy did not lead to a decline in social conflict or the eradication of state terror. On the contrary, Peronism itself now split into right and left factions. With the sponsorship of certain elements of the government, a paramilitary organization known as the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, or Triple A, began to assassinate suspected guerrillas and other leftists, a campaign that intensified after Perón’s death in 1974.[109] That year, the Triple A began to threaten leftist artists, leading to the exile of several, including folksinger Horacio Guarany, with whom Sosa was closely associated (she had recorded his “Si se calla el cantor” in 1973).

Sosa now found it increasingly difficult to find a mainstream audience for her work. In a 1974 interview, she insisted that she was not a political singer who sang only for politicized audiences—“The artist has to tend toward being popular, not shut oneself up in small groups of intellectuals”—but she acknowledged that some listeners now rejected her for political reasons: “I now know that there is a certain kind of person who likes how I sing but does not like what I sing.”[110] Moreover, Sosa could not control the meanings that audiences made of her work. Even though she had never espoused revolutionary violence, her recording of “Juan Azurduy” was embraced by militants. Her performance of the part in Güemes, la tierra en armas had emphasized Azurduy’s self-sacrifice and her fidelity to her husband alongside her bravery, yet for many Montoneros the character was an expression of the “masculinized” female guerrilla.[111] Sosa had benefited enormously from her connection to the prestigious, apolitical wing of folk music represented by Ariel Ramírez, Eduardo Falú and others, but in the polarized context of the mid-1970s she was increasingly pigeonholed as a leftist. Sosa continued to perform in Argentina whenever possible, but in response to the challenging environment, she also adopted a heavy schedule of international touring. In 1973 alone, she performed in the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Spain, France, the Soviet Union, and Uruguay.[112] Meanwhile, Sosa’s association with leftist folk singers from throughout the continent deepened, culminating in her 1975 visit to Cuba, where she was celebrated as one of the central figures in revolutionary, Latin American song.[113]

As she was becoming ever more firmly identified with revolutionary Latin America, Sosa acquired a new nickname in Argentina, one that linked her more explicitly than ever before with the poor. Like many Argentines with mestizo features or dark complexions, Sosa had long been called “negra” by friends. Since the early twentieth century, “negro/a” was a common Argentine term of endearment whose inversion of racial hierarchy lent it a populist charge. Yet the massive internal migration that began in the late 1930s and the close political bond forged between the so-called cabecitas negras and Perón made the term more problematic. Now “negro/a” conjured a much more concrete class affiliation: “negros” were the poor, often dark-skinned masses who inhabited the villas miserias of Buenos Aires. As a result, when Sosa became a star in the 1960s, the press never referred to her as “negra,” preferring instead “indígena” or “aindiada.” These terms linked her to a remote, abstract indigeneity and, as I have suggested, helped turn her into a symbol of an essential Argentineness. Sosa’s artistic vanguardism, her prestige, and her highbrow aspirations would have made “la negra” unsuitable, at least as part of her public persona. Yet in 1975, mainstream publications began to adopt this nickname for her. After yet another international tour, one newspaper celebrated the return of “la ‘negra’ Sosa,” while the fan magazine Radiolandia explained the nickname to readers who might not yet have heard it: “La Negra (as all her friends lovingly call her).”[114] This transformation in Sosa’s public persona reflected a larger transnational trend toward race consciousness. In particular, as Eduardo Elena has demonstrated, Peronists, who used to studiously avoid racial terminology, now embraced it. While intellectuals examined the role of racism in Argentine society, activists now proudly claimed to represent the interests of negros.[115] Even though Sosa was no Peronist, her new identity as “la negra” gave her a powerful populist appeal. It further tipped the balance of her iconicity away from apolitical, highbrow nationalism and toward a much more concrete affiliation with the poor. Likewise, it changed the meaning of her Latin Americanism. As “la negra,” Sosa became a representative of the Argentine poor; as such, her calls for Latin American solidarity sounded much more revolutionary and class conscious than those of a moderate progressive like Félix Luna.

In 1975, Sosa received a series of ominous threats from the Triple A. The harassment worsened after the coup of March 1976, which installed Argentina’s most violent military dictatorship. In response, she tried to keep a low profile, performing in much smaller venues and avoiding any overtly political songs. In 1978, the junta explicitly banned four of her recordings from the radio and television, including two songs from the Cantata Sudamericana.[116] As sung by Sosa, these abstract appeals to South American unity were now deemed subversive. That same year, authorities threatened to jail any record store owner who sold Sosa’s most recent album, a tribute to Atahualpa Yupanqui.[117] The following year, she was briefly arrested after a performance in La Plata. In this context, it was increasingly difficult for Sosa to find work, and in 1979 she finally left the country for exile in Spain and France.

The Return of La Negra

In February 1982, as the increasingly unpopular military dictatorship struggled to hold onto power, Mercedes Sosa returned to Argentina for a series of concerts at Buenos Aires’s Teatro Ópera. In order to engineer her return, the rock producer Daniel Grinbank booked the 2,400 seat theater for eleven nights, covered the walls of Buenos Aires with posters, and placed ads in the newspapers. Cleverly, he did not apply to the authorities for permission until the first three shows had already been sold out. The junta, anxious about its public image, allowed the shows to proceed, although it did establish certain preconditions. Sosa agreed not to perform “Juana Azurduy” or “La carta” (though she later broke this promise in the case of the “La carta”), not to invite the blacklisted Victor Heredia to perform with her, and to allow a police presence in the theater. She eventually sold out all eleven shows, and the concerts earned universal praise in the media.[118] One newspaper reported on the “obvious censorship” of certain songs and suggested that the spontaneous chant of “La Negra no se va” (La Negra will not leave) demonstrated that the audience embraced Sosa in a spirit of resistance to the dictatorship. But the overall tone of the event was peaceful and inclusive. Sosa introduced herself the same way she did when she performed abroad: “I am Mercedes Sosa, I sing, and I am Argentine.”[119] This simple declaration of nationality was echoed in the title of the double album recorded at the concerts, Mercedes Sosa en Argentina. In the end, she achieved more than a triumphant return; she made herself into a national symbol perfectly suited to Argentina’s imminent, democratic transition.

Illa Carrillo Rodríguez has argued convincingly that the 1982 concerts “were the locus of a process of negotiation in which different forms of consensus were sought and attained.”[120] The effort to forge consensus, to imagine an open and unifying national community, went beyond Sosa’s willingness to accept the terms stipulated by the junta to include her decisions about which songs to perform and which guest performers to invite. At the Ópera, she sang many of her trademark songs, including “Alfonsina y el mar,” “Canción con todos,” and the Violeta Parra songs “Gracias a la vida” and “Volver a los 17.” However, she also sang songs by the Cuban singer-songwriters Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés, as well as “Los mareados,” a classic tango from the 1920s. This repertoire definitively pushed her beyond the genre of Argentine folk music. Even more striking, Sosa invited two rock performers onstage with her, singing “Cuando ya me empiece a quedar solo” with Charly García and “Sólo le pido a dios” with León Gieco. García’s introspective lyrics about the price of fame resonated with the theme of the artist as a tortured, creative soul in songs like “Alfonsina y el mar.” By contrast, Gieco had forged a folk-rock image partly modeled on Bob Dylan. He and Sosa performed his antiwar anthem “Sólo le pido a Dios” as a full-throated sing-along.[121] By singing with these two musicians, Sosa implicitly rejected the critique of cultural imperialism that had long kept folk nationalists—including those of the Movimiento Nuevo Cancionero—from embracing local rock music. She built a bridge to the rock audience, including it within a new, more inclusive vision of the Argentine nation.

As the military relinquished power following the debacle of the Malvinas War, Sosa achieved a level of popularity that far exceeded her earlier audience. Some 800,000 copies of Mercedes Sosa en Argentina were sold during the first four months of the democratic government.[122] By 1989, well over 2 million copies had been sold, making it easily the best-selling record of the decade in Argentina.[123] During the democratic transition, Sosa periodically reenacted the ritual of national unity she first performed at La Ópera, staging concerts before massive audiences. In 1983, she sold out the twenty-five-thousand-seat Ferro Carril Oeste stadium in two days. Once again, León Gieco and Charly García accompanied her on stage; this time the singer-songwriter Piero performed with her as well.[124] In 1984 and again in 1985, she performed multiple sold-out concerts at the twelve-thousand-seat Luna Park stadium. At all these shows, she incorporated music from a wide range of genres and countries, including, for example, songs composed by Brazilian popular singer Milton Nascimento and by Argentine rocker Fito Páez, alongside material by the younger generation of Argentine folk musicians, as well as a selection of her older hits. According to press reports, the audiences at these concerts were diverse, “a public of all ages and all levels” according to one reporter, “young and old, students and workers, employees and executives” according to another.[125] At one of the 1985 concerts, some fans held banners for the Unión Cívica Radical, the centrist party then in control of the government, while others brandished signs for the Frente del Pueblo, a leftist coalition, and still others proclaimed their support for the popular soccer team Boca Juniors.[126] Sosa had emerged as a unifying figure, identified with the nation above all divisions, partisan or otherwise.

Since she first embraced her indigeneity in 1965, Sosa had publicly symbolized Argentine national identity. It was her embodiment of a deep, national essence that led Ernesto Sábato, Félix Luna, and Leopoldo Torre Nilsson to cast her in works that exalted patriotism. Yet she was also affiliated with a revolutionary Latin Americanism that pushed in a very different direction. By the mid-1970s, these two sides of her persona were no longer sustainable: embraced by the militant left and rejected by the patriotic right, Sosa could no longer represent the nation for all. Yet in the early years of the democratic transition, she reestablished and even expanded her national iconicity. Although she had performed in popular movies in the early 1970s, it was in the early 1980s that she became a pop star on a massive scale, capable of selling out huge arenas. Sosa’s music, like Astor Piazzolla’s, surely evoked nostalgia for many fans, yet given its mass appeal it must also have resonated in other ways. Her selection of material—her openness to rock music, in particular—contributed to her new popularity, but the biggest factor was a change in the transnational political context. By the mid-1980s, Central America had become the principal Cold War front in the Western hemisphere. While the U.S. government funded massive counterrevolutionary campaigns in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, many of the anticommunist military dictatorships established in South America in the 1960s and 1970s came to an end. In Argentina, the junta’s reign of terror had destroyed the institutional basis of the left in the late 1970s. Now the end of the dictatorship put the extreme right on the defensive as well. In this context, Sosa’s politics were far less threatening.

During her years of exile, Sosa had deepened her Latin Americanism by touring annually throughout the region, including a particularly extensive swing through Brazil in 1980, and by expanding her repertoire to include a greater number of songs by composers from outside Argentina. But in the early 1980s, her calls for regional solidarity resonated not with left-wing revolutionary movements, of which almost no trace remained in Argentina, but with the common experience of democratic transition. She continued to sing socially conscious songs like Víctor Jara’s “Plegaria a un labrador,” but in the new context, these songs no longer seemed like those of a revolutionary militant. In her late forties at the time of her return to Argentina, her age accentuated her maternal image, especially as she mentored younger folk and rock artists.[127] In this way, Sosa now appeared as a sort of conscience of the nation, insisting that social justice be among the core values of the nation in the process of being reimagined. Even the meaning of her nickname, “La Negra,” by which she was now called in virtually every publication, had shifted. While the name still alluded to her mestizo features and to her affiliation with the poor, it also conjured a more general identification with the whole Argentine pueblo. A typical account of her first Luna Park concert of 1984 highlighted this identification: “As if every day that had passed [since her last performance in Buenos Aires] had generously watered and fertilized her representativeness, La Negra was the transportation of thousands of Argentines toward memory and hope, toward accusation and homage, toward anger and tenderness, toward longing and brotherhood.”[128] The name, La Negra, reinforced her “representativeness,” her capacity to speak to and to move “thousands of Argentines.”

Sosa was clearly associated with the Argentine human rights movement. The song, “Como la cigarra,” which she sang in her 1982 comeback concert, became a hymn to resilience in the face of state terror. Written a decade earlier by María Elena Walsh, the song’s lyrics were reinterpreted in light of the disappearances suffered at the hands of the dictatorship: “So many times, they erased me, so many times I disappeared, I went alone and crying to my own burial.” Given the scope of Sosa’s popularity, it was not surprising that Raúl Alfonsín, Argentina’s first democratic president after the end of the dictatorship, sought her public support for his government. For her part, Sosa responded positively to these overtures. In the early years of the transition, Alfonsín’s policies were very much in line with the demands of the human rights community. The new government established a truth commission to uncover the crimes committed by the military regime, and it put the nine junta leaders on trial in 1985. Later though, Alfonsín responded to persistent pressure from the military by supporting laws to limit the prosecution of military officers for crimes committed during the Proceso. He incurred the opposition of some human rights groups by seeking to limit the pursuit of justice in order to facilitate national reconciliation.[129] Nevertheless, Sosa remained a fervent supporter of Alfonsín.[130] Although this loyalty may have reflected a personal friendship, it also made sense in light of Sosa’s identity as a representative of the Argentine people. In the early years of Argentina’s new democracy, both she and Alfonsín stood for national unity in the effort to rebuild Argentina after a long experience of violence and division.

Even as she attained massive popularity in Argentina, Sosa spent much of her time abroad. Of the 240 concerts she performed between 1987 and 1990, 207 took place outside of Argentina.[131] She continued to perform throughout the world in the 1990s and, despite poor health, the 2000s as well. In 2009, just months before her death, she recorded a double CD, entitled Cantora, composed of duets with major figures from Argentine and Latin American rock and pop. She had long since outgrown the role of Argentine folksinger to become what one newspaper called “the great voice of America.”[132] In addition to old friends like Charly García, Fito Páez, León Gieco, Víctor Heredia, and Caetano Veloso, the album also included younger musicians, including the Colombian pop star Shakira. Perhaps most noteworthy was a version of “Canción para un niño en la calle” recorded with René Pérez, or Residente, of the critically acclaimed, Puerto Rican hip hop group Calle 13. A denunciation of child poverty with lyrics by Armando Tejada Gómez, the song features the socially conscious poetry typical of the Movimiento Nuevo Cancionero; Sosa first recorded it in 1967. The 2009 version includes lengthy raps by Pérez, but as if to restore the song’s connection to Argentina, it also features a bandoneón. That Pérez would embrace the opportunity to record this song with Sosa suggests that the identity she forged in the 1960s and 1970s continues to be relevant. More than just a relic from the Cold War, Sosa’s version of revolutionary Latin Americanism is still a vital resource on which leftist artists from the region can draw.

6

THE MUSIC OF GLOBALIZATION

Gustavo Santaolalla and the Production of Rock Latino

Compared to Mercedes Sosa and other folk singers, Argentine rock musicians were slow to embrace a Latin American identity. Sosa had fully inhabited a revolutionary Latin Americanism as early as 1971, when she recorded her album of Violeta Parra songs. From that point on, she claimed an affiliation with the downtrodden and oppressed from throughout the region and collaborated extensively with musicians and composers from Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, and Cuba. By contrast, in the 1970s, Argentine rock musicians listened almost exclusively to music from the English-speaking world, and they lacked a substantial audience beyond Argentine borders. While their appropriations and resignifications cannot be reduced to mere imitations, they were, fundamentally, local responses to developments in the United States and England. This contrast partly reflected the genres’ very different positions in commercial networks. While Argentine folk music had been taken up in the 1950s by multinational record companies like Philips, Argentine rock music—or rock nacional, as it would tellingly come to be called—was distributed almost entirely by domestic record labels for a domestic audience. Cut off from regional markets, the Argentine rock scene developed in isolation from the rest of Latin America.

This dynamic was definitively reversed in the 1990s, when Argentine musicians joined a movement that was reshaping rock music throughout Latin America. Marketed as rock en español, rock latino, or Latin Alternative, a host of innovative bands attracted sizeable audiences outside their home countries with music that sounded quite different from the British and North American rock of the day. Although rock attitudes and timbres were still audible in their music, these bands borrowed freely from a broad range of Latin American genres, such as cumbia, vallenato, salsa, ranchera, candombe, and chacarera. Moreover, while many bands blended rock with folk traditions from their own country, the musical mixing went well beyond this model. Rhythms and instruments from a range of Latin American locations suddenly seemed available and attractive to rockers from throughout the region. This new form of rock was a product of capitalism in an era of intense globalization. It was produced and distributed overwhelmingly by the small group of massive, multinational corporations known as the majors, often recorded in the United States, and advertised on MTV Latino, a new cable television network based in Miami. The genre’s openness to musical hybridity and its framing as a Latin style partly reflected the global distribution of economic and cultural power. And yet neither the sound of the new rock nor its local reception were determined by the multinationals. Like other popular music genres, the precise form that rock latino took was shaped by a series of choices made by musicians and other key intermediaries as they navigated these global structures.

Although many Latin Americans were involved in the production of rock music during the 1990s, one person has been consistently identified by critics and scholars as “the single most important contemporary figure … in Latin/o rock”: the Argentine musician, composer, and producer, Gustavo Santaolalla.[1] In the 1970s, as the leader of the band Arco Iris, Santaolalla tried to create an authentically Argentine form of rock by incorporating elements drawn from local folk music. In 1978, disenchanted with life under the dictatorship, Santaolalla moved to Los Angeles. There, he was exposed to punk, new-wave, ska, and Chicano rock, and like so many other itinerant Argentine musicians, he confronted North American attitudes and stereotypes about Latin people. Santaolalla’s experiences in the United States transformed his musical approach. Although he remained interested in rock music as a vehicle for the expression of identity, he left behind the folkloric concept of authenticity that had motivated his experiments with Arco Iris. He now embraced a broader, Latin American musical identity built from a wide range of commercial genres. Thanks to this new vision as well as to the music-industry connections he forged in Los Angeles, Santaolalla became the most important and successful producer of rock latino in the 1990s and 2000s, working with many of the most influential bands and artists from Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, and Puerto Rico.

Santaolalla functioned as a key intermediary between the global music industry and the Latin American rock audience. Together with his musical partners and protégés, he created rock music that appealed both to North American critics enamored with world music and to record companies looking for a Latin product. But the new style was also useful to Latin American musicians and fans engaged in projects of self-invention. Within Argentina, rock latino promoted unprecedented identity formations and even contributed to new forms of social protest. Before this period, Argentine rockers had purposefully avoided engagement with other forms of Latin American music. They defined their music in opposition to a series of genres they considered commercial and tacky, including Sandro-style balada as well as the various forms of música tropical. The rock latino of the 1990s challenged this division and, in so doing, began to suggest a new way of conceiving Argentine national identity. Working with Santaolalla, the band Bersuit Vergarabat combined angry denunciations of neoliberal economic policies with a revalorization of stigmatized Latin American genres like cumbia. In this way, the rock latino that Santaolalla had helped invent contributed to an ideological transformation that culminated in the massive protest mobilizations of 2001.

Arco Iris and the Challenge of Authenticity in Argentine Rock

Gustavo Santaolalla’s youth was shaped by both the folk boom and the arrival of rock and roll. Born in 1951, he grew up in modest, middle-class comfort in Ciudad Jardín, a planned, suburban community in Greater Buenos Aires. His father worked for an advertising agency, gradually rising from the position of delivery boy to that of assistant manager. Santaolalla, like other kids at this time, learned folk music and dance in primary school. At the age of seven he was given a guitar. Although his private teacher quit when he refused to learn to read music (a skill he in fact never perfected), he played by ear, imitating the performers he saw on folk music television programs. By the age of eleven, he had already formed his own folk group. Yet rock and roll would exert a more powerful attraction. Santaolalla’s parents avidly followed the latest musical trends in the United States, filling the house with the sounds of Frankie Laine and Dinah Shore. When rock and roll arrived in the late 1950s, they brought home records by Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, and a bit later, Los Teen Tops, the Mexican band that specialized in Spanish-language covers of rock hits. Alongside the folk programs, Santaolalla regularly watched the Club del Clan. When he heard the early Beatles songs “Love Me Do” and “Please, Please Me,” his conversion to rock and roll was definitive.[2]

At first, Santaolalla embraced the lighthearted, unthreatening fun of the Nueva Ola, but like many other Argentines of his generation, he eventually rejected this music in favor of a more rebellious style of rock. His parents originally supported his musical interests, buying him a record player and, in exchange for earning good grades in school, his first electric guitar and amplifier. They even paid for his first recording sessions. More broadly, Santaolalla embraced his parents’ Catholicism, attending church frequently. It was through his participation in a Catholic youth group that he met his future bandmates, Ara Tokatlián and Guillermo Bordarampé. In fact, Santaolalla shared his father’s dream that he might eventually become a priest. However, his growing commitment to the culture of rock soon took on a rebellious tinge. He left the church, grew his hair long, and dedicated himself entirely to music. Although he initially acquiesced to his parents’ insistence that he attend university, he dropped out when a professor told him to cut his hair. He now fought constantly with his parents, and his mother, in particular, became “hysterical” when she saw his long hair.[3]

As Valeria Manzano has demonstrated, the rock scene that Santaolalla joined in the late 1960s was part of a broader “youth culture of contestation” that took shape during the Onganía dictatorship. Following the coup that brought it to power in 1966, the military government sought to prevent the spread of communism by imposing a strict social order based on patriarchal moral values. Many young people resisted this conservatism, drawing on the resources made available by the transnational counterculture, including rock music and the fashions that accompanied it. Like Santaolalla, they risked punishment by growing their hair long.[4] At the same time, they rejected the music of the Nueva Ola, because they heard it as both conformist and inauthentic. For young Argentines who felt oppressed by the social conservatism of the dictatorship and that of their parents, rock music—with its celebration of personal freedom and nonconformism—appeared to offer an antidote.

Yet fans of rock, or “beat” music, as it was more typically called at the time, faced something of a paradox. Their rejection of hypocrisy and conformism led them to embrace music and fashions imported from abroad, but was it possible to create an authentic lifestyle through imitation? The first efforts in this direction came from the group of musicians who hung out at La Cueva, the club Sandro had helped create. This scene had its first big hit in 1967 when RCA sold some 250,000 copies of “La balsa” (The Raft) by Litto Nebbia’s band Los Gatos. The song featured a catchy melody and the distinctive sound of a Farfisa organ, but what struck a chord with fans were the lyrics, in which the singer declares his disillusionment with the world and his intention to build a raft and naufragar (be shipwrecked). In the wake of “La balsa,” the term naufragar became a local equivalent for “dropping out,” and a growing group of long-haired náufragos, also called “hippies,” began to hang out in city squares.[5] But even after the success of “La balsa,” young rock fans could still sound defensive about their enthusiasm for a foreign genre. One fan at a Los Gatos concert declared, “We are not ‘hippies’ nor do we want to imitate anyone. We only feel happy and at home here.… We are authentic.”[6] Another pair of young people, asked to name someone they would like to meet, responded, “The Beatles. No one from Argentina … because most Argentines are false with themselves. Too conventional, prejudiced, scared.”[7] Rock music promised these young fans freedom and an escape from hypocrisy, but it was not clear yet how to construct an authentic identity on the basis of foreign music.

For the new rock musicians, the most pressing question was whether to write and sing lyrics in Spanish or in English, which was still the language of “real” rock. The release of “La balsa” wasn’t the only noteworthy musical event of 1967; Sandro’s Beat latino album and his megahit, “Quiero llenarme de ti” also appeared in that year. For rockers like Santaolalla, Sandro’s turn to balada, as well as his embrace of a Latin identity, smacked of cheap commercialism; singing rock in English was a way to emphasize their distance from this model. For Santaolalla, who had attended an English primary school and visited San Diego on a student exchange, English came easy. His bands in the mid-1960s all had English names: the Rovers, the Blackbirds, the Crows. Their shows included covers like “Gloria” by Them and Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” alongside the English-language originals that Santaolalla was now writing. In 1967, shortly after “La balsa” had come out, a friend introduced him to Ricardo Kleinman, a radio disc jockey who had begun to act as a talent scout for RCA. Kleinman listened to the three songs that the band had recorded and suggested that they switch to Spanish. Santaolalla refused. Even after the success of Los Gatos, Santaolalla thought of rock music in Spanish as “grasa,” a term meaning “tacky” but also conveying lower-class associations.[8] Santaolalla was not alone; Luis Alberto Spinetta, who was soon to emerge as a leader of the new movement, recalled that he had written songs in both English and Spanish, but that his band, Almendra, still did not play the Spanish ones in public.[9]

Nevertheless, the record labels, as well as key intermediaries like Kleinman, continued to push for Spanish-language songs, probably because they saw it as the only way to expand the market for Argentine rock. Eventually, Kleinman converted several bands to his point of view, and then used his radio program, Modart en la noche, to build an audience for local rock in Spanish, playing the latest domestic releases alongside current British and North American hits.[10] For his part, Santaolalla was convinced to sing in Spanish when he heard Almendra’s “Tema de Pototo,” released in 1968 by RCA. A Beatlesque tune with poetic lyrics and a sophisticated arrangement including strings and horns, the song was certainly not “grasa.” At the band’s next audition—this one for the publicist Fernando Falcón, who worked with Kleinman—Santaolalla was again asked if he had any songs in Spanish, and this time he said yes. Having convinced Santaolalla to make rock music in his native language, Kleinman and Falcón came up with a new Spanish name for the band: Arco Iris, or “Rainbow.” The band released its first single in 1969, selling some eight thousand copies in Argentina, Chile, and Venezuela, not nearly enough to be considered a hit but enough to keep RCA interested.[11]

The story of Arco Iris took a decisive turn when Santaolalla met a Ukrainian-born, former model named Danais Winnycka. Dana, as she was known, had traveled in India and was a practitioner of yoga, vegetarianism, and alternative medicines. Santaolalla and his bandmates, who were only seventeen and eighteen years old at the time, fell easily under her sway. Dana’s appeal was rooted in the transnational moment. The previous year, the Beatles had traveled to India and made the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi their spiritual advisor; “oriental mysticism” was in style in the rock world. In any case, the band began meeting every day with Dana and eventually moved in with her, living as a spiritual community they referred to as “the Brotherhood.” Under her guidance, they read the Bhagavad Gita and refrained from eating meat as well as from alcohol, drugs, and sex. Their days were given over to a strict regimen of yoga, meditation, and of course, music. This asceticism alienated them from the Argentine rock community, which was as committed to sex and drugs—“the circus” local rockers called it—as its North American counterpart. Almost as shocking as their sexual abstinence was their pursuit of good housekeeping. Reporters seemed transfixed by the image of young, long-haired men cooking, cleaning, and ironing for themselves, and one musician denigrated them as “the housewives of rock.”[12]

The discipline of the Brotherhood proved conducive to hard work, and Arco Iris soon released an ambitious debut album that drew on elements from blues, rock, and jazz. The song “Quiero llegar” opened with a vamp modeled directly on the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five,” while “Camino” shifted abruptly from a jazz jam to a slower section based on bossa nova before ending in a driving rock rhythm. Like most progressive or art rock of the era, Arco Iris’s music featured lengthy improvisations: Ara Tokatlián contributed flute and saxophone solos, and many songs ended with a long guitar solo by Santaolalla. The band’s lyrics combined earnest love poetry with spacey psychedelia: one song was called “Lullabye for the Boy Astronaut.” Rock critics celebrated the band’s progressive music but doubted it would sell many records: “The music of Arco Iris is among the most difficult produced in Argentina. And, as a result, discographically, they will not have a massive impact.”[13] This assessment was prescient; the band’s first album sold poorly, and RCA canceled its contract. Arco Iris’s subsequent albums would all be released by the domestic record label, Music Hall.

