Improvised Music in Buenos Aires
published, in a slightly different version, in The Wire (London) 399 (May 2017)
“The music we’ve chosen to play,” says multi-reed instrumentalist Luis Conde, “is a space where we’re always standing in the midst of a crisis, a crisis of the elements. I couldn’t have asked for better than that.” Improvised music is not for the faint of heart, and in Buenos Aires even less so, yet it does seem to be flourishing there—the audiences at events I attended in late 2016 were no smaller than at home in Brooklyn, and the music is every bit as engaging. As in European and American cities, the music survives on a DIY homemade spirit to subvert conventions and construct a kind of presence. But the struggle is waged against greater odds. “We find our support in the vortex of the crisis, the instability,” continues Conde, who followed a circuitous route through literature, free jazz, and rock to reach his current activity of the past two decades. “We have no place, but we’re connected with everyone, with people in Europe, the US, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, and we have good dialogues with them all.” That fruitful rapport can be heard in his provocative duo performance (Mirrors Edges) with Norwegian saxophonist Frode Gjerstad, as well as their trio (Give and Take) with Conde’s partner, pianist Fabiana Galante.
published, in a slightly different version, in The Wire (London) 399 (May 2017)
“The music we’ve chosen to play,” says multi-reed instrumentalist Luis Conde, “is a space where we’re always standing in the midst of a crisis, a crisis of the elements. I couldn’t have asked for better than that.” Improvised music is not for the faint of heart, and in Buenos Aires even less so, yet it does seem to be flourishing there—the audiences at events I attended in late 2016 were no smaller than at home in Brooklyn, and the music is every bit as engaging. As in European and American cities, the music survives on a DIY homemade spirit to subvert conventions and construct a kind of presence. But the struggle is waged against greater odds. “We find our support in the vortex of the crisis, the instability,” continues Conde, who followed a circuitous route through literature, free jazz, and rock to reach his current activity of the past two decades. “We have no place, but we’re connected with everyone, with people in Europe, the US, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, and we have good dialogues with them all.” That fruitful rapport can be heard in his provocative duo performance (Mirrors Edges) with Norwegian saxophonist Frode Gjerstad, as well as their trio (Give and Take) with Conde’s partner, pianist Fabiana Galante.
Photo by Irene Devlin-Weiss
Conde and Galante live in a comfortable modern apartment near the northern city limit. Though the open floor plan makes it look otherwise, their place isn’t really all that large, enough to host some friends, his horns, and her Steinway baby grand, along with the upright in the hallway, both inherited from her family. Like him, she is in her early fifties and also took a winding path to her practice as an improviser, but from an early and extensive training in classical and contemporary music, including a degree in piano from the rigorous program at the university of La Plata and a master’s that she did in Scotland; Conde started studying music intensively when he was twenty-six. To underline the precariousness of the experimental musician’s life there, Galante notes there is generally “no state support for improvised music” in Argentina, “nor for art practices that are hard to classify like ours.” Yet she finds benefit in such conditions, since the musicians have nothing to lose, “which generates perhaps another type of musical situation. The degree of risk, in terms of the sound, is left to our own devices. So we can do what we want.” Indeed, the free improvisers in Buenos Aires tend to be fearless in what they take on, experimenting with whatever suits them and creating their own opportunities.
As a measure of such initiative, for the past ten years Galante has co-produced the series Instantes Sonoros with Carlos Murat, who has documented most of the events on video—the YouTube channel Warnesgroup holds an invaluable trove of his videos covering improvised music in Buenos Aires, and he has built up an important audiovisual archive dating back to the late 1990s. Instantes Sonoros presents “improvised music, performance, sound art, nearly everything outside of the mainstream, that has no clear label,” according to Galante, and the organizers pay out of their own pockets to maintain the series at Domus Artis, a cultural center in Villa Urquiza, a northern district of the city. All the local improvisers have played there, as well as many foreign musicians, each knowing that the pay will be minimal. In the early years, the series had one night a month, with two or three groups per event; but last year, they had just three dates in total. Galante is inevitably stoical about its survival in the current political and economic winds: “Perhaps that will be the end of it, or maybe it will continue somewhere else.” Which fits with Conde’s perception of improvised music there as having aspects of a nomadic existence. “We seek out our own spaces, which keep changing all the time,” he says. “A music that has to always be new cannot be played always in the same place. It has to be mobile, traveling.”
How much do the musicians themselves manage to travel? Since the last economic shock in 2000-2001, with the Argentine default and the devaluation of the peso—a period in which, paradoxically, improvised music has grown most—some practitioners moved to Europe or the US, but of the many who stayed most have played abroad at least a little. Conde’s first improvising trio performed at Roulette in New York in 2001 and at the Improvisa festival in Barcelona; in 2011, along with Galante and electric guitarist Fernando Perales, they all joined Chilean musicians in Santiago to perform John Zorn’s Cobra; and in 2016, he did a three-week residency in Santiago, working with local musicians and non-musicians to develop a piece based on five Chilean poets. Perhaps the most intrepid traveler has been trumpeter Leonel Kaplan, who was focused in the past fifteen-plus years on extended techniques and the purest matters of sound (as in his fascinating if austere duet with German trumpeter Birgit Ulher on Stereo Trumpet, from 2015). Now in his early forties and shifting direction, he initially studied mainstream jazz, which led to free jazz and the avant-garde, and thus to Bill Dixon’s work. Around 2000, he began to know improvisers and composers in Buenos Aires who were oriented more toward texture, incorporating sensibilities from contemporary music: Sergio Merce, Lucio Capece, Gabriel Paiuk, Diego Chamy, and Luis Conde as well. They formed the collective Música Actual en Buenos Aires and organized numerous concerts before it ceased activities around 2007.