This pattern was typical: after their initial efforts with bands like Los Gatos and Almendra, the major labels backed away from Argentine rock music, focusing instead on Latin pop stars like Sandro and folk artists like Mercedes Sosa. As discussed in chapter 4, multinational record companies were, by this point, aggressively pursuing local products that could be marketed not just domestically but throughout Latin America. Both Sandro and Sosa had this sort of appeal because they each offered a type of music that could be packaged as distinctively Latin American. By contrast, Argentine rock musicians played what was understood to be a Spanish-language version of a foreign genre. Rightly or wrongly, the major labels assumed that Latin American rock fans would rather buy records by North American or British bands than by rock groups from elsewhere in the region. For the next decade, Argentine rock bands recorded primarily for domestic labels like Music Hall, Microfón, and Mandioca.[14] These labels likely provided musicians with more artistic freedom than the majors would have, but they lacked the capacity for international promotion. Cut off from transnational circuits, bands like Arco Iris produced music almost exclusively for the domestic market.

With the backing of Music Hall, Santaolalla hoped to make music that sounded just as good as the English-language rock he loved but that was also authentically Argentine. Toward this end, he turned to his nation’s folk traditions.[15] On its first Music Hall album, Tiempo de resurreción (1972), Arco Iris incorporated Argentine folk music in two different ways. First, the band played some songs in rhythms drawn directly from Andean folklore. For example, the song “Vasudeva” set imagery drawn from Hermann Hesse’s Buddhist novel, Siddhartha, to the huayno rhythm. Second, the band used Andean instruments in songs that had nothing else to do with folk music: Santaolalla occasionally played charango and Ara Tokatlián played the indigenous flute known as the pinkillo.

However, it was a third, quite different type of folk rock that captured the attention of most Argentine rock fans. “Mañana campestre” (Country Morning), which would become by far the biggest hit of the band’s career, was a straightforward example of North American style folk rock with no discernible elements drawn from Argentine traditions. Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, Santaolalla sang of enjoying the peaceful beauty of nature with his romantic partner. “Mañana campestre” owed its success to the fact that it much more easily fit the dominant Argentine rock aesthetic, based as it was on English-language models. For Argentine fans, it was “Mañana campestre” and not the band’s Andean fusions that sounded like “real” rock.

Nevertheless, Arco Iris continued to experiment with Argentine folk music on the album Sudamérica (o el regreso a la aurora) (1972) and its successor, Inti Raymi (1973). The first of these was an ambitious rock opera that told the story of Nahuel, the heir to an indigenous empire who embarks on a spiritual journey that enables him to revitalize the great civilization of his people. Released the same year as Mercedes Sosa’s Cantata Sudamericana and one year before Gato Barbieri’s Chapter One, the album had a great deal in common with these Latin Americanist projects. Like those other records, Sudamérica used Andean instruments, folk rhythms from throughout the continent, and a celebration of pre-Columbian civilization in order to depict a proud and unified South American culture. Described by one critic as “Indo-pop,” the music included moments of zamba, chacarera, cueca, vidala, baguala, huayno, malambo, vals peruano, and even Afro-Cuban rhythms alongside blues and rock.[16] Santaolalla’s lyrics celebrated the Inca past even as they predicted a glorious future of peace: “Perhaps the new Incas / Perhaps the new light / The promised hour / Will soon begin. / South America.”

The framing of Arco Iris’s new music as South American—rather than Argentine—reflected both local and transnational influences. Santaolalla’s musical vision was shaped by his interactions with Argentine folklorist Leda Valladares, whose experience playing folk music for Europeans had led her to dedicate her life to studying and collecting the work of unknown, amateur folk musicians in the Andean Northwest. After many conversations with Valladares, Santaolalla travelled to the small town of Casabindo, Jujuy, in order to experience indigenous culture directly.[17] This focus on the indigenous Andes led to an interest in the Inca Empire and, thus, helped Santaolalla formulate an identity that exceeded Argentina’s national boundaries. But even as he delved deeply into Andean folk music, Santaolalla was also still following musical developments in the United States. He was particularly impressed with the jazz fusion band Weather Report, which visited Argentina around this time. Commenting on that band’s use of percussion and sounds drawn from nature, he noted that “Latin America is very exuberant in this sense, it has all the force of the primitive, something that the United States and England do not have. That is why Weather Report has a Brazilian percussionist, Dom Um Romão.”[18] Santaolalla’s folk explorations, like those of Barbieri and Sosa, participated in the same exoticizing, primitivist impulse that attracted North American and European musicians to Latin America. Like theirs, his approach was a product of both the stereotyping gaze of the North and the progressive Latin Americanism of the South.

FIGURE 6.1 • Arco Iris. From left to right: Guillermo Bordarampé, Ara Tokatlián, Gustavo Santaolalla, Horacio Gianello. La Bella Gente (January 1973), 8.

Although its long hair and commitment to rock music clearly aligned Arco Iris with the counterculture, the band’s political message was ambiguous. Critics in the middle-class press celebrated the group for its artistic ambition, impressive work habits, and apolitical orientation as well as for the good behavior of its fans.[19] Arco Iris was one of the few major bands not to perform at the rock concert held to celebrate the Peronist electoral victory in March 1973. As Santaolalla explained, “Our music is clean, it has no political undertones. The important things are peace and internal transformation.”[20] Santaolalla even bragged that the band had received a complimentary note from the U.S. embassy’s cultural attaché.[21] Nevertheless, some elements within the revolutionary left responded enthusiastically to Arco Iris’s folk-rock fusion. Noticias, a newspaper linked to the Montoneros, gave Inti-Raymi a rave review. Noting that Arco Iris was following a path opened by Gato Barbieri, the paper’s reviewer praised the anti-imperialist implication of its approach: “It is not possible to achieve authentic expression through the imitation of foreign styles.”[22]

However, for many rock critics, it was Arco Iris’s folk-rock fusion that sounded inauthentic. In the late 1960s, a battle had raged between partisans of Almendra on the one hand and the blues-rock band Manal on the other. Manal’s supporters disparaged Almendra as “soft” music for middle-class kids and insisted that their rougher, allegedly working-class, blues aesthetic represented “real” rock.[23] In this context, playing acoustic instruments, as Arco Iris usually did during the opening sets of its concerts, could be controversial. By actively incorporating folk rhythms, the band ended up alienating the critics who policed rock’s generic borders. The rock magazine Pelo, initially a strong supporter of Arco Iris, seemed to turn against the group once it embarked on its folk experiments. Arguing that they were now “limited” by folk music, the magazine’s writers did not hide their disdain: “The music lacked nuances, and the lyrics were based on the well-worn [reiteradas] metaphors used by official folk music.”[24] The magazine’s antipathy deepened when Arco Iris began displaying an Argentine flag during its live performances of “Hombre,” one of the centerpieces of Sudamérica. Santaolalla argued that waving the flag was part of the band’s effort “to exalt South American social and cultural values,” an important objective at a time when too many musicians were “obsessed [with] reading foreign magazines, looking passionately at what foreign bands are doing.”[25] But in the aftermath of a right-wing dictatorship that had tried to inculcate a conformist patriotism, the flag was a problematic symbol.

Santaolalla’s comments regarding the flag controversy reveal that the turn to folk music was his way of responding to the central challenge of rock in Latin America: how to build an authentic identity on the basis of an imported musical form. Even though he was a connoisseur of rock music from the English-speaking world—he acknowledged, for example, that Arco Iris’s acoustic performances reflected the influence of folk-rock bands like Crosby, Stills and Nash[26]—he believed that by incorporating rhythms and instruments from the Andes, Arco Iris had moved beyond mere imitation. In essence, Santaolalla had tried to introduce a new concept of authenticity to Argentine rock. The dominant rock discourse defined authenticity as the opposite of commercialism; rock bands were authentic to the extent that they resisted selling out and made “progressive” music that expressed the values of the rock community.[27] During Arco Iris’s RCA phase, Pelo declared it “the most authentic [band] in Argentine popular music” precisely because its music was difficult and ambitious.[28] To this notion of authenticity, Santaolalla added a different one, rooted in the romantic nationalism that undergirded the work of folklorists like Leda Valladares. According to this concept, Arco Iris’s music was authentic because its use of indigenous elements expressed something essential about Argentine or South American identity.[29] For many critics, though, this sort of nationalism smacked of less progressive, “official” forms of music. In any case, Arco Iris’s folk rock fusion remained a minority taste. The band enjoyed a loyal following, but it never approached the massive popularity of groups like Sui Generis, the duo formed by Charly García and Nito Mestre.

Arco Iris moved away from folk music with its last album, Agitor Lucens V (1974), a concept album that explored the topic of extraterrestrial life. Although folk rhythms could still be discerned in the music, the group abandoned acoustic instruments in favor of a heavier sound modeled on the jazz fusion of John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. With its odd meters inspired by Chick Corea and Don Ellis, the album was avant-garde art rock, and it managed to reconquer the critics of Pelo, who declared that “rarely has a group had such a great capacity for change: without leaving aside the telluric roots they have achieved a much more consistent product.”[30] But even though the album won over the critics, it did not attract a mass audience.

Having tired of the intense discipline of the Brotherhood, Santaolalla left Arco Iris in 1975. His new band, Soluna, represented a move away from the long-form, conceptual work he had done in Sudamérica and Agitor. Instead, he now wrote a series of more accessible rock songs featuring rich vocal harmonies. In his desire to distance himself from the experience of the previous six years, Santaolalla had abandoned the folk fusion project, at least for the time being. As he told one interviewer, “Now I would like to do all the rock songs that I could not do before.”[31] Soluna made an auspicious debut at the Luna Park in Buenos Aires, went on a successful tour through the Argentine interior, and recorded an album, Energía natural, in 1977. Yet despite favorable reviews, the record made very little impression in the market. For Santaolalla, this disappointment fueled a growing desire to leave the country. The dictatorship that had taken power in 1976 made life quite difficult for long-haired rockers. In later interviews, he mentioned the difficulty of finding places to play and even noted that he had been imprisoned several times.[32] In 1978, one year before Mercedes Sosa left for Europe, Santaolalla moved to Los Angeles.

Reinventing Santaolalla: Los Angeles in the 1980s

On the eve of his departure for the United States, Santaolalla had big plans. He believed that the move would allow him to grow musically, and he intended to build a binational career modeled on that of Brazilian stars, Milton Nascimento and Egberto Gismonti. Describing how he hoped to sell records in the United States, he pointed to the Uruguayan brothers Hugo and George Fattorusso, whose jazz fusion band, Opa, was enjoying modest success in the North. Santaolalla argued that his new material shared a certain sensibility with Opa’s music: “The idea of making music that has the musical level and swing necessary for the market over there, but at the same time reflects all the rhythmic richness of Latin American music.” He hoped to connect with other Latin American musicians engaged in this project, including the Fattorussos as well as the Uruguayan percussionist Rubén Rada and the Brazilian musical couple Airto Moreira and Flora Purim. Citing Joni Mitchell’s recent interest in Latin American music—her 1977 album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter included a Brazilian surdo played by Airto, as well as bongos, congas and claves—Santaolalla declared, “I think the next important thing is going to come from Latin America.”[33] Santaolalla was also well aware of Gato Barbieri, who had done as much as anyone else to promote the notion that “Latin music” had something vital and appealing to offer contemporary North American popular music. In his rock opera Sudamérica, Santaolalla had already conceptualized his musical identity as South or Latin American rather than merely Argentine. He now hoped that this identity would help him break into the U.S. market.

There were two problems with Santaolalla’s plan to cater to the North American demand for Latin rhythm. First, his experiments thus far had been primarily with Andean rhythms like zamba and huayno, not the Afro-Cuban rhythms that listeners and musicians in the United States heard as Latin. Second, it was not clear that rock had much room for rhythmic diversity. It was no coincidence that most of the Latin American musicians whom Santaolalla listed as models specialized not in rock, but in jazz fusion. Thanks to the efforts of musicians like Barbieri and Airto and the interest of groups like Weather Report and Return to Forever, a significant space had opened within this subgenre for the inclusion of musical elements understood as Latin. Santaolalla’s reference to Latin America’s “rhythmic richness” reveals that he shared the same basic understanding of what Latin America had to offer as the jazz fusion crowd, not surprising given his long-standing interest in the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, and Chick Corea. But whereas jazz had opened up to Latin American rhythmic influences, North American rock music remained rhythmically constrained. The one significant exception was the Latin rock championed by the bands Santana and Malo, but here again Latin meant Afro-Cuban rhythm and percussion. Santaolalla could have decided to follow the lead of the Fattorusso brothers, who began as rock musicians before transitioning to jazz fusion. But if he was going to remain a rock musician, he would need to find a new path.

Santaolalla’s plans failed to bear fruit in the United States, and this initial disappointment pushed him to experiment with new approaches. Although his demo seemed to impress the executives at Warner-Elektra-Atlantic (WEA), he was told that he would have to wait for a contract. Meanwhile, he found himself bored by the bands who then dominated the rock charts—Boston, Kansas, Journey, Jefferson Starship—bands he suspected were created by major media corporations interested only in record sales. Instead, Santaolalla began to listen to new forms of rock music being played by lesser known bands in the Los Angeles clubs. Impressed by the punk, postpunk, and new wave music he heard, he shaved his beard and cut his hair “in order to be part of that movement.” With the right-wing dictatorship in power in Argentina, long hair still signified rebellion. But in the United States, that look amounted to living in the past, and Santaolalla wanted to be on the cutting edge. Together with Aníbal Kerpel, a fellow Argentine exile who had played keyboards for the prog-rock group Crucis, he placed ads for a bass player and drummer. The resulting band, named Wet Picnic, would play new wave music aimed at the North American market with lyrics in English. For the time being, he put aside his plan to bring Latin American rhythms to the United States.[34]

After several months of aggressively marketing itself, Wet Picnic gained a foothold in the major Los Angeles rock clubs: Madame Wong’s, the Whiskey a Go Go, Blackie’s, and others.[35] Santaolalla, who composed most of the band’s music, listed as influences both local new wave bands like The Motels, and bigger acts like The Police, the British band that was just then on the cusp of international superstardom.[36] In late 1981, Wet Picnic released Balls Up, an EP, on Unicorn Records, a short-lived subsidiary of MCA. As the record reveals, Santaolalla’s musical transformation had been every bit as dramatic as the change in his appearance. Gone were all the elements of his earlier style, rooted in the rock aesthetics of the 1960s: the psychedelic lyrics, the lengthy jams, and bluesy electric guitar of Arco Iris, the finger-picking and vocal harmonies of Soluna. Thanks to Wet Picnic’s broad range of tempos—from slow ballads to songs that moved at near-hardcore speed—and to Santaolalla’s accented English and dramatic vocal style, the album sounded like “an idiosyncratic brew” to critics.[37] Nevertheless, the band’s heavy reliance on synthesizers and on clean-toned, staccato electric guitar identified it clearly as new wave. The up-tempo “Are You in Touch?” featured reggaelike syncopations that may have reflected the influence of The Police, but most of the album featured straighter rhythms. Although one reviewer claimed to hear “subtle Latin flavoring (care of singer Gus Santaolalla’s South American heritage),” this was a testament to the tendency of North Americans to hear any music played by a Latin American as Latin.[38] In fact, Wet Picnic’s music had none of the South American folk elements that Santaolalla had experimented with in earlier years. Singing in English for the U.S. market, he no longer felt the need to establish his Argentine authenticity.

FIGURE 6.2 • Santaolalla’s new look. Expreso Imaginario 64 (November 1981), 8.

Santaolalla’s decision to move to Los Angeles rather than Miami or New York, the other likely destinations for a Latin American musician in exile, had already begun to shape his career in ways that he could not have imagined. New York, with its large Puerto Rican and Dominican communities, was the historic home of salsa and, increasingly, merengue. But this Latin dance music was totally disconnected from the thriving punk and new wave scene centered at the downtown club, CBGB. This gulf reflected a historic pattern: Puerto Ricans in New York had for years mostly shunned guitar-based rock as the music of the colonizer.[39] Meanwhile, by 1980, the major labels had moved their Latin American headquarters to Miami, where they sought to produce music that could unify the Spanish-language market. Toward that end, the city’s recording studios produced a steady stream of homogenous Latin Pop aimed both at audiences throughout Latin America and at Latinos in the United States. The formula, devised by the Cuban-American band, Miami Sound Machine, combined vaguely Latin dance numbers with romantic tunes in the balada tradition.[40] As a Latin American musician, it would have been difficult for Santaolalla to participate in the cutting edge rock scene in New York or to escape the Latin Pop formula in Miami.

In Los Angeles, where Caribbean influences were overshadowed by the musical traditions of Mexico and of the historic Chicano community, the borders between Anglo and Latino popular music were more porous. Unlike East Coast Puerto Ricans, Chicanos in Los Angeles had been playing and listening to rock since the 1950s. With a few exceptions, such as Ritchie Valens’s “La bamba,” Chicano rock was sung in English and was often indistinguishable from its Anglo counterpart.[41] In the late 1970s, Los Angeles had a thriving punk and new wave scene, featuring bands like The Germs, X, and the Go-Go’s. And just as they had with earlier subgenres of rock, Chicanos embraced the new music. Although they often found it difficult to break into the Hollywood clubs where Anglo punk bands played, Chicano bands like Los Illegals, The Brat, The Zeros, and The Bags played their own English-language punk music in East Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, in other words, Wet Picnic—a band led by Latin Americans playing a North American form of contemporary rock music in English—was hardly anomalous. More important, the historic engagement of Chicanos with rock music meant that Los Angeles, despite its deep racial, class, and ethnic divisions, offered rich opportunities for musical border-hopping. For example, at the very moment that Santaolalla arrived, the soon-to-be-famous Los Lobos was forging its hybrid style in the Los Angeles clubs, spicing its retro rock with Tex-Mex accordion.[42]

Santaolalla’s encounters with the Chicano punk scene in Los Angeles reawakened his interest in Latin American music. One of the bands that had impressed him on his tours through the clubs was a punk trio called The Plugz, led by Tito Larriva, a Mexican American who grew up in El Paso.[43] With the exception of a hardcore version of “La Bamba,” The Plugz sang in English and sounded quite similar to other punk bands of the moment.[44] By 1981, though, the band was evolving, playing in slower tempos and incorporating a rhythm-and-blues style horn section. Santaolalla and Kerpel joined The Plugz in the studio for the recording of the band’s second album, Better Luck, which Santaolalla also coproduced. In addition to bass and second guitar, Santaolalla played charango on a number of tracks, giving the band a distinctive sound and suggesting that he envisioned The Plugz as an opportunity to experiment with Latin American elements. While much of the album sounded like a bluesy punk hybrid, it also revealed the influence of multicultural Los Angeles. The ska tune “Touch for Cash” reflected The Plugz’ experience performing alongside ska bands at venues like O.N. Klub.[45]

The one Spanish-language track on Better Luck, “El clavo y la cruz,” would prove particularly important for Santaolalla’s musical development.[46] On the recording, which paired high-speed punk with the Mexican norteño rhythm, Santaolalla played the part of a Mexican charro, flavoring the song with traditional mariachi shouts. On one level, “El clavo y la cruz” represented a return to the musical project of Arco Iris, namely the effort to blend rock with other musical elements in order to express a Latin American identity. But the song offered a new twist on that project. Santaolalla learned to imitate mariachi musicians as a child growing up in Argentina, where Mexican films were frequently shown on television.[47] Yet as an Argentine rocker, it never occurred to him to incorporate Mexican elements, because his musical identity was rooted in a folkloric concept of authenticity. Following the lead of Valladares and others, he sought out his own roots in the untainted folk culture of isolated, indigenous communities in Argentina. Thinking of himself as Latin American meant connecting to South America by way of the indigenous cultures of the Andes. But living in the United States had expanded his understanding of his own Latin American identity both geographically and conceptually. Years later, he reminisced about how moving to Los Angeles had affected his musical development: “It was … what ended up bringing me to who I am and where I am today. And it’s that connection between Latin America and the United States.… Remember that Los Angeles is the second city with the biggest Mexican population after [Mexico City].”[48] Los Angeles shifted Santaolalla’s frame of reference, encouraging him to look toward Mexico and not just to indigenous folk traditions, but also to the music of contemporary urbanites and migrants.

Santaolalla had also arrived at a propitious moment. As late as the 1960s, Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans—the three main Latino communities in the United States—saw themselves as distinct groups with very little in common. As the sociologist G. Cristina Mora has recently demonstrated, the intertwined efforts of government bureaucrats, Latino activists, and the Spanish-language media diffused and institutionalized the idea of “Hispanic panethnicity” during the 1970s and 1980s.[49] Santaolalla arrived in the United States just as these links were being forged; for the first time, communities of Latin American descent in the United States were embracing a common Latino or Hispanic identity. This context helps explain why Santaolalla now saw Chicano rock, mariachi music, as well as the Mexican films of his youth as expressions of his own Latin American identity.

For the time being, Santaolalla had few opportunities to pursue the musical direction suggested by his work with The Plugz. Instead, he began to regain visibility in Argentina as a sort of apostle for the modernization of rock nacional. The musical and technical expertise he had developed in the clubs and recording studios of Los Angeles made him an attractive collaborator for Argentine musicians seeking to make their sound more up to date. In one of the earliest examples of the transnational production of Argentine rock music, Santaolalla helped León Gieco record three songs in a Los Angeles studio in October 1980. The two had met around 1972, when the young Gieco showed up at the communal home of Arco Iris in order to take guitar lessons from Santaolalla, who was just then becoming famous thanks to the success of “Mañana campestre.” Santaolalla played him records by Joan Baez and Crosby, Stills and Nash, and convinced him not to record with RCA, which had plans to transform Gieco into a more commercial pop star.[50] In 1973, Santaolalla produced Gieco’s eponymous debut album, and over the next few years, Gieco emerged as a major figure, the “Argentine Bob Dylan.” Producing and performing on Gieco’s new album in 1980, called Pensar en nada, Santaolalla pushed his old friend in a new direction, helping to turn this 1970s-style folkie into a 1980s rocker.[51]

Within the Argentine rock milieu, Santaolalla now represented the promise and pitfalls of North American influence. Charly García, perhaps Argentina’s most established rock star, made fun of what he saw as new wave faddishness in “Mientras miro las nuevas olas,” a song he recorded with his band Seru Giran in 1980. Comparing new wave music to the Nueva Ola of the 1960s, García concluded, “As I watch the new waves, I am already part of the sea.” In interviews with the porteño press, Santaolalla made it clear that he felt García was talking about him. He criticized the “stagnation” of the Argentine rock scene and made his irritation with García clear: “I am still watching the new waves. I am still not part of the sea. The day I’m part of the sea, I’ll be dead.”[52]

In late 1981, Santaolalla returned to Buenos Aires to record a Spanish-language solo album aimed at the local market. For his new album, he avoided the idiosyncratic mannerisms of Wet Picnic and offered an up-to-date style of rock that he hoped might appeal to Argentine listeners. Santaolalla used a clean guitar sound, adding solos and fills that seemed inspired by guitarist Mark Knopfler of the popular British band Dire Straits. The influence of The Police could be heard in the reggae rhythms that appeared throughout, and the album even included a reggae version of the Arco Iris song “Vasudeva.”[53] The album’s hit, though, was “Ando rodando” (I’m travelling around) a straight, mid-tempo rocker in which Santaolalla alluded to his current geographical and musical quests. In April 1982, when war with England erupted following the Argentine invasion of the Malvinas (or Falkland) Islands, the military government banned the broadcasting of music in English. This measure was a major boon to Argentine rock in general and, in particular, to “Ando rodando,” which suddenly became one of the most popular songs on the radio.[54]

The Malvinas War and the democratic transition that followed led to a renaissance in Argentine rock that effectively ended the music’s isolation from foreign markets. A key element in this process was the sonic modernization that Santaolalla had helped provoke. In 1983, Charly García put aside his resistance to the new trends, releasing Clics Modernos, an extremely influential album recorded in New York with a modern, electronic sound. The band that he used to present the album in concert included bassist Alfredo Toth and drummer Willy Iturri, the rhythm section that had played on Santaolalla’s solo album the previous year. Clics Modernos, in turn, helped ignite a boom in Argentine “pop-rock,” featuring danceable rhythms, synthesizers, and often, drum machines, a style that quickly attracted the interest of the multinational record companies. During the 1970s, the major labels had focused their Latin American sales efforts on balada, folk, and English-language rock, seeing little export potential for Argentine rock. But the cosmopolitan hipness of the new pop-rock changed their calculations. Bands like Virus, Soda Stereo, ZAS, and Enanitos Verdes were signed by the multinationals and toured Latin America in order to build a fan base. The results were astonishing. ZAS sold a million copies of its album Rockas vivas throughout Latin America. By 1988, Soda Stereo was the number one international artist on the roster of CBS Argentina, an unprecedented status for a rock act. As Soda’s manager Alberto Ohanian argued, these efforts returned Argentina to its earlier status as a major exporter of pop music to the rest of Latin America: “What we did with Soda Stereo was to recover a market that Sandro, Leo Dan or Palito Ortega dominated in the 1960s and that had been abandoned.”[55] Santaolalla got into the act as well, producing the second and third albums of G.I.T., a band formed by the rhythm section of Toth and Iturri alongside guitarist Pablo Guyot. Santaolalla used the technical knowledge he had amassed in the United States to give the band a contemporary, Top 40 sound that brought it substantial commercial success throughout the region.[56]

Neither Santaolalla’s solo album nor the new Argentine rock that he had helped inspire contained any traces of the approach he had pursued with The Plugz. Most of the new acts were uninterested in incorporating elements from Latin American musical genres.[57] However, in 1984, following the breakup of Wet Picnic, Santaolalla did get the opportunity to revisit Argentine folk music when his old friend León Gieco invited him to participate in an ambitious project.[58] Gieco was disappointed with the new direction of Argentine rock, which he heard as a pale imitation of North American trends: “I think that they are repeating the model of Sandro, Palito Ortega, and Los Teen Tops, [who] limited themselves to translating lyrics or copying foreign models. Like a cowboy movie dubbed into Spanish.”[59] By contrast, he was inspired by the folk musicians he had encountered on a recent tour of the Argentine interior, and he now invited a group to Buenos Aires to record with him, including the violinist Sixto Palavecino from Santiago del Estero. Worried about the commercial prospects of the project, the president of Music Hall, Gieco’s record label, suggested that he invite Santaolalla to help out. Santaolalla immediately embraced the project, but he argued that bringing folk musicians to Buenos Aires was “inorganic” and that the musicians would be uncomfortable. A better approach “would be to go where the music originated, with the people who are the creators of that music, and record them there.”[60] The label agreed to finance the project, and Santaolalla and Gieco spent more than six months traveling the country with mobile recording equipment. The result was a three-volume collection named De Ushuaia a La Quiaca, after the southernmost and northernmost towns in Argentina.[61] The first volume, released in 1985, included songs composed by Gieco and recorded in a studio, but the other two, released as a double album in 1986, were recorded on location and featured collaborations with local folk musicians singing either their own material or anonymous folk songs.[62]

For Santaolalla, De Ushuaia a La Quiaca represented a return to the folkloric concept of authenticity, according to which the essence of the nation could be found in the cultural practices of its isolated, rural communities. For much of their travels, Santaolalla and Gieco were accompanied by the folklorist Leda Valladares, with whom Santaolalla had studied in his Arco Iris days. Serving as a guide to the anonymous, “deep” folk culture of the Northwest, she helped identify local collaborators and participated in many of the recordings.[63] But as Santaolalla later recalled, his renewed interest in folk music also reflected his exposure to world music during his time in the United States.[64] Though De Ushuaia a La Quiaca preceded the world music boom sparked by the release of Paul Simon’s Graceland in 1986, it is likely that Santaolalla was aware of projects like Brian Eno’s and David Byrne’s experiments with Afrobeat and Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD festival, which brought together rock and pop musicians with acts from throughout the developing world. Elsewhere, Santaolalla explained that it was the anticorporate ethos of punk, its pursuit of musical innocence, that inspired him to look for “pure music” in the form of noncommercial folk.[65] In any case, the project’s ethnographic impulse hearkened back to the approach he had taken in the 1970s, when he turned to Argentine folk music as a source of authenticity.

Nevertheless, the new conceptual approach that Santaolalla had developed during his time in Los Angeles was apparent in the project as well, particularly in the decision to include at least one local genre that was not typically seen as folkloric: cuarteto music from Córdoba. A music with a primarily local, working-class following, cuarteto developed in the 1940s, when quartets of accordion, piano, bass, and violin began to play the European dance repertoire with an up-tempo, oompah beat they called tunga-tunga.[66] As Santaolalla pointed out, within the rock intelligentsia “cuarteto music was totally devalued, considered a garbage music [una música de porquería], basically,” and Gieco was surprised when his friend suggested they include it.[67] Santaolalla’s interest in cuarteto suggests that his interaction with Chicano musicians had expanded his understanding of what constituted “folk music.” It was not limited to the indigenous traditions of the Andes; any local, popular music—no matter how commercial—could count. Moreover, as he played with the legendary Cuarteto Leo, Santaolalla made an important musical discovery:

All of a sudden that polka-type energy started to mutate into a sort of ska. And they got into the energy that we were putting into it, for example with me playing the electric guitar because that was an instrument they didn’t have. Then all of a sudden there was the electric guitar playing upstrokes … and the guys just died. And I loved it, because ska music fascinates me and polka also has that, which in the United States they call oompah music.[68]

Santaolalla connected rock to cuarteto via the Jamaican ska rhythm that he had learned in Los Angeles. It was a method he would return to in the future.

The Guru of Rock Latino

During his first decade in Los Angeles, Santaolalla had thoroughly transformed himself. He had traded in the musical and sartorial trappings of a hippy for those of a new wave artist. He had immersed himself in chicano punk and ska, while learning his way around a first-world recording studio. Although he maintained his earlier interest in mixing rock with Latin American genres in order to express his musical identity, both his understanding of that identity and his taste in musical genres had expanded decisively. But Santaolalla had yet to find another opportunity to make thoroughly modern yet distinctively Latin American rock music, as he had, briefly, with The Plugz. His next chance to do so would come not from Argentina, but from Mexico.

Like their Argentine counterparts, Mexican young people had embraced rock music in the 1960s and 1970s, using it to forge a counterculture to resist the conservative, patriarchal values of their parents and their government. Yet Mexico’s one-party, authoritarian government repressed rock in the 1970s more effectively than the Argentine dictatorships. Following the controversial Avándaro rock festival in 1971, rock music was pushed underground, limited to semiclandestine, improvised performance spaces known as hoyos fonquis.[69] In the 1980s, Mexican rock experienced a reawakening. This revival had multiple components: working-class chavos banda inspired by punk music, middle- and upper-class bands imitating the latest new wave groups from the United States, new radio programs and nightclubs, as well as the movements of civic activism that emerged in Mexico City in response to the earthquake of 1985 and provided new venues for underground rock bands.[70]

Another key aspect of the Mexican rock revival was the influx of rock from Argentina. The new Argentine bands were particularly successful in Mexico, where their only real competition came from Spanish rock groups, then experiencing a boom of their own. Mexico accounted for fully one-third of Soda Stereo’s Latin American sales.[71] In 1987, BMG Mexico released a series of albums by Mexican, Spanish, and Argentine acts and promoted them under the collective title “Rock en tu Idioma.” Impressed by the sales figures, the multinationals began to sign Mexican rock bands. The labels needed experts to help them select bands and mold them into acts that would sell throughout the region, and they naturally turned to Argentine rock producers with proven track records. Chief among them was Oscar López, then producing Miguel Mateos, an Argentine star who had left ZAS to embark on a successful solo career.[72] As a result of this influence, most of the Mexican bands signed to major labels in the 1980s followed the Argentine formula: they were pop-rock bands that emulated the sounds of contemporary hits from the United Kingdom and the United States.

Gradually, a number of bands began to challenge this model by making distinctively Mexican rock.[73] This phenomenon gained traction in 1989, when the band Caifanes released the single “La Negra Tomasa,” a Cuban guaracha repurposed as a cumbia. Caifanes was a postpunk group who modeled their look and sound on the British gothic rock band The Cure. Signed to BMG by López, the band had enjoyed moderate sales of its first album. As a sort of joke, Caifanes had taken to opening its concerts with “La Negra Tomasa,” a song whose dance rhythm and lighthearted lyrics contrasted sharply with the band’s typical material. The members of Caifanes had grown up in a working-class neighborhood of Mexico City, where cumbia had long been popular dance music, and “La Negra Tomasa” was a classic. The recorded version, which actually sounded, improbably, like The Cure playing a cumbia, was a massive hit.[74] It proved not only that Mexican audiences craved rock in Spanish, but also that they would respond to rock music that incorporated elements from local culture.

Gustavo Santaolalla was well positioned to take advantage of this incipient trend. He had connections with Argentine rock producers like Oscar López, who had produced Santaolalla’s solo album in 1982, and who now introduced him to many of the bands in the emerging Mexican scene.[75] Moreover, he was based in Los Angeles and together with Aníbal Kerpel, with whom he would continue to collaborate, he had developed expertise in cutting edge recording techniques. But Mexican bands responded above all to Santaolalla’s musical interests. Unlike López, who simply promised to give bands “the American pop edge,” Santaolalla was aesthetically ambitious; he was looking for ways to blend rock with Latin American elements.[76] He got his chance to do so when he signed on to produce the first album by the band Maldita Vecindad y Los Hijos del Quinto Patio. With a name that evoked their working-class backgrounds—vecindades are converted colonial structures which serve as inexpensive housing in Mexico City, and the quinto patio represents the cheapest, most marginal space within the vecindad—the group emerged in the wake of the 1985 earthquake. Encouraged by Santaolalla to experiment in order “to find the Mexican rock sound, to invent that sound,” Maldita Vecindad developed an innovative musical style that incorporated a diverse mix of genres from Latin America and beyond.[77]

Maldita Vecindad created a highly influential template for the new rock latino, or rock mestizo as it was sometimes called. The band’s second album, El Circo, also produced by Santaolalla, became a massive hit, selling 200,000 units within a year of its release.[78] Both in its lyrics and its performance attire, the band evoked Mexican popular culture of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly the figure of the pachuco, a countercultural icon of “lower-class hypermasculinity” that first appeared among Chicanos in 1940s Los Angeles and was popularized in Mexico by the film actor German Valdés, known as Tin Tan.[79] By celebrating pachucos, whom Mexican intellectuals had condemned for turning their back on the culture of the homeland, Maldita Vecindad built a bridge to the Chicano community in the United States.[80] At the same time, the song “Pachuco” drew an implicit connection between pachucos and the punks of the present day: “Hey dad, you were a pachuco / you were also scolded. / Hey dad you danced mambo / you have to remember.” Like Colombian cumbia and other Caribbean dance genres, the Cuban mambo had a long history in Mexico. Mambo pioneer Dámaso Pérez Prado first achieved stardom in Mexico City in 1949, leading a big band that featured the legendary Cuban singer Benny Moré.[81] Thus, even if it did not quite qualify as Mexican folk music, Cuban dance music represented an historic piece of Mexican popular culture. And since it had long been pushed off Mexican radios by baladas and other forms of Latin pop, the mambo was now available for reappropriation by young musicians looking to Mexicanize rock.[82]

Maldita Vecindad incorporated mambo alongside Mexican ranchera and son veracruzano as well as punk, Algerian rai, and the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti, but the master rhythm that made this fusion possible was ska. A precursor of reggae, ska first emerged in Jamaica in the late 1950s when record producers and musicians adapted North American rhythm and blues by introducing staccato guitar and horn parts that heavily accented the “offbeats,” the “ands” in “one-and-two-and-three-and four.” In 1979, a full-fledged ska revival emerged in the industrial British cities of Birmingham and Coventry. Known as Two Tone after the record label that disseminated the music, the revival featured biracial bands that blended the ska rhythm with the fast tempos and attitude of punk. Bands like The Specials, The Beat, The Selecter, and Madness emphasized fun, even as they disseminated an ideal of racial harmony, symbolized by an iconography that featured a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. The heyday of the Two Tone movement lasted only until around 1983, but it had a major impact across the Atlantic.[83]

In Mexico, the members of Maldita Vecindad came to ska by way of The Clash, the British punk band that had experimented extensively with Jamaican genres. Maldita Vecindad, who had been politicized by frustration with the government’s response to the earthquake, responded to the leftist message of The Clash. But in ska, they heard connections to the Latin American dance music their parents had enjoyed. As Roco put it, “The moment I heard it, I recognized the whole Caribbean part. From then on, we got deeper into ska.”[84] The syncopations and horn sections in ska provided an opening for Maldita Vecindad to explore ways of incorporating other Caribbean rhythms. They made the same sort of connection that Santaolalla had when he played a ska guitar part while jamming with the Cuarteto Leo. Two Tone had made ska into a hip, Anglo popular music, and that in turn made it imaginable for Mexican rockers to indulge a taste for dance music played by large bands with horn sections, a model that had been completely segregated from guitar-based rock. According to Pato, the band’s guitarist, “When we started to play, within rock and roll orthodoxy, it was unthinkable to say that you liked Pérez Prado or that you liked cumbia.… Later, it became a fad, as if all the groups were rescuing Mexican identity [la mexicanidad].”[85] And as this narrative makes clear, the version of Mexican identity that Maldita Vecindad constructed was an inclusive one that emphasized Mexico’s connections to other Latin American cultures; the band’s music incorporated not only Mexican forms like ranchera and son jarocho, but also mambo and cumbia. Santaolalla’s long track record of blending rock with Argentine folk music as well as his more recent experiences with The Plugz and the Cuarteto Leo made him the perfect producer to help Maldita Vecindad realize its vision. He could imagine a blend of punk and ska on the one hand with Latin American dance music on the other, and thanks to his connections in the transnational music industry, he could sell this hybrid rock to the major labels.

Santaolalla and Maldita Vecindad were not alone in forging connections between rock, punk, ska, and Caribbean rhythms. At roughly the same moment, two other influential bands were making similar aesthetic moves. The members of the Argentine band Fabulosos Cadillacs first heard Jamaican rhythms in the hits of The Police, but their direct exposure to ska came through the Argentine underground band Sumo, whose leader, Luca Prodan, had spent much of his youth in England. In the early 1980s, the Cadillacs embraced the party spirit implicit in the music and style of Two Tone bands like Madness, and they began to recruit horn players.[86] After recording several ska albums, Fabulosos Cadillacs began to open up to other Caribbean rhythms, particularly on the album El León (1992), which included salsa, calypso, bolero, and merengue. As Vicentico, the band’s singer, described their stylistic evolution, “We were always close to the Latin [lo latino].… We began to find in salsa and Latin music something similar to what we once found in reggae, soul and ska.”[87] At the same time, Mano Negra, a French group led by Manu Chao, the son of Spanish exiles, was traversing similar musical terrain. Inspired by the mixture of punk and ska developed by The Clash, Mano Negra crafted a carnivalesque style that combined politically engaged lyrics with multiple languages and musical styles in a chaotic pastiche. The band’s interest in Latin American rhythms deepened during a tour of South America in 1992. Mano Negra’s European pedigree gave the band a certain stature; the group’s interest legitimized local rockers’ efforts to incorporate Caribbean rhythms. As Santaolalla later argued, the appearance of Mano Negra “led bands that had begun as ska to take the same path.”[88] By 1992, then, Maldita Vecindad, Fabulosos Cadillacs, and Mano Negra had begun to sketch the possibilities of a rock music built on a fusion with Caribbean rhythms. While not all the rock latino bands that would emerge over the next decade shared these bands’ interest in Jamaican rhythms, ska would remain a potent source of variation within the genre. More important, ska had helped crack open the constraints on rock and opened the genre to an influx of Latin American rhythms.

Santaolalla remained at the forefront of the new rock latino. In 1992, he discovered Café Tacuba, a band from the middle-class Mexico City suburb of Ciudad Satélite, and produced their debut album for WEA. Santaolalla would go on to produce all of the group’s records, helping to make Café Tacuba the most critically acclaimed rock band in Latin America. The band’s 1994 album, Re, follows the lead of Maldita Vecindad, Fabulosos Cadillacs, and Mano Negra, but pushes the idea of musical fusion to an extreme. The music contains elements of an amazingly eclectic array of musical genres, from funk, disco, and speed-metal to Mexican huapango, ranchera, and mariachi to Caribbean cumbia and bolero. Moreover, as Josh Kun points out, genres and even temporalities seem to collide within the space of a single song. The song “El aparato,” begins with a strummed guitar reminiscent of traditional son jarocho and ends with indigenous-style chants over synthesizers and video game keyboard sounds. This pastiche, in Kun’s words, “recognizes the place of the local while also traveling within the space of the global, performing a transnational musical movement that begins to blur the very distinction itself.”[89] In its insistent juxtaposition of the local and the global, Café Tacuba’s music reflects contemporary Mexico City and indeed most Latin American cities, where cosmopolitan, consumerist modernity exists side-by-side with elements of traditional culture. It also reflects an aesthetic awakening reminiscent of that of Maldita Vecindad. As singer Rubén Albarrán put it, “At first we copied everything we could from the United States. But then we started bringing in the music our parents used to listen to, boleros and tropical stuff.… Eclecticism liberated us.”[90]

Through his work with Mexican bands, Santaolalla had begun to realize his vision of a distinctively Latin American rock music, but he had not yet been able to bring this approach to his native Argentina. He felt that most of the Argentine bands that had emerged in the 1980s were too focused on copying trends from the United States and England.[91] However, in 1993, Santaolalla reestablished himself in the world of Argentine rock by inviting the power trio Divididos to Los Angeles and producing their new album, La era de la boludez. Divididos were founded by two of the surviving members of Sumo, which had dissolved after the death of Luca Prodan in 1987. The band specialized in a hard-rock mixture of blues and funk, but it had also shown signs of an interest in Argentine folk music, and it was that tendency that Santaolalla responded to and encouraged.[92] La era de la boludez included a blues-rock cover of Atahualpa Yupanqui’s “El arriero,” two decades after Gato Barbieri had claimed the song for Latin jazz, as well as a hard rock chacarera called “Huelga de amores.” Nevertheless, Divididos did not limit themselves to mixing rock with Argentine folk music. In the spirit of rock latino, the band embraced other rhythms as well, including, most notably, reggae. On the album’s biggest hit, “Qué ves,” a reggae guitar part was set against the 6/8 rhythm typical of chacarera, while Santaolalla played counter-rhythms on the charango. The mixture of Jamaican and Andean rhythms with instrumental timbres and a vocal style drawn from hard rock sounded nothing like Café Tacuba, but conceptually it represented a similar sort of musical hybridity. Commercially, La era de la boludez was a triumph; it was named album of the year in several fan polls and made Divididos Argentina’s biggest rock band.[93]

Insofar as the new rock latino was a coherent movement, genre, or style, it owed that coherence to the marketing schemes of the major labels. In informal partnership with the handful of large Latin American media companies, the six major, multinational record companies determined the shape of popular music production in Latin America.[94] Although the region accounted for only 6.2 percent of global music sales in 1996, its markets were the fastest growing in the world. And the Latin American markets were completely dominated by the majors, whose products accounted for 80 percent of the region’s music sales. In their efforts to expand sales, the major labels focused not only on selling their North American and European artists but also on producing Latin American artists, as they had since the advent of the record industry. As a result, in the late 1990s, record sales in the largest Latin American markets were divided roughly in thirds between English-language products, domestic material, and material from throughout Latin America. This last third revealed the powerful influence of the global music industry on Latin American popular music. The major labels’ efforts to find products that would appeal across the region met with significant success in the 1960s and 1970s, with the emergence of balada singers like Sandro. It was a model that remained very much in place in the 1990s. According to the director of Polygram Venezuela, “Every day it’s less important where an artist comes from.… And since it’s no longer profitable to produce only for the national market, good product has to be projected internationally.”[95] The major labels saw the growing population of Latinos living in the United States as another segment of the Latin American market, and they actively promoted artists who could appeal there as well. By contrast, Brazil was not integrated in this way, since the language barrier was deemed insurmountable and since Brazilians were not a significant immigrant group in the United States. The shape of rock latino reflected these ideological and commercial imperatives.

Beginning with BMG’s “Rock en tu Idioma” campaign of the late 1980s, the multinationals had worked to create a unified market for Spanish-language rock among Latin Americans and Latinos in the United States, much as they had for balada. This effort got a boost in 1993 when the cable broadcaster MTV launched a new channel aimed at Spanish-speaking, Latin American audiences. (MTV Brasil, launched three years earlier, was an entirely separate network.) Broadcasting from Miami, MTV Latino used young “VJs” primarily from Argentina and Mexico to present rock music videos. The network’s primary goal was to construct its Latin American audience as consumers of international youth brands like Levi’s, Coca-Cola, and Reebok. Toward that end, it originally crafted a programming mix in which North American and British artists accounted for some 75 percent of the videos played, leaving only 25 percent for Latin American acts. Over time, the proportion of music from Latin America increased, though English-language rock retained its dominant position. Moreover, the network avoided all Latin American genres that were deemed to clash too much with rock; “you can’t go from an Aerosmith … to merengue or salsa, and expect not to have a train wreck,” as one executive put it.[96] Instead, the Latin American acts that gained heavy rotation on MTV Latino were major label rock bands like Fabulosos Cadillacs, Soda Stereo, Divididos, Café Tacuba, and Caifanes. In a very real sense, the network made the idea of rock latino viable both by enabling musicians and fans to hear bands from across the continent and by constructing the genre through its discourse and programming.[97] Although the VJs spoke in identifiable national accents, the network elaborated a single, homogenous Latin youth identity. There were no references to the national histories of rock or to local subgenres; instead, bands from throughout Latin America were decontextualized, or rather, recontextualized as instances of a single genre called rock latino.[98]

As rock latino emerged as a recognizable genre, Santaolalla became its central gatekeeper and kingmaker. In 1996, he signed an exclusive deal with MCA, soon to be renamed Universal Music, to lead the label’s efforts at finding and producing “artists that will work not only in Latin America, but also in the United States.”[99] The following year, he launched his own label, Surco Records, as an affiliate of Universal. With Surco as its centerpiece, Universal now launched a major effort to “push into the Latin music marketplace.”[100] Over the next five years, Santaolalla produced hit albums by Molotov and Julieta Venegas from Mexico; Puya from Puerto Rico; Bersuit Vergarabat, Árbol, and Erica García from Argentina; Peyote Asesino and La Vela Puerca from Uruguay; and Juanes from Colombia. Thanks in part to Santaolalla’s preeminence, Los Angeles became the recognized capital of rock latino. Alongside Surco Records, the city was home to multiple recording studios and performance spaces that featured Latin American and Latino rock bands, as well as public relations and management firms, like Cookman International, that specialized in promoting the genre’s stars. Los Angeles was also home to many of the rock bands formed by U.S. Latinos in these years, as well as to La Banda Elástica, the leading fanzine dedicated to rock latino from both the United States and Latin America.[101]

In many ways, the construction of rock latino mirrored that of balada and its successor, Latin pop, yet the end result sounded quite different. By the 1990s, most Latin pop was produced in Miami, much of it by the former leader of Miami Sound Machine, Emilio Estefan Jr. The Latin pop boom of 1999, when latino stars like Ricky Martin and Jennifer López achieved unprecedented sales and visibility in the United States, was propelled almost entirely by albums produced by Estefan for Sony Records. Likewise, the biggest pop stars from Latin America, whether they aimed to cross over to the Anglo market, like Colombian singer Shakira, or merely to build their Latin American and Latino audiences, like Alejandro Fernández from Mexico, all seemed to go through Estefan. In the case of Latin pop, the concentration of the industry, its domination by a handful of companies, and its location in a North American city led to the homogenization of the product, as Estefan’s formula—Americanized balada and Caribbean flavored dance pop—became hegemonic.[102] Pointing to the case of Colombian vallenato singer Carlos Vives, whose musical style was transformed by his decision to work with Estefan, Ana María Ochoa argues that the prominence of Miami yielded a “global, pan-Latin sound.”[103] To a certain extent, the same dynamic is visible in Santaolalla’s production: he, himself, boasted that Café Tacuba’s records sounded just as good as Radiohead’s, and the emulation of first-world production standards arguably does amount to a form of Americanization.[104] Nevertheless, Santaolalla never imposed a rigid formula on the acts he produced. Not only was rock latino more diverse than Latin pop, but to most listeners, it was also more aesthetically ambitious. Moreover, in contrast to the love stories that dominated Latin pop, bands like Maldita Vecindad and Divididos often used their music to express hard-hitting social criticism.

These contrasts suggest a paradox. Rock latino was made possible by the domination of the global music industry by a handful of multinational companies based in the United States and Europe. A radically unequal form of global capitalism somehow facilitated the production of distinctively Latin American forms of rock music. Similarly, Ignacio Corona notes that rock latino expressed the cosmopolitan, consumerist impulses of Latin American middle classes in the era of neoliberal economic reforms—the desire, in other words, to consume rock that sounded as good as Radiohead—even as it also represented resistance to cultural homogenization.[105] How is it that the structures of global mass culture yielded homogenization in the case of pop produced in Miami but diversity and resistance in the case of rock produced in Los Angeles?

One answer is that in their pursuit of Latin American and Latino audiences, the major labels relied heavily on intermediaries with local expertise, and Santaolalla and Estefan proved to be very different sorts of intermediaries. This is not to suggest that Santaolalla disavowed commercial aims. On the contrary, he spoke the same language of market analysis as his partners at Universal: “Latinos who live in the United States spend $292 billion annually.… In Mexico and Argentina markets are growing, and in all that megaspace, there will be a place for alternative music.”[106] Nevertheless, within the commercial realities dictated by the profit motives of the majors, Santaolalla pursued his own aesthetic and ideological goals. For one thing, he never outgrew the countercultural attitude that he developed as a long-haired rock musician in Argentina. Discussing the rebellious messages disseminated by many of the bands he produced, Santaolalla revealed his awareness of the irony of his position: “I loved the idea of being able to establish Surco, a label that was financed from the first world, but we were making products that in a certain way provoked, bothered … with things that spoke of reality.”[107] Thanks to his leverage as an intermediary, Santaolalla was able to use first-world money to make music that expressed a third-world perspective.

It is difficult to pinpoint the effect of a producer, especially one who, like Santaolalla, avoided imposing a particular formula. Although some have noted the presence of a specific guitar sound on many of his recordings or a distinctive way of recording vocals, his primary channel of influence came through the selection process.[108] Santaolalla typically asked the bands he produced to come to the recording sessions with many more songs than would fit on a compact disc, and it seems reasonable to assume that he would tend to choose material that appealed to his own tastes. More important, Santaolalla exerted a major influence on the shape of the field by choosing which bands to work with. His access to the promotional capacity and budget of a major label as well as his own track record for producing hits made him an extremely desirable producer who was able to work with whichever artists he wanted. Although the bands he produced all sound distinctive, they do share a tendency toward generic pastiche and the blurring of the global and the local. To cite just a few examples: the heavy metal rap band Molotov included norteño polka rhythms, Árbol played both chacareras and hardcore tunes, and La Vela Puerca juxtaposed ska-punk with murga, an Afro-Uruguayan folk form.[109] Santaolalla clearly used his leverage as a key intermediary for Universal to shape rock latino in this direction. As he put it, “Anyone who comes to me nowadays knows that one element that will always be present is the theme of identity … it is important that who you are and where you are from be reflected in what you do.”[110]

Santaolalla’s aesthetic was informed and enabled by the advent of world music, embraced by recording companies and retailers as a way of marketing artists from outside the United States and Europe. The fad undoubtedly primed North American critics to respond positively to the new rock latino, particularly bands that emphasized recognizably Latin elements. Following a New York double bill, one reviewer praised Maldita Vecindad for “mixing ska, rock, and elements of Caribbean music” while denigrating Caifanes for playing boring “70’s arena rock.”[111] Since world-music fans craved difference, they responded positively to rock latino’s use of Latin American rhythms. Santaolalla was clearly aware of his music’s appeal to world music enthusiasts; he sometimes justified his own rosy predictions for rock latino by citing David Byrne, one of the leading promoters of world music, on the originality of third-world approaches to rock.[112] Santaolalla’s project made sense to the major labels partly because it resonated with the discourse of world music.

Nevertheless, rock latino was different from world music. World music exoticized its objects, collapsing diversity and distinctiveness into one essential difference: us and them, Western and non-Western. Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste has identified the story of the Colombian band Bloque (originally Bloque de Búsqueda) as a paradigmatic instance of this process. After being signed by Byrne’s Luaka Bop label, the band was largely forgotten in Colombia. It enjoyed critical acclaim and some commercial success in the United States, but only at the cost of being “exhibited as a musical curiosity of the third world.”[113] Yet the case of Bloque is not typical of rock latino. Although both Byrne’s Luaka Bop and Santaolalla’s Surco were affiliated with major labels (Warner Brothers and Universal, respectively), the former aimed at the mainstream North American market, while the latter was created to pursue Latin American and Latino consumers. Fernández L’Hoeste reads Bloque as having been ripped from its original, Colombian context, but the context that produced most rock latino was fundamentally transnational. The music was forced to fit within a box—“Latin”—that was constructed, at least in part, by the stereotyping, exoticizing North American gaze, yet the contents of the box were designed by Santaolalla and other intermediaries, together with the Latin American musicians with whom they worked. Moreover, since this music was only commercially viable to the extent that it appealed to Latin American listeners, it could not signify only as exotic.

In an interview in 1998, Santaolalla argued that his current work was a continuation of his efforts with Arco Iris, that he had been trying to use rock music to express a “Latin identity” since the 1970s.[114] To a certain extent, this was true, but his conception of that identity had changed. With Arco Iris, Santaolalla sought to link rock music, which expressed his sense of belonging to cosmopolitan youth culture, to Andean folk traditions, which expressed his Argentine and South American identity. By contrast, the bands he worked with in the 1990s built their music by drawing on a far wider range of music, including many commercial genres to which they had no ethnic or national connection. In this vision, a band like Maldita Vecindad could express its Latin-ness through a hybrid forged of Jamaican ska, British punk, and Cuban mambo. These genres could be heard to express a Latin identity not because they represented a deep, folk tradition but because together they comprised the sound of contemporary Latin America, a pastiche of old and new, local, regional, and global.

Rock Latino in Argentina

Within Argentina, the rock latino boom inspired a certain amount of ambivalence. Although many of the bands Santaolalla produced were popular there, some observers worried that the concept erased much of the history of Argentine rock. On the eve of the Surco Festival of 1998, which brought together Árbol, Bersuit Vergarabat, Molotov, and Peyote Asesino in Buenos Aires, the rock critic Danial Amiano congratulated Santaolalla for his vision of incorporating “autochthonous rhythms” into rock. Nevertheless, he found the idea of rock latino reductive, partly because it left out so many of the giants of rock nacional, but also because it shoehorned Argentina into a version of Latinidad that did not quite fit: “For North Americans, Latin America has to do directly with Caribbean and Afro rhythms, something from which, certainly, we are pretty distant, but which explains clearly the success of the Cadillacs.”[115] Amiano’s comment begins to suggest the ways that rock latino destabilized well-established patterns of national identification within Argentine rock music. Some Argentine rock fans may have been uncomfortable with the racialization implicit in the idea of rock latino, the way it seemed to equate Latin identity with nonwhiteness. But even for the most antiracist of Argentines, rock latino smacked of cultural imperialism, since it imposed a Latin identity conceived from a North American perspective. Argentine efforts to construct pan-Latin unity, like those of Mercedes Sosa and Arco Iris, tended to focus on the nation’s connection to the Andes, the Inca Empire, and South America, and not to the Caribbean, Brazil, and Afro-Latin culture.

For most of its history, Argentina’s rock nacional had been primarily recorded and distributed by domestic labels. Aiming to satisfy the domestic demand for a locally relevant, Spanish-language version of rock, the music developed by adapting the latest styles from Britain and the United States. Arco Iris challenged this model by incorporating elements from Argentine folk music, but even Santaolalla looked to artists like Crosby, Stills and Nash and the Mahavishnu Orchestra for inspiration and legitimation. More important, the reliance on domestic labels meant that there was no integrated, Latin American market for rock in Spanish, and that in turn meant that local bands generally did not forge connections with musicians and audiences in other Latin American countries. Instead, rock authenticity was defined in opposition to major-label artists like Sandro, who produced a style of music designed to appeal to broader Latin American markets. In the 1980s, Argentine rock bands modernized their sound thanks partly to Santaolalla’s influence, and the major labels discovered their appeal for Latin American audiences. By creating a Latin American market for rock in Spanish, the major labels created the conditions in which rock latino, defined largely by intermediaries like Santaolalla, could emerge. But because the music was designed for the broader Latin American and Latino market and because Santaolalla’s own understanding of Latin identity had shifted during his years in Los Angeles, the impact of rock latino in Argentina was unpredictable.

Rock latino intersected in complex ways with the ideological divisions that structured Argentine popular music. The conflict that had first emerged in the schism between Manal and Almendra persisted into the 1980s, when underground bands like Sumo and Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota claimed to offer a more authentic, less commercial alternative to the massively popular Soda Stereo. By the 1990s, the heirs to these alternative bands constituted a distinct subgenre known as rock chabón or rock barrial. Bands like Divididos, Los Piojos, La Renga, and Dos Minutos played a variety of different rock styles, but their lyrics betrayed a common ideology. All of these bands responded to the deindustrialization and deepening inequality produced by the neoliberal economic policies of President Carlos Menem (1989–99). Representing an audience of disenfranchised, largely unemployed youth, they glorified criminality, vagrancy, and drug use, while attacking police violence. They trumpeted their allegiance to the local barrio and, as an extension of that identity, their patriotism. Using a nationalist discourse drawn from historic Peronism, they condemned President Menem and his allies as “kleptocrats” and unpatriotic “sell-outs [vendepatrias].”[116] Many older fans of rock nacional responded to rock chabón with alarm, particularly since they believed that the new genre had destroyed the culture of live music, bringing the pointless violence of the soccer stadium into the nightclub and concert hall.[117]

In the early 2000s, rock chabón relinquished its status as the most notorious type of popular music in Argentina, a distinction now held by a new genre: cumbia villera. Cumbia itself had been introduced in Argentina in the early 1960s and quickly gained popularity much as it did elsewhere in Latin America. On the television program El Club del Clan, cast member Chico Novarro performed comic cumbias like “El orangután.” Later, Los Wawancó, a group of medical students from other Latin American countries, built a successful career in Argentina by specializing in the genre.[118] Yet fans of folk music and rock nacional considered cumbia mersa—tacky music enjoyed by the uneducated. By the 1980s, the genre had been linked to two other dance musics of low prestige, chamamé and cuarteto. Dozens of dance clubs, or bailantas, emerged in Buenos Aires, catering to a lower-class clientele, as well as to groups of poor immigrants from Bolivia and Paraguay, and specializing in these so-called tropical genres. By this point, cumbia’s status in Argentina as a music enjoyed by the poor and disdained by more middle-class and intellectual music fans was well established.[119] In response, the genre was adopted by the same sectors who had backed rock chabón: lower-class youth frustrated by their bleak economic prospects in neoliberal Argentina. Beginning in 1999, bands like Damas Gratis and Los Pibes Chorros emerged under the banner of cumbia villera, proclaiming their allegiance to the residents of the villas miserias, the shantytowns where the poorest residents of Buenos Aires lived. In their lyrics, cumbia villera bands glorified criminality and attacked the police in much the same way as rock chabón did, but to those messages they added a proud identification as “negros,” thereby embracing the racial term with which generations of elite Argentines had insulted the poor residents of the shantytowns.[120]

Despite the overlap in their lyrics and the fact that they drew their audiences from similar sectors, rock chabón and cumbia villera represented two quite distinct identities, and it was that division that rock latino seemed to challenge. One ethnography found that rock chabón fans were anxious to define themselves against cumbieros, often by arguing that while rock was socially committed music, cumbia was just for fun.[121] This distinction built on associations that had long attached to the genre. The label “tropical” as applied to cumbia, chamamé, and cuarteto (two of which had no direct connection to the tropics) not only linked these genres to frivolity, but also had the effect of “othering” them: if they were tropical they were not Argentine. Argentine rock was “rock nacional,” but “cumbia nacional” would have been an oxymoron. By including percussion and horn sections and playing Caribbean rhythms, Fabulosos Cadillacs challenged existing models of Argentine rock and were often criticized as “uncultured.”[122] And yet the Cadillacs stopped short of cumbia.[123] By focusing their Latin American rhythmic explorations on salsa, merengue, and Brazilian batucada, they avoided the one Caribbean dance genre that actually had a substantial following, but also a pronounced stigma, in Argentina. Nevertheless, the advent of rock latino made a reconsideration of cumbia inevitable. The band Los Auténticos Decadentes, whose first album was released in 1989, followed the Cadillacs’ lead, but made a point to embrace popular genres that had been the target of snobbish condescension, and prominent among them, cumbia.[124] Los Auténticos Decadentes was a party band that avoided any sort of social criticism, but given its mix of ska and punk with cumbia and other Afro-Latin rhythms, the band fit comfortably within the rock latino template. As a result, the band was soon signed by major labels, first Sony and then RCA.

The Argentine band that most fully explored the musical and ideological potential of rock latino was Bersuit Vergarabat. Formed in 1989, Bersuit emerged from within the rock chabón movement. Its lyrics, like those of other bands in this subgenre, combined leftist politics with references to the barrio, partying, fighting, and transgressions of various types. After its first three albums, Bersuit had earned a solid following in Argentina. For their fourth album, the band accepted Santaolalla’s invitation to record with him in Los Angeles. The resulting album, Libertinaje (1998) made them megastars in Argentina while dramatically increasing their profile throughout Latin America. In all likelihood, Santaolalla’s interest in producing Bersuit was due to the band’s openness to a diverse range of Latin American rhythms. Libertinaje opened with a cumbia called “Yo tomo” and followed with a dizzying variety of genres. As Rolling Stone Argentina put it, “On Libertinaje there is not too much rock in the conventional sense of the term: there are cumbia, rap, chamamé, and Uruguayan candombe and murga.”[125] Thanks to Bersuit’s use of distorted electric guitar, overheated vocals and conventional drum kit, the group still sounded like a rock band, no matter how deeply it delved into other genres. But by combining an angry politics of denunciation with an adventurous musical eclecticism, the album demonstrated the capacity of rock latino to shake up the ideological commitments of Argentine fans.

On Libertinaje, Bersuit implicitly connected the valorization of stigmatized genres like cumbia to a direct verbal assault on the current government in the name of the poorest members of society. The deceptively playful cumbia “C.S.M.” indulges in what Silvia Citro has described as “grotesque realism” by labeling President Carlos Saúl Menem “baboon ass commando” and fantasizing about anally raping him.[126] The ska workout “Se viene” denounced rising poverty and unemployment and directly predicted the overthrow of the Menem government: “The explosion of my guitar and of your government as well, is coming.” Perhaps most notorious was a cover version of “Sr. Cobranza,” a song by the underground band Las Manos de Filippi that directly accused Menem and his economics minister, Domingo Cavallo, of being drug dealers. Bersuit’s version started as a mellow rap and culminated in a hard rock tirade laced with obscenities. The final verse seemed to connect the dots between Bersuit’s multiple affiliations: “In the jungle shots are heard. / They’re the weapons of the poor. / They’re the screams of the latino.” Scandalized by the song’s violent denunciation of the president, the government banned the song, to which Universal responded by printing the lyrics on a poster and plastering three thousand copies throughout Buenos Aires.[127] Thanks in part to the promotional machinery of a major label, the song and the album survived official censorship and sold massively.

Referring to the group’s concerts in June 2001, one critic described Bersuit as “a rock latino band, yes, but increasingly they do rock in their attitude and lyrics and Latin in their music.”[128] But to the extent that this formulation relegates Bersuit’s politics to the rock side of the equation, it is not quite right. In comments from the stage and to reporters, the band’s lead singer, Gustavo Cordera, clarified the politics of the band’s music. When the band El Otro Yo declared “cumbia is shit” at a rock festival in Cosquín, Cordera responded by embracing the genre as the music of the poor: “When I paddle the Riachuelo in a canoe, in the shacks I hear a lot of cumbia, a lot of cuarteto, that’s why I have it in my heart, because it’s the music of Dock Sud [the working-class barrio where Cordera grew up] and La Boca. Long live rock and roll and long live cumbia. Cumbia rocks!”[129] On Hijos del culo (Children of the Ass), also produced by Santaolalla and released in 2000, Bersuit pushed its musical eclecticism even further, including Mexican ranchera and Spanish flamenco alongside ska, cuarteto, cumbia, and murga. While the album’s lyrics avoided the explicit messages of Libertinaje, the music continued to express a powerful politics. Cordera explained the album’s scatalogical title:

The child of the ass is the guy born out the backside, who lives in the ass of the world, who was shit on for many years, and who is fucked [está hecho mierda].… After traveling through many countries and being abroad thanks to the Libertinaje tours, we could see ourselves. I could understand my place in Docke [Dock Sud], from where I tell things, know that I am a sudaca [derogatory word for a South American], know what it means to be an Argentine and what that means in the rest of the world. And I was able to confirm that we are children of the ass.[130]

Here, Cordera implicitly rejects versions of Argentine national identity premised on the country’s European roots, its whiteness, and its superiority to the rest of Latin America. For Bersuit, incorporating cumbia and other, similar genres into rock constituted a political gesture, a way of embracing a rebellious, third-world identity.

In December 2001, the prediction Bersuit Vergarabat had made in “Se viene” came true: an “explosion” of protest and collective violence brought down the government of Fernando de la Rúa and ultimately ended the nation’s decade-long experiment with neoliberalism. This popular uprising cut across class lines. On the one hand were lower-class sectors who had forged new organizations, known collectively as the piquetero movement for the road blocks that were their preferred protest tactic. On the other were largely middle-class groups threatened by the deepening economic crisis. Some of these latter groups were galvanized into action by the ban on withdrawals that the government imposed in order to prevent a bank run, while others reacted to what they perceived as the incompetence, corruption, and authoritarianism of the political class.[131] This complex process has been the subject of a great deal of sociological research, but we still lack a thorough account of the cultural shifts that allowed for the emergence of these new forms of organization and protest and for the construction, albeit temporary, of a cross-class alliance.

Although such an account is obviously beyond the scope of this book, it is possible to suggest that rock latino contributed to this cultural transformation. As Maristella Svampa and Sebastián Pereyra have shown, the piquetero movement emerged in the context of “the weakening of Peronism in the popular sectors” caused by the neoliberal policies pursued by Menem’s Peronist government and by the failure of the unions to represent the interests of their members. They go on to note that Peronism’s declining hold on the poor had a generational aspect: young people were less and less likely to share their parents’ view that Peronism represented the best hope for social justice.[132] In the context of this ideological vacuum, Bersuit’s angry assaults on Menem and the band’s appropriation of Latin-ness provided discursive resources for the elaboration of new identities. As Citro argues, Bersuit’s concerts were highly participatory affairs, opportunities for “ritual transgression,” in which young people performed the antiauthoritarianism that many of them would enact on the streets in December 2001.[133] Moreover, by breaking down the barriers between cumbia and rock, the band helped lay the cultural groundwork for the cross-class unity that protesters forged in the streets. Gustavo Santaolalla, who as a rock musician in the 1970s steered clear of political engagement, now produced rock music with an overt and effective antigovernment message. With the backing of a major multinational corporation interested only in its profit margins, he created music that helped young Argentines reconceptualize their national identity and motivated them to join a popular uprising.

Santaolalla’s career achievements were not limited to his work as a producer. In 1998, he recorded a solo album named Ronroco after the eponymous Andean stringed instrument. When film director Michael Mann used a track from the album in his film The Insider (1999), Santaolalla began a long and productive relationship with Hollywood. He has since gone on to compose multiple film soundtracks, including those for Amores Perros (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000), The Motorcycle Diaries (dir. Walter Salles, 2004), Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee, 2005), and Babel (dir. González Iñárritu, 2006), winning Oscars for the last two. Although not all his Hollywood work has been in connection with films set in Latin America, enough of it has been to suggest that his reputation as a Latin American musical visionary helped him move into films. He has also remained active as a musician, launching the electronic tango collective Bajofondo Tango Club in 2002. Composed of Argentine and Uruguayan musicians, the band has earned critical acclaim for its fusion of tango with contemporary dance genres like drum-and-bass and trip-hop. On one level, the project betrays a world-music sensibility: it is a way of preserving a musical tradition by mixing it with instrumentation, technology, and other elements from the contemporary, “first-world” soundscape. And yet, some of Bajofondo’s songs allude to less traditional versions of Argentine music, such as Lalo Schifrin’s “Mission Impossible” and Gato Barbieri’s “Last Tango in Paris.”[134] In this way, Santaolalla and his musical accomplices seem to convey a vision of the tango not as a folkloric tradition fixed in the past, but as a style crafted and recrafted over many years by generations of musicians in transit.

CONCLUSION

The musical careers I have examined in this book represent at least four distinct patterns of transnational interaction. Oscar Alemán and Arco Iris created versions of foreign genres for consumption by domestic audiences. Lalo Schifrin and Gato Barbieri also worked in foreign genres, but they aimed their products primarily at the North American market. Astor Piazzolla and Mercedes Sosa were specialists in Argentine musical forms who incorporated foreign influences to attract audiences both at home and abroad. Finally, Sandro and Gustavo Santaolalla invented new genres or subgenres that appealed to audiences throughout Latin America.

These four patterns suggest the variety of ways that the history of Argentine popular music has been shaped by the transnational context in which it is embedded. At different moments and toward different ends, Argentine musicians have listened to and borrowed from their counterparts in Europe, North America, and Latin America. Similarly, they have created music for both the domestic market and for various distinct foreign audiences, tailoring their creations to meet a specific set of assumptions and aesthetic preferences in each case. In itself, this diversity of influence and audience rebuts accounts that reduce the globalization of popular music to a simple story of homogenization or cultural imperialism. And yet, this is not to dismiss the very real power differentials that shape global culture. All Argentine popular musicians have had to navigate a deeply unequal field constructed by the transnational music business. Each of the musicians analyzed in this book recorded for one or more of the major multinational corporations that dominated this business, a fact that had a significant influence on the music they produced. In the last instance, it was the men who ran these corporations who decided what sort of music would be recorded and to which audience it would be marketed.

Still, no matter how unequal, the economic and ideological structures of the global music business yielded opportunities that Argentine popular musicians were able to exploit. Musicians’ creative responses to these opportunities produced surprising effects. Although Alemán’s appearance and national identity limited his career opportunities both in Paris and Buenos Aires, they also enabled him to find an audience for his distinctive version of cosmopolitan blackness. Barbieri was forced to inhabit the foreign musical category of Latin, but he was able to expand it to include South American rhythms and instruments. Sosa confronted the exoticizing primitivism of European and Argentine folk audiences, but she used it to construct her own, innovative persona. In each case, the global music business imposed real limits on what musicians could achieve, but their efforts to create within these limits yielded unexpected and consequential outcomes.

Most important, musicians emerged as key intermediaries between Argentina and global culture. When their music was consumed by North American and European audiences, it stretched hegemonic ideas of Latin identity in new directions. Within Argentina, it made available new resources for identity formation. Piazzolla’s New Tango, in dialogue with contemporary jazz even as it was deeply rooted in Argentine tradition, enabled his urban, middle-class audience to express a new, cosmopolitan form of Argentine nationalism. Sandro drew on North American rock and doo-wop, as well as French, Spanish, and Italian pop, to craft a style of balada that resonated with local traditions of popular melodrama and encouraged his fans to enjoy his music as distinctively Latin. Santaolalla’s rock latino reconciled young Argentines’ desire to be part of cosmopolitan culture with their quest for authenticity and, in so doing, enabled many to overcome their snobbish condescension toward Latin American culture. These musicians helped transform the way Argentines understood their place in the world.

Sorting through the overlapping chronologies of these career narratives, one can begin to assemble an overarching story of change over time. In particular, what emerges is a picture of the way that the globalization of popular music led to the extension and deepening of various forms of Latin identification. At the dawn of the mass cultural era, the recording industry divided the music of the world into two categories: North American and local. This arrangement promoted North American influence and preserved local musical genres like tango, but it minimized the opportunities for other sorts of musical exchange; in this context, Latin Americans were unlikely to think of the music they enjoyed as Latin. By the 1940s, the diffusion of the bolero throughout Latin America had emerged as an important exception to this pattern, as the record companies began to recognize the potential for a common Latin American music market. Nevertheless, the structure of the music business continued to limit the formation and dissemination of hybrid forms. Late in his life, Alemán complained that he had invented bossa nova twenty years before João Gilberto but that no one had picked up on it.[1] Alemán’s jazzy recordings of Brazilian songs were popular in Argentina, but they did not circulate much outside of the country.

The North American and European demand for the exotic represented an important channel for the transnational circulation of music from Latin America, but it also limited the way musicians and fans engaged with it. So-called Latin music, usually in the form of Cuban-inspired rhythms and stereotyped lyrics, had been popular in the United States since the 1930s. In subsequent decades, Caribbean musicians and North American jazz players pushed this exoticism in novel directions. Still, music producers, critics, and consumers remained committed to an international division of labor in which Latin America provided exciting rhythms, while North America remained the source of melodic or harmonic “ideas” and sophisticated arrangements. Astor Piazzolla’s New York quintet of 1959 failed to find an audience partly because it violated this formula. Three years later, Lalo Schifrin helped sell bossa nova to audiences in the United States by sticking to it.

The advent of rock and roll in the mid-1950s and the dramatic expansion of global record sales in subsequent decades created new opportunities for musical transnationalism. In particular, the multinationals implemented a new strategy focused on unifying the Latin American markets. Even as they flooded these markets with rock and pop music from the United States and Europe, the major labels hoped to find Latin American products that could sell throughout the region and among the growing Latino population in the United States. They achieved limited success with the lighthearted pop of the Nueva Ola, but the real breakthrough came with Sandro and the invention of balada in the late 1960s. Since it was built out of contemporary, cosmopolitan materials, balada did not exoticize Latin America, nor did it participate in the logic of the international division of labor. It was enthusiastically embraced by audiences throughout the Americas as a distinctively Latin aesthetic preference.

The strategies of the multinational recording companies and shifting demographics in the United States were not the only factors that encouraged the dissemination of Latin identity. The deepening of the Cold War provided another impetus. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, anti-imperialist or even revolutionary forms of musical Latin Americanism gained popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. Gato Barbieri’s Latin-jazz third worldism, reflected the influence of Latin American as well as African American radical movements. But perhaps because it was produced from within the North American jazz establishment and designed primarily for the U.S. market, Barbieri’s music made less of an impression in Latin America. On the other hand, Arco Iris’s contemporaneous folk-rock fusion experiments did attract a loyal following among Argentine rock fans, but the major labels’ lack of interest in rock nacional meant that it had little chance of being heard outside the country. By contrast, Mercedes Sosa’s revolutionary Latin Americanism gained a massive audience throughout Latin America. Philips had signed her in the hopes that her sophisticated version of folk music would appeal to discerning, middle-class consumers in Argentina, Europe, and the United States. But Sosa’s version of Argentine identity, grounded in a close connection to the indigenous Andes, resonated in the rest of Latin America, as did her self-conscious affiliation with the oppressed.

In the 1980s, the major labels belatedly realized that Argentine rock music, like balada and folk, would sell in other Latin American markets. Reliant on intermediaries who could identify bands with commercial potential, the multinationals empowered Gustavo Santaolalla to create a new style of rock music that incorporated elements from a diverse array of Latin American genres. Like balada, rock latino attracted a broad audience from throughout the region and interpellated it as Latin. However, because it retained the countercultural ethos of the rock music of the 1960s and 1970s, this music tended to be much more politically engaged than balada. North American exoticism persisted during this period, taking the form of world music, a trend that enabled Astor Piazzolla to gain an audience in the United States toward the end of his life. But it was major-label rock, not the ostensibly more authentic music packaged as world music, that enabled audiences to express their resistance to the devastation wrought by neoliberal economic policies.

Over the course of the twentieth century, then, the globalization of popular music contributed substantially to processes of identity formation throughout Latin America. The deepening of transnational economic and cultural connections, controlled as it was by a small number of multinational corporations, had multiple and contradictory effects: it substantially increased the volume of North American and European popular music consumed in Latin America, and it promoted the marketing of exotic representations of Latin America in the United States and Europe. But it also gave rise to new musical expressions of Latin identity, including a homogenous form of Latin pop music, an anti-imperialist folk genre that hailed a politicized Latin American audience, and a style of rock built on a pastiche of Latin American and global genres. As a result of their privileged position in transnational musical circuits, Argentine musicians were central to all three of these continent-wide musical developments.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the global music industry has experienced rapid dislocation and transformation. For the major labels, the advent of the mp3 and the surge in music piracy represented a profound crisis, eroding profits and undermining well-established business strategies. The problem of piracy was particularly severe in Latin America, leading the major labels to cut back on their efforts in the region. At the same time, the advent of new technology created new opportunities for Latin American popular musicians, who no longer needed the support of a multinational corporation in order to reach foreign audiences. While many artists used online promotional tools to distribute their own music, the period also saw a flowering of independent labels specializing in various forms of Latin music. Recently, though, the major labels have begun to regain their footing, increasing their revenue through both downloads and streaming services. Meanwhile, thanks to improvements in digital infrastructure, between 2011 and 2015 Latin America has seen the fastest growing music sales in the world, and in response, the major labels have returned.[2] These developments have transformed the opportunities and obstacles that Argentine popular musicians face. Nevertheless, much as in the previous century, the aesthetic and ideological effects of these changes will not be determined simply by the structures of the global music industry. On the contrary, the music produced and consumed by Argentines will continue to reflect the choices made by the nation’s musicians in transit as they navigate a shifting transnational landscape.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. El País (July 10, 1994), http://elpais.com/diario/1994/07/10/cultura/773791206_850215.html. All translations in this book are mine, unless otherwise noted.

2. Sosa’s relationship with Parra and other Latin American folk singers is discussed in chapter 5.

3. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 3.

4. Ortiz, “Mundialization/Globalization,” 401–3. The fuller statement of Ortiz’s conception is in Ortiz, Mundialización y cultura. For a similar perspective, see Erlmann, “The Aesthetics of the Global Imagination.”

5. García Canclini, Imagined Globalization, 28.

6. Corona and Madrid, “Introduction,” 5.

7. Sublette, Cuba and Its Music, xiii.

8. For an account of this cultural exchange focused on Latin American dance history, see Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots.

9. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 269.

10. Miller, Segregating Sound, 170–74. On the role of local intermediaries, see, for example, McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil, 137–45.

11. Miller, Segregating Sound, 167–80.

12. Desfile Musical Odeón Columbia 9:91 (May 1942).

13. Karush, Culture of Class, 48–59.

14. Yúdice, “La industria de la música en la integración América Latina-Estados Unidos”; Ochoa Gauthier and Yúdice, “The Latin American Music Industry in an Era of Crisis.”

15. García Canclini, Imagined Globalization, 133. On Miami pop, see also Party, “The Miamization of Latin American Pop Music”; Cepeda, Musical ImagiNation, 35–60.

16. On the circulation of tango in the United States, see Matallana, El tango entre dos Américas. On tango exoticism in Paris and New York, see Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion.

17. Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots, 135–37.

18. Poppe, “Made in Joinville,” 491–92.

19. Karush, Culture of Class, 137, 110–12.

20. Falicov, “Hollywood’s Rogue Neighbor,” 245–60.

21. Bose, A Hundred Horizons, 148–92. The quote is from 151.

22. Elena, “Argentina in Black and White.”

23. Milanesio, “Peronists and Cabecitas.”

24. Garguin, “ ‘Los argentinos descendemos de los barcos.’ ”

25. See, for example, Frith, “Music and Identity.” For an excellent summary of the scholarship on music and identity as well as a provocative proposal for resolving some of its most vexing challenges, see Vila, “Narrative Identities and Popular Music.”

26. Tucker, “Mediating Sentiment and Shaping Publics.”

27. The most useful statement of the relationship between structure and agency for historians is Sewell, Logics of History, 124–51.

1. BLACK IN BUENOS AIRES

1. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, esp. 77–92.

2. Thompson, “Argentina,” 80.

3. See Quijada, Bernard, and Schneider, Homogeneidad y nación.

4. Frigerio, “ ‘Negros’ y ‘Blancos,’ ” 88–93.

5. Information on Alemán’s early years comes from several interviews that he granted after he was rediscovered by the Argentine media in the early 1970s. See “Oscar Alemán,” in Ardiles Gray, Historias de artistas, 287–92; Sopeña, “Oscar Alemán.” Other useful sources are Pujol, Jazz al sur, 91–101; and the documentary film by Hernán Gaffet, Oscar Alemán: Vida con swing (2002). Unfortuntately, Sergio Pujol’s exhaustive biography of the guitarist was published after I had already completed this chapter. See Pujol, Oscar Alemán.

6. Prieto, El discurso criollista.

7. On the role of Afro-Argentines in criollismo, see Solomianski, Identidades secretas; Castro, Afro-Argentine; Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots, 51–70.

8. On Bueno Lobo, see Mello, “Gastão Bueno Lobo.”

9. The Les Loups records appeared in Victor’s local advertisements. See Caras y Caretas (March 3, 1928); (April 7, 1928); (November 10, 1928); (January 19, 1929); and (April 6, 1929).

10. La Canción Moderna 1:6 (April 30, 1928).

11. Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation, 165–202.

12. For a good selection of Hawaiian steel guitar across a range of musical genres in the late 1920s and early 1930s, see the CD, Slidin’ on the Frets.

13. For this and all recording information in this chapter, I am entirely dependent on the online Oscar Alemán discography meticulously assembled by Hans Koert: http://people.zeelandnet.nl/koerthchkz/tune0.htm. This discography was maintained by the Dutch collector Hans Koert until his death in 2014. It has now been updated by Argentine collector Andrés Liber: http://hotclubdeboedo.blogspot.dk/p/blog-page.html.

14. Koert, “Les Loups, ‘Criollita.’ ” http://oscar-aleman.blogspot.com/2011/09/les-loups-criollita.html. “La criollita” is the only Les Loups song on which Lobo plays the cavaquinho instead of the Hawaiian guitar.

15. See, for example, Seigel, Uneven Encounters, 88.

16. The World’s Music Charts: Songs from the Year 1927. http://tsort.info/music/yr1927.htm.

17. Seigel, Uneven Encounters, 105; Hertzman, Making Samba, 107–12.

18. On tango’s associations with blackness, see Karush, “Blackness in Argentina.”

19. Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, 103–16. The quotation is on 107. On the impact of James Reese Europe, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, and Louis Mitchell in England, see Parsonage, The Evolution of Jazz.

20. Jackson, Making Jazz French, 123–35.

21. Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker, 144–79; Archer-Straw, Negrophilia, 113–33; Wood, Josephine Baker Story. On Colin and Baker, see Dalton and Gates, Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin.”

22. Micol Seigel has revealed and examined the Brazilian dimension of this multilateral exchange. See Seigel, Uneven Encounters, 95–135.

23. Jackson, Making Jazz French, 132–33.

24. Seigel, Uneven Encounters, 97–107; Davis, White Face, Black Mask, 20–28; Hertzman, Making Samba, 103–13.

25. Rye, “Southern Syncopated Orchestra,” 66.

26. Pujol, Jazz al sur, 24–27 and 36–39; Seigel, Uneven Encounters, 127.

27. See, for example, La Voz [Madrid], November 9, 1929, 6.

28. Koert, “Oscar Alemán 1930–1931.”

29. Thompson, “Globetrotting Romeu Silva.” See also, Seigel, Uneven Encounters, 125–26.

30. Ardiles Gray, Historias de artistas, 292–94; Pujol, Jazz al sur, 91–96; Bergmeier and Lotz, “James Arthur Briggs,” 141. The photo of Alemán dressed as Baker appeared in Crisis (January 1975), 31.

31. Quoted in Dregni, Django, 101.

32. Sintonía (November 25, 1942).

33. Coleman, Trumpet Story, 99.

34. On African American jazz musicians in Paris, see Stovall, Paris Noir.

35. Ardiles Gray, Historias de artistas, 297. For other versions of the story, see Crisis (January 1975), 30; La Nación Revista (May 27, 1979), 30.

36. Koert, “Oscar Alemán: Star.”

37. Quoted in Dexter Johnson, liner notes to Oscar Alemán.

38. Dregni, Django, 102–3.

39. On the complex racial politics of Lang’s work, see Mike O’Malley, “Blind Imitation.”

40. The historian Sergio Pujol discusses Brazilian influence on Alemán’s guitar style in Gaffet, Oscar Alemán.

41. Coleman, Trumpet Story, 99–100.

42. Jackson, Making Jazz French, 191–93.

43. Síncopa y Ritmo (April 1941), 4.

44. Sintonía (June 25, 1941): 33.

45. Síncopa y Ritmo (May–June 1941), 2.

46. Síncopa y Ritmo (October–November 1941), 16.

47. See Seibel, “La presencia afroargentina,” 202.

48. Matallana, “Locos por la radio,” 95.

49. Sintonía (May 1, 1943): 13.

50. This anecdote is related in Gaffet, Oscar Alemán, DVD.

51. On the treatment of race in Argentine jazz criticism of this period, see Borge, “Dark Pursuits.”

52. See, for example, Sintonía (September 2, 1933): 7. Canción Moderna 1:17 (July 16, 1928).

53. Sintonía (March 9, 1935).

54. Síncopa y Ritmo (April 1941), 26. For another example of this sort of racial determinism in Argentine jazz criticism, see Síncopa y Ritmo (December 1941–February 1942), 4–5.

55. Sintonía (March 1946): 40.

56. For a biography of Salgán, see Ursini, La supervivencia. Although Ursini does not mention his race, more recent accounts describe him as Afro-Argentine. See Frigerio, “ ‘Negros’ y ‘Blancos,’ ” 88–93; Thompson, Tango, 194–99.

57. Antena (December 2, 1952).

58. Crisis (January 1975), 32.

59. Karush, “Blackness in Argentina.”

60. Síncopa y Ritmo (February–May 1944), 10–11.

61. Jazz Magazine (August–September 1953), 6.

62. Jazz Magazine (April–May 1956), 16–17.

63. Pujol, Jazz al sur, 120–32. On this controversy as it played out in France and the United States, see Jackson, Making Jazz French, 196–97; Stowe, Swing Changes, 180–245.

64. Jazz Magazine (March 1954), 29.

65. Jazz Magazine (June–August 1956), 22.

66. Jazz Magazine (December 1951), 7.

67. Jazz Magazine (May 1951), 5–6.

68. Mysteriously, Alemán’s sextet was always known as his “Quinteto de swing.”

69. El Disco (October 1951), 5.

70. Sintonía (November 1947).

71. Sintonía (April 1, 1945), 22B; See also Sintonía (April 1948), 23.

72. Jazz Magazine (July–August 1952), 19.

73. Jazz Magazine (March–April 1953), 20.

74. Jazz Magazine (January–February 1952), 10; (October 1952), 18–19; (December 1953), 24.

75. Jazz Magazine (November 1951), 20.

76. See Karush, Culture of Class, 200–201.

77. Ursini, La supervivencia, 67–89.

78. Mundo Argentino (February 29, 1956), 7–9.

79. Primera Plana (December 15, 1970), 8.

80. Primera Plana (September 21, 1971), 45.

81. Crisis (January 1975), 30.

82. Thompson, “Argentina,” 80.

2. ARGENTINES INTO LATINS

1. Jazz Magazine (March–April 1951), 23.

2. For a critique of the emphasis on canon building in jazz studies, see Gabbard, “Introduction.”

3. See, for example, Garrett, Struggling to Define a Nation, 48–82; Fernández, From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz. The term Latin tinge is John Storm Roberts’s elaboration of “Spanish tinge,” the phrase with which the early jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton referred to the Latin American influence on his music. See Roberts, The Latin Tinge.

4. For their part, scholars of mambo, salsa and other Latin genres have been more likely to take Latin jazz as a serious object of analysis, but they have tended to situate it within the genealogy of Latin music rather than that of jazz. For an insightful example, see Loza, Tito Puente.

5. Seigel, Uneven Encounters, 82.

6. Pérez Firmat, “Latunes,” 187.

7. Roberts, Latin Jazz; Washburne, “The Clave of Jazz”; Austerlitz, Jazz Consciousness, 42–97.

8. The association of jazz with harmony and melody, as opposed to rhythm, was an ironic one, given the blackness of the genre and its earlier association with syncopation and primitive beats. See Moreno, “Bauza-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz,” 93–94.

9. Cited in Roberts, Latin Jazz, 71. For an illuminating analysis of the racial aspect of this dualism, see Moreno, “Bauza-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz.”

10. For one slice of this vast history, see Seigel, Uneven Encounters, 67–135.

11. Jazz Magazine (December 1951), 23.

12. Jazz Magazine (December 1951), 8.

13. Jazz Magazine (October 1952), 12. For Schifrin’s opposition to mixing jazz with classical music, see Jazz Magazine (June–August 1956), 21–22.

14. Jazz Magazine (June–August 1956), 18; Mundo Argentino (May 16, 1956), 30. See also Schifrin and Palmer, Mission Impossible.

15. Mundo Argentino (May 16, 1956), 30.

16. Schifrin and Palmer, Mission Impossible, 23.

17. Schifrin and Palmer, Mission Impossible, 24.

18. See Orquera, “From the Andes to Paris,” 105–18.

19. On Los Incas, see Rios, “La Flûte Indienne.”

20. Schifrin and Palmer, Mission Impossible, 28–29. On Yma Sumac, see Leydon, “Utopias of the Tropics,” 45–71.

21. Cited in Orquera, “From the Andes to Paris,” 113.

22. Jazz Magazine (September–December 1956), 26; Jazzlandia (June 1957). Sergio Pujol cites Carlos Ugartamendía who remembers that the Schifrin band in this period incorporated some Latin rhythms in the style of Stan Kenton. See Pujol, Jazz al sur, 164. But reports from the period do not mention this aspect, and there does not seem to have been any Cuban percussion in the band. Moreover, Schifrin’s own accounts of this period confirm that “we were not playing Latin music.” Quoted in Gillespie with Fraser, To Be, or Not … to Bop, 432. See also Schifrin and Palmer, Mission Impossible, 43.

23. Pujol, Jazz al sur, 132–35; 165. Schifrin described his intention to move to New York in Jazz Magazine (June–August 1956), 22.

24. Gene Lees, “The Making of a Film Composer,” High Fidelity (June 1972), 16. Schifrin was featured playing “Spanish tunes” in Cugat’s band on the Voice of Firestone television program. See Los Angeles Times (April 19, 1959), sec. VII, 14. On this period, see also Schifrin and Palmer, Mission Impossible, 44, 51–52.

25. Giddins, Visions of Jazz, 292–94.

26. Bob Dawbarn, “Lalo Schifrin’s Gillespiana Has Latin Flavour,” Melody Maker (November 25, 1961), 13.

27. Ralph Gleason, “Some Jazz Collaborations Produce Historic Music: Gillespie-Schifrin Team Will Produce Major Jazz Works,” Boston Globe (June 17, 1962), 73.

28. Schifrin and Palmer, Mission Impossible, 32.

29. For one set list, see Mimi Clar, “Gillespie’s Quintet in Concert at UCLA: JAZZ EVENT,” Los Angeles Times (November 6, 1962), D7. One British critic described Dizzy as “one of the originators of the music we now call bossa nova” and reported that the quintet had been playing it as early as its European tour of 1961. See Gramophone (June 1963), 80.

30. The live Gillespie Quintet album is Dizzy on the French Riviera (Phillips, 1962). The studio album is New Wave!! (Jazz Bossa Nova) (Philips, 1963). Gillespie actually claimed that his group was “the first in the United States to play that music, samba, in the context of jazz,” having gotten there before Stan Getz. See Gillespie with Fraser, To Be, or Not … to Bop, 431. For a complete Lalo Schifrin discography, see http://www.dougpayne.com/lsdindex.htm.

31. “Dizzy, Mary Lou Swing At New Culture Center,” The Chicago Defender (November 17, 1962), 10.

32. Goldschmitt, “Doing the Bossa Nova,” 68.

33. Leonard Feather, “Blindfold Test,” Down Beat (December 20, 1962), 38.

34. On the symbolism of the Gillespie/Pozo collaboration, see Moreno, “Bauza-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz,” 94–99.

35. Gene Lees, quoted in liner notes to Lalo Schifrin, Bossa Nova: New Brazilian Jazz (Audio Fidelity, 1962).

36. Whitney Balliett, “Bossa Nova, Go Home,” New Yorker (December 1, 1962), 197–99. On the invention of a bossa nova dance in the United States, see Goldschmitt, “Doing the Bossa Nova.”

37. Gramophone (February 1963), 80.

38. Gene Lees, liner notes to Schifrin, Bossa Nova.

39. Feather, “Blindfold Test,” Down Beat (December 20, 1962), 38.

40. Jazz Magazine (December 1951), 8. On the Jobim’s and Gilberto’s debt to Mulligan, see Gene Lees, “Bossa Nova: Anatomy of a Travesty,” Down Beat (February 14, 1963), 22–4.

41. Robert Riley, “Schifrin’s Own Third-stream Jazz,” Christian Science Monitor (October 19, 1964), 4. “Jazz Mass,” Down Beat (February 11, 1965), 17–19. Art Seidenbaum, “Neophonic: The Pluses and Minuses,” Los Angeles Times (March 28, 1965), B16.

42. Butler, Jazz Noir, 105–9.

43. Marc Myers, “Sounds of Suspense,” Wall Street Journal (November 12, 2012), http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203347104578102952956343468.

44. Spencer, Film and Television Scores, 1950–1979, 16.

45. For Schifrin’s own thoughts on these compositions, see Miguel Angel Ordónez, “Lalo Schifrin: El músico ilusionista,” Score Magacine (May 20, 2005), http://www.scoremagacine.com/Entrevistas_det.php?Codigo=12.

46. “The Jazz Composers in Hollywood,” Down Beat, 1972, 12–15.

47. B. Houston, “Schifrin: Instinct Alone Is Not Enough,” Melody Maker (October 1965), 6.

48. Jazz Magazine (July 1954), 28.

49. Gene Lees, “Leandro Barbieri, Club Mogador, Buenos Aires,” Down Beat (1962), 38. Lees mistakenly refers to the famous 676 as the 767.

50. Cited in Dewar, “Hot and Cool from Buenos Aires to Chicago,” 163.

51. Leonard Feather, “Gato Tangos to Beat of a Diverse Drum,” Los Angeles Times (April 29, 1973), B45. On Tucumán 676, see Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 83–84.

52. Strega, Bossanova y nuevo tango, 125–40.

53. Pujol, Jazz al sur, 153.

54. Ernesto Martelli, “El regreso de Billy Cafaro,” Clarín (January 8, 1999), http://edant.clarin.com/diario/1999/08/01/c-00801d.htm. Barbieri is visible playing behind Cafaro in a scene in the film La Patota (dir. Daniel Tinayre, 1960). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6id1C3SDWWI. Cafaro’s biggest hits in Argentina were Spanish-language versions of Paul Anka’s “Pity, Pity” and Lloyd Price’s “Mr. Personality.”

55. Fischerman, “El nacimiento del cool argentino.”

56. On Jóvenes viejos, see Labra, “La duda y la ironía,” 100–103.

57. Bob Palmer, “ ‘When I Scream With My Horn …,’ ” New York Times (July 2, 1972), D9.

58. Mike Hennessey, “Cherry’s Catholicity,” Down Beat (1966), 14–15. This article implies that Cherry’s decision to relocate to Europe may also have reflected a desire to avoid the political turmoil associated with free jazz in the United States. On Cherry’s self-image as “an improviser,” see Jost, Free Jazz, 162.

59. Jost, Free Jazz, 144.

60. Jost, Free Jazz, 148–62.

61. Much has been written about Coltrane’s evolution between Giant Steps (1960) and A Love Supreme (1965). A good place to start is Ratliff, Coltrane, 50–91.

62. Elisabeth van der Mei, “Caught in the Act. Don Cherry. Town Hall, New York City,” Down Beat (November 3, 1966), 26.

63. Michael Cuscuna, “Charlie Haden’s Protest Jazz,” Down Beat (November 13, 1969), 13.

64. See Beal, Carla Bley, 71.

65. Piekut, “Race, Community, and Conflict in the Jazz Composers Guild”; Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself, 92–95, 113.

66. Quoted in Piekut, “Race, Community, and Conflict in the Jazz Composers Guild,” 225.

67. Panorama (January 6–12, 1970), 58.

68. Quoted in Hentoff, Jazz Is, 246–47.

69. Bob Palmer, “ ‘When I Scream With My Horn …,’ ” New York Times (July 2, 1972).

70. Analía H. Testa, “Leda Valladares, tras las raíces del folklore,” La Nación (February 27, 1999), http://www.lanacion.com.ar/198755-leda-valladares-tras-las-raices-del-folklore.

71. For a fascinating analysis of fusion that nevertheless entirely ignores the role of Latin music in this genre, see Fellezs, Birds of Fire.

72. For an account of the “Latin-jazz-funk” of the 1970s, a story that overlaps significantly with the history of fusion, see Roberts, Latin Jazz, 156–93.

73. For descriptions of the Afro-Cuban use of ostinatos and repeating rhythmic vamps, see Sublette, Cuba and Its Music, 82, 159, 539.

74. William Russell, “Don Cherry—‘Complete Communion,’ ” Down Beat (July 28, 1966), 27.

75. John S. Wilson, “Barbieri Offers an Exciting Jazz,” New York Times (November 6, 1971), 22.

76. Nat Hentoff, “Original Liner Notes,” Gato Barbieri, The Third World (Sony, 2009).

77. W. Smith, “Gato Barbieri—‘El Pampero,’ ” Down Beat (March 1, 1973), 21.

78. Bob Palmer, “Music for a Moroccan Pan,” New York Times (December 19, 1971), D40.

79. Michael Cuscuna, “Original Liner Notes,” Gato Barbieri, Fenix (RCA Victor, 2001).

80. Robert Palmer, “The Specific Art of Gato Barbieri,” Rolling Stone (December 21, 1972), 14.

81. Michael Bourne, “Gato Barbieri—‘Fenix,’ ” Down Beat (March 30, 1972), 21.

82. Clarín (April 11, 1973).

83. Thompson, “Unraveling the Gnattali-Barbieri Mystery.”

84. Kahn, The House that Trane Built, 246–51.

85. For some examples of these stereotypes, see Smith, “Gato Barbieri—‘El Pampero,’ ” Down Beat (March 1, 1973), 21; Mike Bourne, “Gato Barbieri—‘Last Tango in Paris,’ ” Down Beat (August 16, 1973), 22.

86. Ray Townley, “Gato Barbieri—‘Gato Chapter One: Latin America,’ ” Down Beat (December 6, 1973), 18.

87. Chuck Mitchell, “Gato Barbieri—‘Chapter Two,’ ” Down Beat (June 6, 1974), 19.

88. Bill Adler, “Gato Barbieri—‘Chapter Three: Viva Emiliano Zapata,’ ” Down Beat (February 27, 1975), 22.

89. For one account of his political proclamations during a U.S. performance, see David Fenton, “Gato Barbieri: Third World Jazz,” Ann Arbor Sun (November 16, 1973), http://oldnews.aadl.org/node/196089. On his chanting the line from “El arriero” in Buenos Aires, see Bob Palmer, “ ‘When I Scream With My Horn …,’ ” New York Times (July 2, 1972).

90. Panorama (January 6–12, 1970), 58. For a similar, positive assessment, see Jorge H. Anders, “Gato Barbieri interpreta al Tercer Mundo con un sentimiento angustiado y rebelde,” La Opinión (January 3, 1973), 21.

91. Ricardo Finkel, “Genio trabajando,” Gente (November 2, 1967), 22–23.

92. Primera Plana (February 23, 1971), 47.

93. Panorama (April 19, 1973), 56.

94. Primera Plana (August 24, 1971), 49.

95. Walter Thiers, “El ‘Gato’ Leandro Barbieri en recitales populares de jazz,” Mayoría (April 17, 1973), 15.

96. Napoleón Cabrera, “Folklore en Licuadora,” Clarín (April 16, 1973).

97. Pablo Alonso, “Yo no soy argentino, soy internacional,” Clarín (January 21, 2011), http://www.clarin.com/extrashow/musica/argentino-internacional_0_412758852.html.

98. Larry Birnbaum, “Gato Barbieri: The Argentine Eclectic,” Down Beat (April 21, 1977), 15–16.

99. Leonard Feather, “Golden Feathers to 70s Notables,” Los Angeles Times (January 6, 1980), 74; Stephen Holden, “Tenor Saxophone: Gato Barbieri,” New York Times (June 12, 1981), C12; Robert Palmer, “The Musical Life of Gato Barbieri,” New York Times (July 1, 1980), C5.

3. COSMOPOLITAN TANGO

1. For articles celebrating Schifrin in this way, see Para Ti (May 12, 1969), 70–71; Gente (March 1, 1973), 28–29. The classical pianist Martha Argerich and the conductor Daniel Barenboim are two other examples. The achievements of these artists are occasions for unproblematic nationalist pride, in a way that those of tango musicians or, for that matter, soccer players cannot be. Like Piazzolla, Diego Maradona is a hero to many Argentines, but his performances are scrutinized for what they say about Argentina.

2. On Piazzolla’s childhood see Speratti, Con Piazzolla, 26–47; Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 3–17; Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 23–41; Gorin, Astor Piazzolla, 29–38; Piazzolla, Astor, 35–98.

3. Karush, Culture of Class, 136–51.

4. Sintonía (December 13, 1939).

5. Sierra, Historia de la orquesta típica, 136–43. According to Sierra, it was Orlando Goñi, Troilo’s pianist, who broke most decisively from the D’Arienzo style. See also Villarroel, Tango, Folklore de Buenos Aires.

6. Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 22–35; Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 53–76.

7. Cited in Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 39; the translation is theirs.

8. Gorin, Astor Piazzolla, 47. For other references to Kenton’s influence on Piazzolla, see Speratti, Con Piazzolla, 64; Jon Pareles, “A New Tango with a Boogie-Woogie Bass?” New York Times (May 23, 1986), C22. Kenton’s experiments with Cuban rhythms and percussion began with his 1947 recording of “The Peanut Vendor.”

9. Karush, Culture of Class, 143–44.

10. Cited in Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 99.

11. Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 50–52.

12. Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 124–29.

13. Readers will recall from chapter 2 that Lalo Schifrin praised Miles Davis’s “Israel” in a porteño jazz magazine in 1951. “Israel” was recorded in the legendary “Birth of the Cool” sessions, in which Mulligan had also participated.

14. Cited and translated by Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 53.

15. César Seveso, “Political Emotions and the Origins of the Peronist Resistance,” in Karush and Chamosa, eds., The New Cultural History of Peronism, 239–69.

16. Cited in, and translated by, Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 59.

17. Tulio Carella, El Tango. Mito y Esencia.

18. Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 137–38.

19. Mundo Argentino (May 16, 1956), 50.

20. Villarroel, Tango, Folklore de Buenos Aires, 138, 157.

21. Mundo Argentino (February 29, 1956), 7–10.

22. On Frigerio, developmentalism and Qué, see Szusterman, Frondizi and the Politics of Developmentalism; Spinelli, Los vencedores vencidos, 249–60.

23. For the letter and response, see Qué (June 4, 1957), 30. For subsequent articles on tango, see (July 2, 1957), 27; (July 16, 1957), 26–27; (July 23, 1957), 26–27; (August 6, 1957), 21.

24. Qué (October 10, 1956), 30–31.

25. Qué (August 13, 1957), 22–23.

26. Qué (December 17, 1957), 22.

27. Qué (August 13, 1957), 23.

28. Qué (October 9, 1956), 36.

29. Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 64.

30. Cited in Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 71.

31. Speratti, Con Piazzolla, 77; Gorin, Astor Piazzolla, 77.

32. Fernando González, liner notes to Pablo Aslan Quintet, Piazzolla in Brooklyn.

33. “Take Me Dancing,” Billboard (December 14, 1959).

34. La Razón (July 11, 1960), 12.

35. On this history, see Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots, 135–37; Miller, “African Rhythms in Brazilian Popular Music,” 7–10. The precise nature of the tresillo—its status as an example of a distinctively African approach to rhythm—has been the source of much musicological debate. See Agawu, Representing African Music, esp. 86–89.

36. Mauriño, “Raíces tangueras de la obra de Astor Piazzolla.”

37. For a thorough discussion of Piazzolla’s use of the yeites and of arrastre, see Drago, “Instrumental Tango Idioms in the Symphonic Works and Orchestral Arrangements of Astor Piazzolla.”

38. Kutnowski, “Instrumental Rubato and Phrase Structure in Astor Piazzolla’s Music.”

39. On Piazzolla’s use of the walking bass and ostinati, see Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 181, 187; Pelinski, “Astor Piazzolla,” 46.

40. Two different versions of this argument are Kuri, Piazzolla, la música límite; and Pelinski, “Astor Piazzolla.”

41. McCann, “Blues and Samba.”

42. Speratti, Con Piazzolla, 114; Jorge Madrazzo, “¿Qué Hay de Nuevo, Astor Piazzolla?,” Siete Días Ilustrados (March 27, 1972), 38.

43. Clarín (July 3, 1975), 2.

44. John M. Goshko, “The Dance,” The Washington Post (April 13, 1969), E6.

45. Panorama (September 1966), 9.

46. La Opinión (September 3, 1974), 29.

47. Clarín (July 3, 1975).

48. Speratti, Con Piazzolla, 97.

49. Gorin, Astor Piazzolla, 47.

50. Gorin, Astor Piazzolla, 58.

51. Malvicino, El tano y yo, 26.

52. Clarín (September 26, 1976), 2.

53. La Razón (April 8, 1986).

54. López Ruiz, Piazzolla loco loco loco, 40–43.

55. López Ruiz, Piazzolla loco loco loco, 34–36.

56. Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 224.

57. On Piazzolla’s disdain for the suits tango musicians wore, see López Ruiz, Piazzolla loco loco loco, 204.

58. Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 79.

59. On the conservative gender politics of the Argentine middle class in this period, see Cosse, Pareja, sexualidad y familia en los años sesenta.

60. La Razón (April 22, 1962), 8.

61. Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media argentina, 333; Bernardo Neustadt, “Ref.: La clase media,” Todo 1:22 (March 1965), http://www.bernardoneustadt.org/contenido_238.htm.

62. Gente (April 28, 1966), 22; Bernardo Neustadt, “Entrevista a Astor Piazzola [sic] y Aníbal Troilo,” Extra I:5 (November 1965), http://www.bernardoneustadt.org/contenido_86.htm.

63. Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazolla el mal entendido, 286.

64. Terán, Nuestros años sesentas, 81–85; Podalsky, Specular City, 148–75.

65. Primera Plana (May 25, 1965), 50. For other pieces on Piazzolla, see (August 13, 1963), 37; (August 18, 1964), 43.

66. Gente (April 28, 1966), 22.

67. Primera Plana (June 22, 1965), 80. For other letters, see (June 8, 1965), 76; (June 15, 1965), 94; (June 29, 1965), 80.

68. Bernardo Neustadt, “Entrevista a Astor Piazzola [sic] y Aníbal Troilo,” Extra 1:5 (November 1965), http://www.bernardoneustadt.org/contenido_86.htm; Siete Días (May 16, 1967), 50–51.

69. Primera Plana (May 25, 1965), 52.

70. Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics.

71. Siete Días Ilustrados 5:254 (March 27, 1972), 39.

72. Siete Días Ilustrados 5:254 (March 27, 1972), 39; Primera Plana (May 25, 1965), 51.

73. Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 251.

74. New York Times (May 27, 1965), 28.

75. La Nación (April 28, 1970), 4.

76. La Prensa (May 10, 1968).

77. Expreso Imaginario (January 1977), 12.

78. Expreso Imaginario (August 1976), 11.

79. Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 331. Within the world of jazz, his current model was the bandleader and composer Quincy Jones, who by the early 1970s, was making soul-inflected jazz aimed at a large, mainstream audience. See Gorín, Astor Piazzolla, 52.

80. See, for example, Gente (December 5, 1970), 66–70.

81. Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 340–55.

82. This recording can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMoOya08e8U.

83. La Opinión (December 18, 1976).

84. La Razón (April 8, 1986).

85. Gorin, Astor Piazzolla, 83. The translation is from this edition. Other sources confirm that Piazzolla was responding to suggestions from European fans when he decided to abandon the jazz fusion experiment. See Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 203–4.

86. La Nación (April 9, 1978), 14.

87. Turino, “The Mbira, Worldbeat, and the International Imagination,” esp. 96–98.

88. Quoted in Clarín (July 15, 1984), E2.

89. Burton, Learning to Listen, 322.

90. Pacini Hernández, Oye como va, 143–47.

91. Quoted in http://www.americanclave.com/1-records-pages/1009-desire.html.

92. Interview with Kip Hanrahan (February 19, 2014). American Clavé released a third Piazzolla album in 1987, Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night, which is more experimental and features several guest musicians.

93. García Brunelli, “De Woodstock a B.A.” Hanrahan recalled that Piazzolla wrote the suite in response to his challenge “to write something that would summarize the whole history of tango.” Interview with Kip Hanrahan (February 19, 2014).

94. Gente (December 5, 1974), 69.

95. Cannata, “Making It There,” 65–67.

96. The “kitsch” quote is from Washington Post (May 11, 1981), C11; for criticisms highlighting the sameness of Piazzolla’s music, see Cannata, “Making It There,” 66, 76.

97. Cruz, “A Year in the Life of Salsa Meets Jazz.”

98. Washington Post (June 8, 1988), C1.

99. New York Times (May 23, 1986), C22.

100. La Opinión (September 23, 1979). La Opinión had been under the control of the military after the detention of its outspoken editor, Jacobo Timerman, in 1977. Timerman was released from prison on September 20 just three days before Grinberg’s article was published and the very day that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights completed its investigation in Argentina.

101. Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, “Síntesis de prensa de la visita de la CIDH a la Argentina en 1979.”

102. On the bridge image, see Misemer, Secular Saints, 80.

103. Piazzolla was occasionally accused of sympathy with the military dictatorship. See Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 95–96.

104. Fusco, “The Tango of Esthetics and Politics,” Cinéaste, 57.

105. Tomás Canosa, “Pino Solanas íntimo: ‘Me casé por primera vez a los 19 años, vivíamos a arroz y tallarines,’ ” Clarín (June 24, 2011), http://www.clarin.com/elecciones/Pino-Solanas-primera-viviamos-tallarines_0_505149689.html.

106. “Interview with Pino Solanas,” available at http://www.piazzolla.org/centro/solanas/. By describing having seen the octeto in Tucumán 676 when he was in his early twenties, Solanas seems to conflate two memories: 676 did not open until 1962, by which time the Quinteto Nuevo Tango had long since replaced the Octeto Buenos Aires and Solanas was twenty-six.

107. Azzi and Collier, Le Grand Tango, 207.

108. Clarín (July 10, 1983).

109. La Nación (April 5, 1986).

4. THE SOUND OF LATIN AMERICA

1. For a nuanced version of the cultural imperialism thesis, see Wallis and Malm, Big Sounds from Small Peoples, 269–303. For examples of the vast literature qualifying or rejecting this thesis, see Garofalo, “Introduction,” in Rockin’ the Boat, 1–14; Kun, Audiotopia, 184–218; Zolov, Refried Elvis.

2. Regev, Pop-Rock Music, esp. 3–9.

3. Regev, Pop-Rock Music, 4.

4. White, “Congolese Rumba and Other Cosmopolitanisms”; Fernández L’Hoeste and Vila, eds., Cumbia!

5. Quoted and translated by Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 71.

6. Mundo Argentino (May 9, 1956), 8; Mundo Argentino (February 6, 1967), 20–21.

7. Qué (February 12, 1957), 24.

8. Mundo Argentino (February 6, 1957), 20–21.

9. Mundo Argentino (February 6, 1957), 20–21.

10. Peterson, “Why 1955?”

11. The classic account is Gillett, The Sound of the City.

12. On the new attention that U.S. music executives were paying to foreign tastes, see Billboard (March 23, 1959), 4.

13. Gronow, “The Record Industry”; Laing, “The Recording Industry in the Twentieth Century,” 40–43.

14. Bakker, “Adopting the Rights-Based Model,” 330.

15. Billboard (February 3, 1945), 53; CBS, Annual Report (1955), 40.

16. CBS, Annual Report (1961), 9.

17. Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 76.

18. Billboard (November 24, 1956), 17.

19. Billboard (July 13, 1959), 4.

20. Variety (April 25, 1962), 45. Similarly, RCA Victor described its intention “to develop foreign sources of repertoire for the U.S. Business, as well as for the other countries,” Billboard (December 22, 1956), 20.

21. Jaramillo Agudelo, Poesía en la canción popular latinoamericana, 205.

22. Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 73–74.

23. María Moreno, “Big Ben, según pasan los años,” Página 12 (December 31, 2006). On Molar’s translations of hits by Paul Anka, Neil Sedaka, and Pat Boone, see Gente (September 17, 1965), 23.

24. CBS, Annual Statement (1959).

25. Ibarra, Los Bracho, 85.

26. Billboard (November 16, 1959), 14.

27. Billboard (June 2, 1962), 8.

28. Gente (August 19, 1965), 29.

29. Variety (October 26, 1960), 57.

30. Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home, 172–206.

31. On agglomeration effects, see Bakker, “Adopting the Rights-Based Model,” 315–18.

32. On Prieto’s massive hit, “La novia,” see Billboard (July 3, 1961), 14. On Capó, see Billboard (June 26, 1961), 41; Santiago, Nueva Ola portoricensis, 46. Santiago provides a good summary of the Nueva Ola throughout Latin America and Europe; see 217–55.

33. On Guzmán and Los Teen Tops, see Zolov, Refried Elvis, 64–66, 76–77.

34. Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 81. See also Pujol, La década rebelde, 251–53.

35. Gente (August 19, 1965), 29.

36. Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 81–82.

37. Billboard (October 20, 1962), 14.

38. Jiménez, “La Nueva Ola y la explosion del mercado discográfico,” 9.

39. Jiménez, “La Nueva Ola y la explosion del mercado discográfico,” 12.

40. On Guzmán’s popularity in Argentina, see Antena TV (March 5, 1963). Guzmán starred alongside Los TNT and Violeta Rivas in the 1965 film Nacidos para cantar (dir. Emilio Gómez Muriel).

41. Billboard (June 8, 1963), 31.

42. Del Mazo, Sandro, 13–37.

43. Antena TV (September 15, 1964).

44. Antena TV (December 22, 1964).

45. Gente (August 12, 1965), 10.

46. Antena TV (July 19, 1966).

47. Atlántida (August 1969), 44.

48. See, for example, Antena (September 2, 1969), np. Elsewhere, he claimed that “Gitano” was a childhood nickname given to him because of the way he danced. Siete Día (June 16–22, 1969), 72.

49. Antena TV (December 22, 1964); Antena TV (July 19, 1966).

50. Maronese, ed., Patrimonio cultural gitano.

51. Claudio Kleiman, “Todo empezó con Sandro,” Página 12 (June 30, 2001), 25, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/2001/01–06/01–06–30/pag25.htm.

52. Spanish “translation” had a comparable effect on Mexican rock and roll. See Zolov, Refried Elvis, 81–82.

53. For an analysis of Sandro’s erotic appeal, see Alabarces, Peronistas, populistas y plebeyos, 103–24.

54. Billboard (March 20, 1965), 22; (August 28, 1965), 30.

55. Del Mazo, Sandro, 38–39; Siete Días (March 27, 1976), 49.

56. La Opinión Cultural (March 2, 1980), 7.

57. Sedaka, who often recorded Spanish-language versions of his hits, had two songs on the Argentine top ten in late 1963. See Billboard (October 26, 1963), 47.

58. On the Beatles’ debt to the Brill Building songwriters, see Scheurer, “The Beatles, the Brill Building, and the Persistence of Tin Pan Alley in the Age of Rock.”

59. For the Brazilian roots of the Brill Building beat, see Emerson, Always Magic in the Air. For a contrary interpretation that stresses the influence of Cuban rhythms, see Sublette, “The Kingsmen and the Cha-Cha-Chá.”

60. Agostini, “Sanremo Effects.”

61. See, for example, the Argentine top ten in Billboard (June 9, 1962), 14, in which both Tony Dallara and Adriano Celentano had records.

62. Antena TV (September 15, 1964).

63. Gary Burns, “DVD Review,” 418.

64. Antena (September 2, 1969); Siete Días (June 16–22, 1969), 72.

65. Party, “Raphael Is Different.”

66. Billboard (July 1, 1967), 55.

67. For a video of this routine from a performance in Colombia in 1978, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gww4KT1CC1E.

68. See “Palito, Sandro, Favio dominan el mundo de la canción,” Radiolandia (July 4, 1969), np.

69. Billboard (December 7, 1968), 66; Billboard (December 27, 1969), T76.

70. Party, “The Miamization of Latin American Pop Music,” 68.

71. Manuel, “Salsa and the Music Industry,” 168–71.

72. For accounts that qualify Manuel’s emphasis on manipulation by the recording industry, see Negus, Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, 137–39; Miller, “Crossover Schemes: New York Salsa as Politics, Culture, and Commerce.”

73. The literature on melodrama in Latin America is voluminous, but one place to start is Oroz, Melodrama.

74. These tours were covered in Billboard as well as in the Argentine fan magazines. See, for example, Antena (September 2, 1969); Radiolandia (June 29, 1973), 42. See also Del Mazo, Sandro, 57–63.

75. Anchou, “El sueño industrial en emergencia,” 449–50.

76. Moira Soto, “El rey del bizarre,” Página 12 (April 30, 2005), http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/radar/9–2198–2005–04–30.html.

77. Quiero llenarme de ti opened in Buenos Aires on May 8, 1969. See Manrupe and Portela, Un diccionario de films argentinos, 492. The film had already opened in New York on April 1. See El Diario La Prensa (April 1, 1969), 25.

78. El Mercurio (February 4, 1968), 33.

79. Gente (March 13, 1969), 59.

80. Gente (September 2, 1971), 92–94; Radiolandia (September 3, 1971).

81. Radiolandia (November 20, 1970), 76–77.

82. Gente (March 26, 1970), 18.

83. El Diario La Prensa (April 1, 1969), 25; (April 2, 1969), 33.

84. El Mundo (San Juan) (April 14, 1969), 9b.

85. El Diario La Prensa (September 17, 1969), 33; (September 18, 1969), 31; El Mundo (October 25, 1969), 15b.

86. Billboard (November 15, 1969), 92.

87. El Mundo (October 3, 1971), 6c.

88. See, for example, Billboard (June 23, 1973), 26. On Sandro’s performance in 1971 at the annual salsa festival in Cali, Colombia, see Waxer, The City of Musical Memory, 266.

89. Santiago, Nueva Ola portoricensis.

90. Billboard (January 3, 1970), 1; (March 11, 1973), 34–35. On the history of Caytronics, see the interview with Ken Cayre at: http://www.disco-disco.com/labels/salsoul.shtml.

91. Gente (April 16, 1970), 12–13.

92. De los Ríos was one of the major architects of the influential “Torrelaguna sound” that characterized most balada recorded in Spain in the 1970s. See Party, “Miamization,” 68.

93. Moira Soto, “El rey del bizarre,” Página 12 (April 30, 2005), http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/radar/9–2198–2005–04–30.html.

94. Boricua 32 (July 1969).

95. El Diario La Prensa (September 2, 1969), 15.

96. El Mundo (October 1, 1971), 18-A.

97. For a good guide to racial identification in Puerto Rico, see Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move, 236–60.

98. See Para Ti (August 25, 1969), 72–73; Antena (September 2, 1969).

99. Karush, Culture of Class, 92–105.

100. Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 81–82.

101. Alabarces, Entre gatos y violadores, 41.

102. Gente (January 29, 1970), 32–33.

103. Gente (December 18, 1980), np; Gente (March 7, 1974), 14–15.

104. Antena (October 19, 1971).

105. Quoted in, and translated by, Eduardo Elena, “Argentina in Black and White,” 201.

106. Siete Días (June 16–22, 1969), 70–71. A similarly mocking tone was apparent in this profile, Atlántida (August 1969) 42–43.

107. La Prensa (September 20, 1970).

108. Gente (April 9, 1970), 28–29.

109. La Bella Gente (November 1972), 48–49.

110. Gente (October 28, 1976), 48–49.

111. Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 123–57.

112. Araújo, “Brega.”

113. Siete Días (April 12, 1971), 72–73.

114. Billboard (January 25, 1975), cbs57, cbs62.

115. Party, “Miamization.”

116. Del Mazo, Sandro, 64.

117. Así en Crónica (February 17, 1980), 16–17; Flash (June 10, 1980), 15; Billboard (October 24, 1981), LA-26.

118. Del Mazo, Sandro, 73–77.

119. Alabarces, Entre gatos y violadores, 72–85; Pujol, Rock y dictadura.

120. Crónica (March 13, 1980), 21; Diario Popular (March 13, 1980), 18.

121. Así 3ra (September 26, 1970), 6–7.

122. Party, “Raphael Is Different”; Party, “Placer Culpable.”

123. On Sandro as mersa, see Alabarces, Peronistas, populistas y plebeyos, 103–24.

124. This deepening appears to have begun before the democratic transition. Andrea Matallana, who lived in a suburb in greater Buenos Aires during the late 1970s, recalled having to hide her enthusiasm for Sandro to avoid ridicule from her teenage friends. Personal communication, October 2, 2014.

125. Del Mazo, Sandro, 92–104.

126. Caparrós, “El mejor argentino.” See also Alabarces, Peronistas, populistas y plebeyos, 118–20.

127. Party, “Placer culpable.”

128. La Nación (October 18, 1998).

5. INDIGENOUS ARGENTINA AND REVOLUTIONARY LATIN AMERICA

1. Claudia (September 1972), 65.

2. Antena (September 7, 1971).

3. Víctor Pintos, “Mercedes Sosa, S.A.” Humor (ca. 1990), 64.

4. Accounts of Sosa’s early life can be found in Braceli, Mercedes Sosa, 25–63; Marchini, No toquen, 277–81; Brizuela, Cantar la vida, 77–82.

5. Braceli, Mercedes Sosa, 46.

6. Chamosa, The Argentine Folklore Movement, 26–63.

7. Chamosa, The Argentine Folklore Movement, 132. On the importance of isolation and the antipathy to commercial culture within North American folklore studies, see Miller, Segregating Sound, 85–120.

8. Díaz, Variaciones sobre el “ser nacional,” 120–21.

9. Antena (February 10, 1953).

10. Chamosa, “El Movimiento Folklórico,” 258. See also Braceli, Mercedes Sosa, 51.

11. Díaz, Variaciones,” 128–29.

12. Díaz, Variaciones, 123–27.

13. Chamosa, Breve historia del folclore argentino (1920–1970), 145–46.

14. Gravano, El silencio y la porfía, 120–22.

15. Karush, Culture of Class, 200–201.

16. Billboard (June 19, 1961), 20. Capitol released the two-sided single “Tom Dooley/Ruby Red” in Argentina, while Odeon released the Weavers’ “Goodnight Irene/Tzena, Tzena, Tzena.” For images of these 45-RPM records, see http://www.schallplattenwelt.de/USL-Odeon.htm; http://www.musicstack.com/item/167192591.

17. Gravano, El silencio, 98–113; Chamosa, Breve historia, 160–63.

18. Díaz, Variaciones,” 145–90; Vila, “Música popular y auge del folklore.”

19. Qué (March 25, 1958), 22.

20. Vila, “Música popular y auge del folklore.”

21. Ahead of the curve, the Abalos Brothers saw their Buenos Aires peña, Achalay, as a place to listen to folk music rather than dance. See Panorama (September 3, 1974), 44–45.

22. Chamosa, Breve historia, 160–65.

23. Folklore 9 (January 1962), 26.

24. Folklore 18 (May 1962), 26.

25. See also García, Tito Francia y la música en Mendoza, de la radio al Nuevo Cancionero.

26. García, “Música y radio,” 259–60.

27. García, Tito Francia, 78. A profile of Matus in the magazine Folklore also reported that he learned “harmonization” from Francia. See Folklore 39 (1963), 12.

28. Quoted in Molinero, Militancia de la canción, 186.

29. Quoted in García, Tito Francia, 32, 78–79.

30. Carrillo Rodríguez, “Latinoamericana de Tucumán,” 245.

31. Folklore 23 (August 1962) 22–23. See also Portorrico, Diccionario biográfico de la música argentina de raíz folklorica, 113.

32. See the image of Galarza on the cover of Folklore 25 (September 1962). Sosa, herself, suggested that Ramona Galarza’s popularity accounted for the presence of Littoral styles on the album. See Crisis (May 1975), 30.

33. Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 184–87.

34. Primera Plana (March 19, 1963), 32.

35. Crisis (May 1975), 30.

36. On this history, see Terán, Nuestros años sesentas; Szusterman, Frondizi and the Politics of Developmentalism; Spinelli, Los vencedores vencidos.

37. Marchini, No toquen, 281. Sosa later claimed that Oscar Matus only joined the Communist Party in the hopes of getting gigs and selling records, but that her own political awakening was sincere. See Braceli, Mercedes Sosa, 86.

38. The manifesto, originally published in the newspaper Los Andes, is available online at http://www.tejadagomez.com.ar/adhesiones/manifiesto.html. For an analysis, see Díaz, Variaciones, 191–98.

39. Molinero, Militancia, 191–94; Díaz, Variaciones, 199–205.

40. Brizuela, Cantar la vida, 86.

41. Crisis (May 1975), 30.

42. Clipping (Córdoba, September 7, 1965), Mercedes Sosa Collection, Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires.

43. Portorrico, Diccionario biográfico, 253–54.

44. Chamosa, Breve historia, 180–81. On Márbiz, see La Voz del Interior (September 5, 2013), http://vos.lavoz.com.ar/folclore/julio-maharbiz-querido-polemico.

45. According to an oft-repeated story, the organizing commission refused to allow Sosa to play because she was a communist, but this account seems implausible given that Horacio Guarany, a well-known member of the party, had been a fixture at the festival since its inception.

46. This story was reported by Marcelo Simón, a writer for Folklore. See Página 12 (January 24, 2008), http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/3–9012–2008–01–24.html.

47. Alma García, “De mujer a mujer,” Folklore Extra: Vida y éxito de Mercedes Sosa (circa 1967).

48. Chamosa, “Indigenous or Criollo”; Chamosa, The Argentine Folklore Movement, 95–106.

49. On the image of the Indian in Argentine folk music, see Molinero and Vila, “Raza y canción.”

50. Panorama (September 3, 1974), 44–45.

51. Yupanqui’s vision was quite close to the indigenismo of the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas. See Kaliman, Alhajita es tu canto; Orquera, “Marxismo, peronismo, indocriollismo.”

52. Quoted and translated by Orquera, “From the Andes to Paris,” 113.

53. Folklore 29 (October 1962), 6.

54. Brizuela, Cantar la vida, 51.

55. Folklore 9 (January 1962), 51.

56. Folklore 114 (February 22, 1966).

57. Gente (February 3, 1966), 3.

58. Así (September 23, 1967).

59. Folklore Extra: Vida y éxito de Mercedes Sosa (circa 1967).

60. Primera Plana (January 31, 1967), 68.

61. Alma García, “De mujer a mujer,” Folklore Extra: Vida y éxito de Mercedes Sosa (circa 1967).

62. Gente (January 30, 1969), 9.

63. Panorama (August 24, 1972), 4.

64. Para Ti (February 19, 1968), 50.

65. Carrillo Rodríguez, “Latinoamerican de Tucumán,” 249–52. On the “illusion of autobiography” in Sosa’s performance identity, see Fischerman, “Mucho más que folklore.”

66. Verba, “To Paris and Back.”

67. On the idea of Chile as a mestizo nation, see Barr-Melej, Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class.

68. Confirmado (June 23, 1966), 57.

69. For an article describing the novel phenomenon of hippies, see Gente (October 12, 1967), 34–39.

70. Braceli, Mercedes Sosa, 102.

71. Time (November 23, 1962), 54.

72. Confirmado (May 7, 1965). Available at http://www.magicasruinas.com.ar/revistero/argentina/falu-sabato-lavalle.htm.

73. Confirmado (June 23, 1966), 57. On Philips’s business strategy, see Díaz, Variaciones, 145–87. In between La voz de la zafra and Yo no canto por cantar, Sosa recorded Canciones con fundamento, released to little fanfare on an independent label formed by Matus.

74. La Prensa (January 29, 1967).

75. Confirmado (May 2, 1968), 44.

76. Antena TV (July 19, 1966); Así (September 23, 1967).

77. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQmZussa6Tk.

78. Mamani, “Réquiem para un cóndor ciego.”

79. Sábato had initially hoped that Piazzolla would compose the music. See Fischerman and Gilbert, Piazzolla el mal entendido, 214–18.

80. Félix Luna, “Mis encuentros con el folklore,” Todo es historia. By 1964, Luna had taken over as editor of Folklore magazine.

81. Quoted in Rodolfo Ortega Peña and Eduardo Luis Duhalde, Folklore argentine y revisionismo histórico, 76.

82. La Unión (July 4, 1970).

83. Paladino and Maranghello, “San Martín en el cine”; del Valle, “Independencia y cine histórico en Argentina, Cuba y Chile (1968–1976).”

84. For Figueredo Iramain’s nationality, see Molinero and Vila, “Raza y canción,” 8.

85. Rios, “La Flûte Indienne.”

86. Rios, “La Flûte Indienne.”

87. Pérez Flores, “La Nueva Canción Latinoamericana en su forma y contenido,” 146–49. According to one account, the Cubans originally invited Sosa, Matus, and Tejada Gómez, but only Matus agreed to attend. See García, Greco, and Bravo, “Testimonial del Nuevo Cancionero,” 96.

88. Confirmado (January 18, 1972), 32. In this interview, Sosa states that she had not heard of Parra until she read of her death in 1967.

89. Braceli, Mercedes Sosa, 298.

90. El Universal (March 12, 1972), 16.

91. Excelsior (March 9, 1972), 23-A.

92. El Día (March 3, 1973), 18.

93. Panorama (October 26, 1971), 48. On Sosa’s deepening politicization in this period, see Molinero and Vila, “A Brief History of the Militant Song Movement in Argentina,” 208–10.

94. Seoane and Ruiz Núñez, La noche de los lápices, 29.

95. Marchini, No toquen, 284.

96. Siete Días (December 21, 1970). Available online at http://www.magicasruinas.com.ar/revistero/argentina/mercedes-sosa.htm. In this interview, she also mentions her difficulty getting work in 1968.

97. Confirmado (June 23, 1966), 57.

98. Ortega Peña and Duhalde, Folklore argentino y revisionismo histórico, 73. Similarly, the Montoneros criticized her for not supporting revolutionary violence. See Braceli, Mercedes Sosa, 200.

99. La Nación (April 22, 1972), 10. See also La Nación (October 10, 1970), np; La Prensa (October 4, 1970), 14.

100. Panorama (October 26, 1971), 48.

101. Primera Plana (June 20, 1972), 46.

102. Maranghello, “Cine y política,” 356. On the Argentinísima radio shows and LP, see Siete Días (December 6, 1971), 101.

103. On Hasta la victoria, see Carrillo Rodriguez, “Latinoamericana de Tucumán,” 254–59.

104. Confirmado (August 29, 1972), 42–43.

105. Braceli, Mercedes Sosa, 150; Marchini, No toquen, 286.

106. Confirmado (December 19, 1972), 44. In the same interview, Luna praised the leftist military regime in Peru.

107. Billboard (January 13, 1973), 44.

108. Carassai, The Argentine Silent Majority.

109. Franco, Un enemigo para la nación, 59–128.

110. Crisis (April 1974), 26–27.

111. Carrillo Rodríguez, “The Revolutionary Patria and Its New (Wo)Men,” 240.

112. Marchini, No toquen, 288.

113. Catty Ruiz, “Será el fúsil y no el rosal: nos dice Mercedes Sosa,” Revolución y Cultura 29 (January 1975), 60–63.

114. Ultima Hora (June 1975), 3. Clipping collection. Specific date obscured. Radiolandia (June 13, 1975), 40. Earlier articles in this same magazine had avoided the nickname. See Radiolandia (March 1, 1974); Radiolandia (January 1975).

115. Elena, “Argentina in Black and White.”

116. Marchini, No toquen, 289–96.

117. Clarín (October 13, 1985), 2.

118. Marchini, No toquen, 301–5; Brizuela, Cantar la vida, 108–11; Carrillo Rodríguez, “Popular Music and the Work of Recollection.”

119. Diario Popular (February 20, 1982), 16; Flash (February 23, 1982), 33.

120. Carrillo Rodríguez, “Popular Music and the Work of Recollection,” 11.

121. Carrillo Rodríguez, “Popular Music and the Work of Recollection,” 16–19.

122. La Razón (July 1, 1985), 22.

123. Berti, Rockología, 62.

124. Clarín (January 5, 1983), 34; Revista La Nación (January 23, 1983).

125. Clarín (April 2, 1984), np; Radiolandia 2000 (October 25, 1985), 66.

126. Clarín (October 19, 1985), 30.

127. On Sosa’s maternal image in this period, See Carrillo Rodríguez, “Popular Music and the Work of Recollection,” 22.

128. Clarín (April 2, 1984).

129. Guzmán Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood, 132–55.

130. Pedro Noel Romero, “La Negra Sosa y Raúl Alfonsín,” JunínYa.com (October 7, 2009), http://www.brandal.com.ar/~juninya/notaopinion.php?id=1254961647&page=89. Her support for him continued into the 1990s. See Clarín (April 13, 1997), 16.

131. Víctor Pintos, “Mercedes Sosa, S.A.,” Humor (ca. 1990), 64.

132. Página 12 (June 24, 2009), http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/7–14325–2009–06–24.html.

6. THE MUSIC OF GLOBALIZATION

1. Avant-Mier, Rock the Nation, 169. For another account that stresses Santaolalla’s role, see Lechner, Rock en Español, esp. 189–99.

2. The most thorough accounts of Santaolalla’s early years are in a pair of extended interviews he gave in the late 1970s: Kleiman, “Gustavo Santaolalla cuenta sus quince años de rock”; Grinberg, Como vino la mano, 130–49.

3. Kleiman, “Gustavo Santaolalla cuenta,” 28–30; Grinberg, Como vino la mano, 140.

4. Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 123–27.

5. Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina, 132–38. On “La balsa,” see also Alabarces, Entre gatos y violadores, 42–47; Pujol, Canciones argentinas, 198–99.

6. Gente (October 12, 1967), 36.

7. Gente (November 30, 1967), 44.

8. Grinberg, Como vino la mano, 137–38; Kleiman, “Gustavo Santaolalla cuenta,” 29.

9. Miguel Grinberg, Como vino la mano, 99.

10. Sponsored by his father’s clothing business, Kleinman’s show was the most popular night-time program on Buenos Aires radio. See Periscopio (December 23, 1969), 50–51. For the contrasting case of Mexico, where rock groups continued to sing in English, see Zolov, Refried Elvis.

11. Pelo 2 (March 1970), 22.

12. Gente (August 26, 1971), 72–73; Pelo 11 (December 1970), np. On the “housewives of rock” insult, see Grinberg, Como vino la mano, 141.

13. Pelo 6 (July 1970), 8. For a musical analysis of Arco Iris, see Carnicer, “Arco Iris.”

14. Berti, Rockología, 64–65.

15. The band had signaled this new direction on “Zamba,” one of the last singles it recorded before leaving RCA. See Carnicer, “Arco Iris,” 5. Other Latin American bands, including Chile’s Los Jaivas and Colombia’s Columna de Fuego, pursued similar strategies. See Cepeda Sánchez, “Apropiaciones de la modernidad cultural.”

16. For “Indo-pop,” see La Nación (April 6, 1973), 12; on the various folk rhythms included on Sudamérica, see Carnicer, “Arco Iris,” 10.

17. Pistocchi, “Gustavo Santaolalla,” 13; Kleiman, “Gustavo Santaolalla cuenta,” 32.

18. Kleiman, “Gustavo Santaolalla cuenta,” 32.

19. Primera Plana (September 21, 1971), 45; La Bella Gente (January 1973), 8.

20. Panorama (May 24, 1972), 51.

21. Panorama (November 23, 1971), 39.

22. Noticias (January 28, 1974), 22.

23. Vila, “Argentina’s ‘Rock Nacional,’ ” 11–12; Alabarces, Entre gatos y violadores, 49–50.

24. Pelo 49 (May 1974), 18–19.

25. Pelo (1973). http://www.magicasruinas.com.ar/revrock077.htm.

26. Grinberg, Como vino la mano, 144.

27. On authenticity in rock nacional, see Vila, “Argentina’s ‘Rock Nacional.’ ”

28. Pelo 12 (January 1971), 11.

29. On the romantic nationalist roots of folklore studies, see Chamosa, The Argentine Folklore Movement, 16–22.

30. Pelo (February 1975), 16–17. On the North American influences on Agitor Lucens V, see also Pelo 63 (July 1975), np; Kleiman, “Gustavo Santaolalla cuenta,” 33; Grinberg, Como vino la mano, 146. Working with choreographer Oscar Araiz, Arco Iris turned Agitor into a sort of rock ballet, which it performed successfully in Paris and Buenos Aires.

31. Pistocchi, “Gustavo Santaolalla,” 13.

32. “Conversations with Ilan Stavans: Gustavo Santaolalla,” La Plaza, http://www.wgbh.org/programs/La-Plaza-661/episodes/Conversations-with-Ilan-Stavans-Gustavo-Santaolalla-9434.

33. Kleiman, “Gustavo Santaolalla cuenta,” 35.

34. This account of his early years in Los Angeles is based on two interviews he gave during a 1981 visit to Argentina: Expreso Imaginario 64 (November 1981), 8–9; Humor 69 (October 1981), 91–93.

35. See, for example, the advertisements in Los Angeles Times (December 28, 1980), O76; (March 15, 1981), M82; (January 25, 1983), G4.

36. On the influence of The Motels, see Humor 69 (October 1981), 92. For Santaolalla’s comments on The Police, see Pelo 141 (February 1981).

37. Los Angeles Times (July 25, 1982), K83.

38. Los Angeles Times (January 28, 1983), G7.

39. Pacini Hernández, Oye como va, 43–50.

40. Party, “Miamization”; Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 192–213.

41. Pacini Hernández, Oye como va, 34–43. On Chicano rock music, see also Lipsitz, “Land of a Thousand Dances,” 267–83.

42. On the Los Angeles Chicano punk scene and Los Lobos, see Avant-Mier, Rock the Nation, 152–59. For a contemporaneous account, see Stuart Goldman, “New Wave Rides High on a Latin Beat,” Los Angeles Times (October 12, 1980), M6.

43. Santaolalla talked about how much he liked The Plugz in Expreso Imaginario 64 (November 1981), 9.

44. The Plugz were often pigeonholed as a Chicano punk band from East L.A., even though Larriva lived in Hollywood, and the band always included non-Latino musicians. Playing saxophone on Better Luck was Steve Berlin, who would soon join Los Lobos. See Nevarez, “Tito Larriva.”

45. On the O.N. Klub and Los Angeles ska, see Long, “Epicenter of a Scene.” For the Plugz performing with ska band The Skanksters, see Los Angeles Times (April 25, 1982), M68. For shared bills with X, see Variety (July 21, 1982), 58; Los Angeles Times (August 10, 1980), R70.

46. Santaolalla’s influence on The Plugz was not perceived in the press. One positive review attributed The Plugz new style to Larriva’s desire “to let his Texas R&B roots mix it up with his punker’s instinct for directness.” New Musical Express (August 7, 1982), 16.

47. This account of “El clavo y la cruz” and of Santaolalla’s early exposure to Mexican films comes from an interview with Santaolalla conducted by the author (June 30, 2015).

48. “Conversations with Ilan Stavans: Gustavo Santaolalla,” La Plaza, http://www.wgbh.org/programs/La-Plaza-661/episodes/Conversations-with-Ilan-Stavans-Gustavo-Santaolalla-9434.

49. Mora, Making Hispanics.

50. Expreso Imaginario 21 (April 1978), 41–42.

51. Pujol, Canciones, 324–26.

52. Humor 69 (October 1981), 92–93.

53. Santaolalla’s understanding of which contemporary musical influences might appeal to Argentine rock fans was astute: even Charly García, who had little patience for new wave music, mentioned The Police as his favorite new band. Expreso Imaginario 65 (December 1981), 20.

54. Fernández Bitar, Historia del rock en Argentina, 101.

55. Berti, Rockología, 70–71.

56. On G.I.T., see Clarín (February 14, 1986), Suplemento Sí, 4–5.

57. One exception was Fito Páez, whose 1985 album, Giros, contained elements of tango, chacarera, and baguala.

58. The last advertisement for a Wet Picnic concert in the Los Angeles Times is on March 27, 1983. Santaolalla may have had something of a personal crisis in these years. In subsequent interviews, he described a period of intense drug use in the early 1980s as well as something of an emotional breakdown in New York City. See Claudio Kleiman, “Operación Triunfo,” Rolling Stone Argentina (January 4, 2006).

59. Quoted in Berti, Rockología, 10.

60. Gieco, De Ushuaia a La Quiaca, 4.

61. The name “De Ushuaia a La Quiaca” was first coined by Gieco’s producer to describe his tour of the Argentine Interior.

62. A fourth album of material was released in 1999. The project also yielded some nine thousand photographs and forty hours of video. Whether as a result of Music Hall’s limited budget or the limits of Santaolalla’s and Gieco’s knowledge of Argentine folk cultures, the project left huge swaths of the country undocumented, including Cuyo and Patagonia. See Guerrero, “De Ushuaia a La Quiaca.”

63. The project also involved an engagement with Latin American Nueva Canción: Gieco recorded a song on the banks of the Beagle Channel with Chilean singer Isabel Parra, Violeta’s daughter. Santaolalla and Gieco also took time out from the project to appear in concert with Mercedes Sosa in December 1984. On the live album recorded at this concert, Corazón Americano (1985), Sosa, Gieco, and Santaolalla performed Santaolalla’s song, “Río de las penas.”

64. Gieco, De Ushuaia a La Quiaca, 4.

65. De Ushuaia a La Quiaca (documentary film), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhFE3II7g2c.

66. Florine, “ ‘Cuarteto,’ ” 34–35.

67. Gieco, De Ushuaia a La Quiaca, 27. On Gieco’s reaction, see Gloria Guerrerro and Claudio Kleiman, “León Gieco,” Rolling Stone Argentina (January 2, 2002).

68. Gieco, De Ushuaia a La Quiaca, 28–29.

69. Zolov, Refried Elvis, 249–51.

70. Paredes Pacho and Blanc, “Rock Mexicano, Breve Recuento Del Siglo XX,” 395–485.

71. Berti, Rockología, 70–71. See also Billboard (August 5, 1989), 72.

72. Blanc, Flashback, 296–97; Paredes Pacho and Blanc, “Rock Mexicano,” 440–43.

73. Among the first to do so was Botellita de Jerez, who specialized in what it called “guacarock,” a parodic blend that punned on local culture and slang. See Paredes Pacho and Blanc, “Rock Mexicano,” 421–23.

74. Blanc, Flashback, 271–72.

75. Santaolalla, Interview with Author, June 30, 2015.

76. On López, see Billboard (November 24, 1990), 37.

77. Roco, lead singer of Maldita Vecindad, quoted in Mandalit del Barco, “Latin Alternative’s Big Cheese: Gustavo Santaolalla,” NPR News (March 9, 2006), http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5253997. See also Martínez, “Corazón del Rocanrol,” 373–86.

78. Billboard (October 17, 1992), 58.

79. Solórzano-Thompson, “Performative Masculinities.”

80. Calderón, “The Mexico City–Los Angeles Cultural Mosh Pits.”

81. Sublette, Cuba and Its Music, 558–62.

82. Paredes Pacho and Blanco, “Rock Mexicano,” 421–22.

83. Traber, “Pick It Up! Pick It Up!”

84. Quoted in Luis Jhon, “El ska según Roco,” http://nasdat.com/index.php?topic=4815.0. See also Carmen de la Peza, “Panteón Rococó: Mexican Ska and Collective Memory,” Intercultural Communication Studies 19:3 (2010), 112–23.

85. Quoted in Durán and Barrios, El grito del rock mexicano, 64–65. Cuban bandleader Dámaso Pérez Prado, one of the key figures in the history of mambo, had his first commercial success in Mexico in the 1950s.

86. Flores, La manera correcta de gritar, 25–46.

87. Clarín (March 6, 1992), Suplemento Sí-3.

88. Clarín (August 19, 1996), 9. Many Latin American bands testified to the influence of Mano Negra. See La Nación (February 2, 2000), np, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/3858-la-mano-que-mecio-el-rock-latino; La Nación (September 27, 1998), np, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/112093-el-tifon-latino-arrasa-estados-unidos.

89. Kun, Audiotopia, 214–17.

90. Quoted in Rubén Martínez, “Land of 1,000 bands,” Spin (December 1, 1997), 112. The classic statement of the collision of different temporalities in Latin America is García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures.

91. Clarín (January 1, 1994), 8.

92. As he put it, the band had decided to explore “our thing [lo nuestro].” Santaolalla, Interview with Author, June 30, 2015.

93. Clarín (January 16, 1994), 8.

94. When Polygram was absorbed by Universal in 1999, the “big six” majors became the “big five.”

95. The information in this paragraph is drawn from Yúdice, “La industría de la música en la integración América Latina–Estados Unidos.” The quote is from 220.

96. Hanke, “ ‘Yo Quiero Mi MTV!’ ” The quote is from 320. For the gradual increase in Latin American acts, see Rodríguez Marino, “MTV Latino,” 156.

97. Verdesio, “Cultural Connections,” 643–45.

98. Rodríguez Marino, “MTV Latino,” 166–69.

99. Billboard (February 24, 1996), 6.

100. Variety (August 11, 1997), 18, 69.

101. Paredes Pacho and Blanco, “Rock Mexicano,” 449.

102. Party, “Miamization.”

103. Ochoa Gauthier, Músicas Locales En Tiempos de Globalización.

104. Cooperativa.cl (9/19/13), http://www.cooperativa.cl/noticias/entretencion/musica/cafe-tacuba/gustavo-santaolalla-cafe-tacuba-no-tiene-nada-que-envidiar-a-radiohead/2013–09–19/111611.html.

105. Corona, “The Politics of Language, Class, and Nation in Mexico’s Rock En Español Movement.”

106. Clarín (January 16, 1994), 8.

107. Santaolalla, Interview with Author, June 30, 2015.

108. For a consideration of Santaolalla’s impact as a producer, see Madoery, “Gustavo Santaolalla.” On his meticulous approach to recording vocals, see Lechner, Rock en español, 193.

109. These examples are drawn from Madoery, “Gustavo Santaolalla,” 9–10.

110. Santaolalla, Interview with Author, June 30, 2015.

111. New York Times (May 27, 1993), C16. Maldita Vecindad were often labeled a “world beat” band in the U.S. press. See, for example, Los Angeles Times (November 17, 1991), H59. For a critical appraisal that celebrated rock latino while denying its similarity to world music, see Eddy, “City of Dreams,” 69–78.

112. Variety (March 28, 1994), 67.

113. Fernández L’Hoeste, “On How Bloque de Búsqueda Lost Part of Its Name,” 194, 195.

114. La Nación (October 2, 1998), np, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/195714-con-acento-latino.

115. La Nación (October 2, 1998), np, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/112678-el-amplio-terreno-del-rock-latino. Rockers Gustavo Cerati and Fito Páez also questioned the term rock latino. For Cerati’s comments, see Berti, Rockología, 129; for Páez’s, see Rodríguez Marino, “MTV Latino,”165.

116. Semán, Vila, and Benedetti, “Neoliberalism and Rock in the Popular Sectors of Contemporary Argentina”; Semán and Vila, “Rock Chabón.” See also Lunardelli, Alternatividad, divino tesoro.

117. Marchi, El rock perdido.

118. Billboard (October 12, 1963), 42.

119. Alabarces and Silba, “ ‘Las manos de todos los negros, arriba,’ ” 52–74; Pujol, Historia del baile, 289–310; Fernández L’Hoeste and Vila, eds., Cumbia! 4–9.

120. Martín, “Cumbia Villera and the End of the Culture of Work in Argentina in the 90s.” Many scholars have identified a pronounced misogyny in cumbia villera lyrics, while others have argued that the genre is one of the first to treat female sexual desire frankly. See Semán and Vila, “Cumbia Villera or the Complex Construction of Masculinity and Femininity in Contemporary Argentina.”

121. Garriga Zucal, “ ‘Rockers’ Moral Limits in the Construction of Musical Communities,” 49–53.

122. Clarín (June 3, 1988), Sí 4. On the episode of the television program Elepé dedicated to the making of El León, Esteban Cavanna comments that before Fabulosos Cadillacs, the “Latinoso” instrumental lineup of percussion and horns was considered “grasa” in Argentina. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92ZnC1J44ww.

123. The band finally did record a cumbia—“Padre Nuestro,” with Pablo Lescano of Damas Gratis as a guest artist—on its 2008 album La luz del ritmo, but this was some two decades after the band’s commercial breakthrough.

124. Marchi, El rock perdido, 71–72.

125. Rolling Stone Argentina (January 9, 1998), np.

126. Citro, “Ritual Transgression and Grotesque Realism in 1990s Rock Music.”

127. Clarín (August 28, 1998). http://edant.clarin.com/suplementos/si/98–08–28/nota_1.htm.

128. Página 12 (July 7, 2002). http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/espectaculos/6–7371–2002–07–07.html.

129. Clarín (February 16, 2001), np, http://edant.clarin.com/suplementos/si/01–02–16/nota2.htm.

130. Rolling Stone Argentina (September 1, 2000), http://www.rollingstone.com.ar/585355.

131. For a general account of this history, see Gordillo, Piquetes y cacerolas.

132. Svampa and Pereyra, Entre la ruta y el barrio, 50–54.

133. Citro, “Ritual Transgression,” 38–39.

134. Torrón, “Bajofondo,” 41.

CONCLUSION

1. Alberto Consiglio, “La figura intacta,” Jazzband 1:3 (1972), 15–25.

2. On the problem of piracy, the retreat of the major labels from Latin America, and the rise of independent labels and do-it-yourself musicians, see Billboard (July 3, 2010), 19; Erica E. Phillips, “Record Company Carves Niche in ‘Latin Alternative,’ ” Wall Street Journal (September 18, 2012). On music sales in Latin America and the return of the majors, see Richard Smirke, “Seven Takeaways from IFPI’s Study of the Global Music Market Last Year,” Billboard (April 20, 2015); Laura Barton, “Latin America: The Music Industry’s New Frontier,” The Guardian (June 19, 2014).

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INDEX

Ábalos Brothers, 147–48, 157, 167–68, 238n21

Afro-Argentines: in criollismo, 17; invisibility of, 10, 15–16, 38; in tango, 21, 32, 224n56

Alemán, Oscar: and blackness, 16, 21, 25, 27, 30–34, 37–38, 45, 217; and Brazilian music, 18–21, 35, 53–54; in Buenos Aires jazz scene, 28–29, 35–36; and criollismo, 17–18; guitar style of, 20–21, 27–28, 34–35; and Hawaiian music, 18–22; and Josephine Baker, 24–25, 26; and Perón government, 30, 146

Alfonsin, Raúl, 177–8; 241n130

“Alfonsina y el mar”, 165–66, 171, 175

Almendra, 183–85, 188, 210

Anderle, Oscar, 122, 129–30, 136, 141

anti-Peronism, 10, 13, 54, 89, 91, 105, 146–48, 165

Arco Iris, 180, 184–89, 194–97, 209–10, 216, 219

Argentina: in global music industry, 7–10, 14, 70, 95, 111–18, 143, 181, 196, 209–10, 217; Northwest region, 60, 144–45, 148–49, 157, 167, 186, 197; Littoral region, 145, 151, 238n32. See also Buenos Aires, nationalism

Armstrong, Louis, 30, 33

arrastre, 85, 98, 230n37

authenticity, 21, 42, 45, 46, 48, 51, 70, 87, 119, 164, 166; in criollismo, 17–19; in folk, 146, 149, 151, 157, 159–62, 167, 197–98; in jazz, 16, 24, 27, 33–4, 36, 38; in rock, 13, 95, 97, 110, 121, 135, 180–85, 188–89, 194, 210, 217; in tango, 8, 31, 73, 77, 79, 81, 83, 88, 93–94, 99, 104, 134

Aznavour, Charles, 123, 127, 129

Baez, Joan, 162–63, 195

Bajofondo Tango Club, 215

Baker, Josephine, 22–29

balada, 108, 110, 125–41, 181, 183, 193, 196, 201, 204, 206, 217–19, 236n92

“La bamba,” 193

Baraka, Amiri [originally, LeRoi Jones], 58

Barbieri, Leandro “Gato”: and bebop, 53; and cool jazz, 54; decision to leave Argentina, 55; and free jazz, 52, 55–57, 60; and fusion, 61; and Latin jazz, 41, 60, 62–65, 67–69, 71, 98, 190; reception in Argentina, 66; and tango, 53, 60, 63, 89, 215; and third worldism, 40, 58–59, 101, 107, 186–88, 218–19

Beatles, The, 1–2, 95, 109, 121–22, 182–84, 235n58

Berger, Karl, 55, 57

Berni, Antonio, 94

Bersuit Vergarabat, 181, 206, 209, 212–15

“Bésame Mucho,” 35, 46

Bley, Carla, 57–58

BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group), 6, 199–200, 205

bolero, 5, 9, 35, 110, 114–17, 127–28, 140, 150, 202–3, 217

bossa nova, 53, 55–56, 60, 62, 101, 118, 172, 185; compared to tango, 86–87, 94–95, 103–4, 107; in the United States, 40, 47–49, 51, 68, 218, 226nn29–30

Boulanger, Nadia, 75–76, 85

Brazilian music, 24–25, 28, 35–36, 38, 42, 51, 54, 59–63, 66, 100–1, 103–4, 117, 123, 136, 158, 205, 212, 235n59. See also bossa nova; cavaquinho; choro; maxixe

Brill Building, 122–23, 140, 235nn58–59

Buenos Aires: Cuban music in, 44; entertainment industry in, 7–8, 17, 19, 36, 38, 114–16, 124, 136–37, 139, 147, 195, 213; as European, 10, 167–68; folk music in, 148, 153–54, 157–58, 162–63, 171, 174, 176–77; jazz in, 21, 23–24, 29, 33, 43, 45, 52–55, 63, 76; rock and roll in, 111; tango in, 37, 72–74, 77, 84, 87, 88, 92, 94, 96–97, 99–100, 104, 134; tropical music in, 211. See also internal migrants; Instituto Di Tella; Octeto Buenos Aires;

“Buenos Aires hora cero,” 86

Burton, Gary, 61, 101–2, 106

Byrne, David, 198, 208

cabecitas negras, 10, 134, 173. See also internal migrants

Café Tacuba, 203–6

Caifanes, 199–200, 205, 208

“Canción del derrumbe indio,” 155–56, 164, 167

Carlos, Roberto, 131, 134–36

Caribbean music, 38, 42, 45–46, 101, 130, 158, 193, 201–3, 208–10, 212, 218. See also Cuban music.

Castilla, Manuel, 148, 164

cavaquinho, 18, 25, 35, 222n14

CBS, 5, 84, 108, 113, 115, 118, 121–23, 128–32, 136, 140, 196. See also Columbia Records

chacarera, 149, 154, 180, 186, 204, 208, 244n57

chamamé, 14, 145, 149, 211–12

charango, 44, 64, 147, 168, 186, 194, 204

Cherry, Don, 55–57, 59–60, 62, 227n58

Chicano rock, 180, 193, 195, 198, 200–1, 243n44

Chilean music. See Nueva Canción; Parra, Violeta; Quilapayún

choro, 18, 20–21, 23, 35, 53–54, 100

Coleman, Ornette, 52, 55–57

Colón Theatre, 106, 142, 171

Coltrane, John, 33, 53, 55–56, 59, 62, 66, 227n61

Columbia Records, 5, 7, 19, 25, 110, 112–16, 118, 152

cool jazz, 13, 40, 47, 49–50, 53–55, 71, 76, 83, 86–87, 89, 95–96, 107, 229n13

Corea, Chick, 61, 97, 99–100, 189–90

Cosquín (folk festival), 155, 159–61, 163

cosmopolitan nationalism, 13, 72, 92–94, 96, 107, 164–66

counterpoint, 76, 78–79, 83, 85–87, 97–98

criollismo, 17, 22. See also gauchesque

Crosby, Stills and Nash, 188, 195, 210

Cruz, Celia, 130

cuarteto, 14, 198, 202, 211–13

Cuban music: in Argentina, 8, 30, 44; in film, 50–51, 54; in France, 44, 102; in jazz, 41–43, 45–48, 60–65, 67

Cugat, Xavier, 41, 46–47, 50, 51, 82, 226n24

cumbia, 109, 117, 130–31, 136, 172, 180–81, 200–3, 211–15, 246n120, 247n123

D’Arienzo, Juan, 73–74, 79, 229n5

Davis, Miles, 33, 40, 43, 46, 50, 61, 97

De Caro, Julio, 73–75, 79, 81, 85, 88

De Los Ríos, Waldo, 131, 236n92

De Ushuaia a La Quiaca, 197–98, 244nn61–63

“Delicado,” 35–36

Divididos, 203–6, 210

Dixon, Bill, 57–58

doo-wop, 110, 114–17, 140, 148, 217

Dylan, Bob, 162, 169, 175, 195

“El arriero,” 62, 66, 157, 204

El Club del Clan, 116–17, 119, 151, 182, 211

Ellington, Duke, 27, 30, 150

EMI, 2, 5–6, 37

Estefan Jr., Emilio, 206–7

exoticism: in Argentina, 16, 19, 21, 29–30, 120, 159, 187; in Europe, 22, 157, 161, 164, 217–19; in the United States, 1, 6–7, 41–42, 45, 50, 59, 68, 99, 101–2, 107, 163, 208–9, 217–19

Fabulosos Cadillacs, 202–3, 205, 209, 212

Falú, Eduardo, 148, 163, 165, 173

Feather, Leonard, 27, 48, 53, 67

Ferrer, Horacio, 95–96

folklore studies, 144, 167

Francia, Tito, 149–50, 163, 238n27

free jazz, 40, 52, 55–63, 68, 95, 227n58

Frigerio, Rogelio, 80, 91, 106, 148, 153

Frondizi, Arturo, 80, 91, 96, 113, 153, 165

fusion (jazz genre), 40, 61, 72, 97–99, 101–2, 187, 189–91, 228nn71–72

Galarza, Ramona, 151, 238n32

Galeazzi, Ricardo, 44–45

García Charly, 97, 138, 175–76, 178, 189, 195–96, 244n53

Gardel, Carlos, 8–9, 21, 73, 85, 113–14, 125, 134, 142

Gauchesque, 146. See also criollismo

Gershwin, George, 34, 73–74

Getz, Stan, 34, 47–49, 53, 89, 101, 103, 226n30

Gieco, León, 138, 175–76, 178, 195, 197–98, 244nn61–63

Gilberto, João, 47, 49, 53, 218, 226n40

“Gillespiana,” 46–47

Gillespie, Dizzy, 33, 42–51, 53, 55, 63, 64, 100, 226nn29–30

Ginastera, Alberto, 74–76

Globalization, 3–7, 10–11, 14, 21, 109, 180, 216–17, 219

“Gracias a la vida,” 169, 175

Gran Rex Theatre, 97–98, 106, 139, 169

Grinbank, Daniel, 174

Grinberg, Miguel, 99, 104–6

Guarany, Horacio, 157, 170, 172, 238n45

Guzmán, Enrique, 116–18. See also Los Teen Tops.

Haden, Charlie, 57, 59–61

Haley, Bill, 80, 111, 114, 147, 182

Hancock, Herbie, 97, 99

Hanrahan, Kip, 102–3, 106, 232nn92–93

Hawaiian music, 18–22, 24–25, 222n12

hippies, 66, 97, 162, 183, 239n69

Hollywood film, 8, 41, 51–52, 111, 113–14, 215

indigenismo, 157, 169, 239n51

Instituto Di Tella, 93–94

internal migrants, 10, 145–46

Jara, Víctor, 169, 171, 177

Jazz: in Argentina, 7–8, 29–31, 33–38, 43, 45, 53–54, 76; in France, 22–27, 76–77; See also cool jazz, swing, free jazz, fusion, Latin jazz

Jazz Composers Guild, 57–58

Jobim, Antônio Carlos, 47–49, 56, 87, 226n40

Jones, Quincy, 47–48, 52, 232n79

Jones, Tom, 124, 131, 134

“Juana Azurduy,” 166–67, 173–74

Kenton, Stan, 34, 42–43, 45, 50–51, 69, 75, 225n22, 229n8

Kerpel, Aníbal, 191, 194, 200

Kingston Trio, 147–48

Kleinman, Ricardo, 183–84

“La balsa,” 183

“La Camorra,” 102–3

Lamarque, Libertad, 8, 135

Lang, Eddie, 21, 27

Last Tango in Paris, 63–64, 215

Latin music: in Argentina, 202; as expression of ethnicity, 40, 48, 52, 62, 68; in film, 50, 63; in fusion, 61, 190; North American stereotypes of, 42, 59, 63, 66–67, 69, 82–84, 101, 107, 190; produced in Miami, 6, 193, 206–7. See also Latin jazz; rock latino

Latin jazz, 40–45, 60–65, 68–69, 76, 83, 86, 102–3, 107, 190

La voz de la zafra, 151, 153–54, 158, 164, 239n72

Lees, Gene, 48, 53, 55

Les Loups, 18–22, 24, 28, 222n14

Lippman + Rau, 164, 168

Lobo, Gastão Bueno, 18–22

López Ruiz, Oscar, 89, 90, 100

López, Oscar, 199–200

“Lo que vendrá,” 78, 86

Los Angeles, 6, 13, 180–81, 189–95, 198, 200, 203, 206–7, 210

Los Cantores de Quilla Huasi, 148–49, 157

Los Chalchaleros, 147–49

Los Cinco Latinos, 114–15, 118, 131

Los Fronterizos, 148, 164

Los Gatos, 183, 185

Los Huanca Hua, 94, 148–49, 157

Los Incas, 44, 167–68

Los Lobos, 193, 243n44

Los Teen Tops, 116, 118, 182, 197

Luna, Buenaventura, 153, 157

Luna, Félix, 165–66, 172, 174, 176

Luna Park Stadium, 176–77, 189

Machito [pseud. for Frank Grillo], 42, 44, 63–64, 82, 101

Mahavishnu Orchestra, 189–90, 210

Maldita Vecindad y Los Hijos del Quinto Patio, 200–3, 206, 208–9, 245n77, 246n111

Malvicino, Horacio, 54, 79, 88–89, 100, 102

mambo, 9, 44–45, 82–83, 111, 117, 201–2, 209, 225n4, 245n85

“Mañana campestre,” 186, 195

Mancini, Henry, 50, 52

Mano Negra, 202–3, 245n88

Márbiz, Julio, 149, 155, 171

Matus, Oscar, 149–51, 153–54, 164, 168, 238n27, 238n37, 239n72, 240n87

maxixe, 23–24, 41

Mejía, Ricardo, 115–16, 151–52

Mendoza, 149–53

Menem, Carlos, 139, 210–11, 213–14

Miami, 6, 128, 136–37, 180, 192–93, 205–7

Miami Sound Machine, 193, 206

middle class, 66, 132, 161, 172, 181, 203, 214, 231n59; and anti-Peronism, 10, 13, 77, 79, 145; and cosmopolitanism, 89–91, 96, 107, 111, 138, 207; musical tastes of, 72, 77, 79–80, 135, 140, 143, 147–49, 165, 167–68, 187–88, 211, 217, 219

Mihanovich, Sergio, 54–55

Mission Impossible theme song, 50–51, 68, 215

Modern Jazz Quartet, 87

Molar, Ben, 114–16, 118, 121, 141

Montoneros, 170, 173, 188, 240n98

Montreux Jazz Festival, 1, 65, 100–1

Moreira, Airto, 61, 100, 190

Movimiento Nuevo Cancionero, 143, 149, 151–54, 157, 161–62, 167, 175, 178

MTV Latino, 139, 180, 205

Mulligan, Gerry, 50, 76, 87, 103, 226n40, 229n13

música tropical, 117, 130, 181, 203, 211–12

music piracy, 220

Nascimento, Milton, 100, 176, 190

nationalism. See cosmopolitan nationalism

negrophilia, 16, 22–23, 27, 29

neoliberalism, 139, 181, 207, 210–11, 214, 219

Neustadt, Bernardo, 90–91

Nueva Cancíon (Chilean folk song movement), 2, 161, 168–71. See also Parra, Violeta

Nueva Ola, 92–93, 95–97, 110, 116–19, 127–28, 130, 149, 151, 182, 195, 218

New Tango, 37, 53–54, 60, 71–72, 84–107, 113, 149, 217

New York City: Latin American musicians in, 41–42, 46, 48, 64, 70, 72–73, 81–83, 89, 97, 128–30, 192–93; musical associations with, 36, 74, 88; music recorded in, 6, 55–56, 102, 196; reception of music in, 8, 94, 103, 130–32, 208, 221n16

Octeto Buenos Aires, 77–83, 100, 106, 233n106

Odeon Records, 2, 5, 7, 24, 29, 34–37, 113–14, 151–52, 237n16

O’Farrill, Chico, 64–65

Oito Batutas, 23

Onganía, Juan Carlos, 137, 166, 182

Opa, 190

Ortega, Ramón “Palito,” 117, 119, 121, 125, 132, 134, 137, 142, 196–97

Pacheco, Johnny, 82–83

Páez, Fito, 1–2, 176, 178, 244n57, 246n115

Palmer, Robert, 59, 62–63, 67

Paris, 89, 242n30; folk music in, 44, 157–58, 161, 167–68; jazz in, 15–16, 21–29, 36, 38, 55, 87; Latin jazz in 44–45, 83; tango in, 8, 43–44, 75–77, 99, 105

Parker, Charlie, 33, 43–45, 53

Parra, Violeta, 1–2, 14, 161, 168–69, 175, 179, 240n88, 244n63

Pel-Mex, 129–30, 132

Pérez Prado, Dámaso, 44, 201–2

Perón, Juan, 10, 30, 71, 75, 77–80, 91, 93, 107, 134, 137, 145–46, 157, 170, 172–73. See also anti-Peronism.

Philips Records, 2, 152, 155, 163–65, 167, 169, 179, 219

Piazzolla, Astor: and Aníbal Troilo, 74, 92, 96; and anti-Peronism, 77–79, 105; and classical music, 75, 85–86; and cosmopolitan nationalism, 92–94; criticizes Gato Barbieri, 63, 87; and fusion, 97–99; and jazz, 13, 75, 79, 83, 87–89, 100–1; as middle-class icon, 90–91; and the New Tango, 84–85; in New York, 72–73, 81–83, 94; and nostalgia, 104–7; in Paris, 75–77; reception in the United States, 94–95, 102–4; and rock music, 96–97; as a tango modernizer, 37, 78–81; and world music, 99, 101–2

piqueteros, 214

Plugz, The, 193–95, 197, 199, 202, 243nn43–44

Police, The, 191–92, 196, 202, 244n53

Polnareff, Michel, 123–24

Pozo, Chano, 42, 44, 48, 63

“Prepárense,” 60, 76

Presley, Elvis, 1, 80, 109, 114, 117, 122, 182

Primera Plana, 20, 67, 91–92, 93, 159, 171

primitivism, 23, 143, 158–60, 169, 187, 217

Puerto Rican: audiences, 128–33, 137, 192–93; musicians, 42, 45, 116, 125, 178, 181, 206

punk rock, 180, 191, 193–94, 198–202, 208–9, 212243n46

Purim, Flora, 61, 190

Qué, 80–81, 91, 148

Quiero llenarme de ti,” 124, 129–30, 135, 183

Quilapayún, 168–70

Quinteto J-T, 82–86, 218

Quinteto Nuevo Tango. See New Tango

race: European ideas about, 9–10, 24; and folk music, 157, 162–63; and jazz, 21, 30–31, 57–58, 63, 225n8; and Latin music, 48; and rock latino, 209–10; and ska, 201; and tango, 21, 31–33. See also Alemán, Oscar: and blackness; cabecitas negras; Sosa, Mercedes: indigenous image; Sandro: racial identity of

Ramírez, Ariel, 148, 158, 163–66, 172–73

Raphael, 124–25, 131, 134

RCA Victor, 5, 84, 110, 112–13, 115–17, 145, 151–52, 155, 163, 183–85, 189, 195, 212. See also Victor Records

reggae, 192, 196, 201–2, 204

Reinhardt, Django, 23, 25, 27–28, 30, 34

Revolución Libertadora, 77–79, 146

Rocha, Glauber, 58–60

rock and roll, 10, 36, 54, 80, 82, 92, 109–18, 121–25, 127, 128, 131, 135, 181–82, 213, 218

rock chabón, 210–12

rock latino, 138–39, 180–81, 200–15, 217, 219

rock nacional, 96–97, 121–22, 135, 137–38, 179, 182–89, 195, 209–12, 219

“Rosa, Rosa,” 124–25

Sábato, Ernesto, 163, 165, 176, 240n79

Salgán, Horacio, 31–33, 36–37, 53

salsa, 51, 82, 101–3, 130–31, 136, 192, 202, 205, 212, 225n4

Sanders, Pharoah, 56, 59, 62

Sandro [pseud. for Roberto Sánchez]: as bad boy, 119; and balada, 109–10, 122–25, 136–38, 181, 183; comeback of, 138–40; erotic appeal of, 121, 125; as gypsy, 120–21, 132; as Latin American star, 128–32, 142–43, 185, 196, 204, 210, 218; as lower-class icon, 134–36; racial identity of, 132–33; and rock and roll, 110, 118, 122, 125, 197

Sanremo, 123–24

Santaolalla, Gustavo: and Argentine folk music, 13, 180, 185–89, 197–98; in Argentine rock scene, 182–85; and Chicano punk, 193–94; as film composer, 215; and fusion, 187, 189–91; in Los Angeles, 191–94; and new wave music, 191–92; as rock latino producer, 181, 199–200, 202–9, 212, 217, 219; as rock modernizer, 195–97

Schifrin, Boris “Lalo”: and bossa nova, 47–49, 218; celebrated in Argentina, 66, 71; criticizes free jazz, 52; criticizes rock and roll, 111; as film and television composer, 50–52; as jazz bandleader, 45, 53; and Latin identity, 12–13, 46–48, 59, 68, 82; and Latin jazz, 44–45, 75–76, 83; as proponent of modern jazz, 34, 43; and tango, 44, 76–77

ska, 180, 194, 198–99, 201–3, 208–9, 212–13, 243n45

Soda Stereo, 138–39, 196, 199, 205, 210

Solanas, Fernando “Pino,” 105–6, 233n106

Sony Records, 6, 206, 212

Sosa, Mercedes: commercial success of, 142; cosmopolitanism of, 162–63; exile of, 174; indigenous image of, 13, 143, 155–56, 158–61; as La Negra, 173–74, 177; and Latin Americanism, 167, 169–71, 173; and Movimiento Nuevo Cancionero, 149–50, 153–54; and Nueva Canción, 2, 168–70; and Perón government, 144, 146; and Philips Records, 163–65, 167; and RCA Victor, 151–52; and representations of Argentine history, 166–67, 171–72; returns to Argentina, 137, 174–78

Spinetta, Luis Alberto, 14, 135, 138, 183. See also Almendra

Sumac, Yma, 44–45

Sumo, 202, 204, 210

Surco Records, 205–9

swing: attribute of music, 22, 28, 77, 88–89, 190; style of jazz, 30, 34–35, 37, 41, 43, 45, 54, 61, 78, 86, 115, 147

“Take Five,” 51, 185

tango; for Argentine audiences, 5, 7, 9, 19–20, 21, 29–30, 53, 70–75, 109, 113, 117–18, 133–34, 150, 152, 175; commercial decline, 36–37, 78, 146–47, 153; in France, 22–23, 43–44, 75–77; Latin American market for, 24, 113–14; in the United States, 8, 41, 61, 64, 81–82. See also New Tango; Piazzolla, Astor; race: and tango

Tejada Gómez, Armando, 149–54, 164, 171–72, 178, 240n87

third worldism, 14, 40, 58–60, 101 208, 214, 218

Tico Records, 82–83

Timerman, Jacobo, 91, 232n100. See also Primera Plana

Tormo, Antonio 144–46, 148, 150

Torre Nilsson, Leopoldo, 166, 176

tresillo, 84, 230n35

Troilo, Aníbal, 144–46, 148, 150

Tucumán, 117, 134, 144, 146, 151, 156–57, 161. See also Argentina: Northwest region

Tucumán 676 (nightclub), 53, 88, 94, 227n51, 233n106

Two Tone, 201–2

Universal Music Group, 6, 205–8, 213, 245n94

Uruguay: audiences in, 29, 33, 153, 173; musicians from, 17, 115, 167, 169–71, 181, 190, 206, 208, 215

Valladares, Lena, 60, 158, 186, 189, 194, 197

Victor Records, 7, 19–21. See also RCA Victor

Viglietti, Daniel, 167, 170

Walsh, María Elena, 14, 158, 177

Weather Report, 61, 97, 187, 190

Whiteman, Paul, 21, 23–24

world music, 13, 56, 72, 99–107, 181, 197–98, 208–9, 219, 246n111

yeites, 82, 84–85, 98, 100, 230n37

Yupanqui, Atahualpa, 14, 44–45, 62, 66, 153, 157–58, 167–68, 174, 204, 239n51

zamba, 148–49, 151, 154, 186, 190, 242n15

ZAS, 196, 199