How much do the musicians themselves manage to travel? Since the last economic shock in 2000-2001, with the Argentine default and the devaluation of the peso—a period in which, paradoxically, improvised music has grown most—some practitioners moved to Europe or the US, but of the many who stayed most have played abroad at least a little. Conde’s first improvising trio performed at Roulette in New York in 2001 and at the Improvisa festival in Barcelona; in 2011, along with Galante and electric guitarist Fernando Perales, they all joined Chilean musicians in Santiago to perform John Zorn’s Cobra; and in 2016, he did a three-week residency in Santiago, working with local musicians and non-musicians to develop a piece based on five Chilean poets. Perhaps the most intrepid traveler has been trumpeter Leonel Kaplan, who was focused in the past fifteen-plus years on extended techniques and the purest matters of sound (as in his fascinating if austere duet with German trumpeter Birgit Ulher on Stereo Trumpet, from 2015). Now in his early forties and shifting direction, he initially studied mainstream jazz, which led to free jazz and the avant-garde, and thus to Bill Dixon’s work. Around 2000, he began to know improvisers and composers in Buenos Aires who were oriented more toward texture, incorporating sensibilities from contemporary music: Sergio Merce, Lucio Capece, Gabriel Paiuk, Diego Chamy, and Luis Conde as well. They formed the collective Música Actual en Buenos Aires and organized numerous concerts before it ceased activities around 2007.
I caught up with Kaplan one morning at his studio in the Flores district, west of the city center, part of a cluster of spaces that he shares with painters, before he had to scoot off on his bicycle to pick up his kid from school; a few days later, he was presenting a duo concert of new work in that same studio. Regarding the Música Actual years, he says, “there was even a point when we had a certain ‘support’ from the state, which lasted for a year until they realized they didn’t like it and threw us all out.” Soon, though, he was going to Europe, and did various tours with Wade Matthews, Axel Dörner, Michel Doneda, and with Nate Wooley in the US as well. Playing abroad, he realized, “ends up not much different than in Argentina. We all have the same problems. I had the opportunity to see many different realities, and now I’m at peace with myself. I’m here, this is what I’m doing. The people I play with or relate to, in a certain sense they too are outsiders in their own countries. I’m further away, but that’s all.” During the same period, for several years, he also toured throughout Argentina as a duo with percussionist Diego Chamy. “The places we played ranged from universities to towns where there was nothing. We had every sort of audience. It was a lot like in the ‘60s and ‘70s in Europe and Eastern Europe, that sort of energy. To suddenly go play in a very small town, and an older woman comes who says it made her think of the wind or when she’s in the mountains, or people come who say you’re like the Hitler of music. There were even fights, between people who wanted us to stop playing and people who wanted us to keep playing. It was a very rich experience.”
Guillermo Gregorio, Brooklyn, 2017
Improvised music in Argentina has been around a long time. But years of dictatorship prevented any continuity, effecting a “cultural blackout,” as Ernesto Sábato put it. As a result, improvisers of today came to their practice with little sense of local history beyond a certain jazz or contemporary music lineage, splintered by exile. The late ‘60s did offer some shocks to the musical system—in a city that was no stranger to the avant-garde—which did not take hold exactly but registered on the landscape. One such jolt was borne from afar, its passage more prolonged than expected. In June 1966, just as General Juan Carlos Onganía was leading a military coup d’état, Steve Lacy’s quartet arrived in Buenos Aires: not exactly safe harbor for free jazz. Despite opposition the group gained a small following, appearing on television, at a museum, in private homes, but they couldn’t earn enough for their return flights. When the quartet—Lacy, Enrico Rava, Johnny Dyani, Louis Moholo, a supergroup in retrospect—played at the venerable Instituto di Tella, whose experimental music center was directed by the composer Alberto Ginastera, Lacy instructed the group to do two free improvised sets of twenty minutes each; it proved to be their only document of the whole adventure, and The Forest and The Zoo was released by the ESP label the following year.
A more fundamental precursor to later improvisers in Buenos Aires, however, was the work of Movimiento Música Más, a collective formed in 1967 by the core trio of musician-composers Guillermo Gregorio, Norberto Chavarri, and Roque De Pedro, along with various artist and non-artist associates. They staged musical events and interventions throughout the city, including on public transport (in Chavarri’s 1971 piece Música para Colectivo línea 7, six musicians boarded a city bus and proceeded to turn it into a musical instrument from inside), and played improvised music in concert halls, always in a spirit of art provocations and social engagement. Whether bold or foolish, they continued to perform publicly throughout the dictatorship (that one ended in ‘73, but the worst was to come three years later). Musicians like Conde and Kaplan only became aware of MMM years after they themselves had already been playing. Kaplan eventually got to know Gregorio on visits to the States. And Conde is organizing a reunion and tribute to the collective in Buenos Aires between May and August of 2017.
While researching in advance of my trip to Argentina, I kept running across the name of Enrique Norris. Around the time of Steve Lacy’s visit to the capital, out west a day’s journey in the city of Río Cuarto (province of Córdoba), the future cornet player and pianist was in high school and acquiring his first jazz record, the Glenn Miller Story soundtrack (with two pieces by Louis Armstrong’s group). Over the next twenty years Norris studied and worked with many musicians in the region until he moved to Buenos Aires in 1985; thirty years after that, he has become a sprightly elder of improvised music, leading his own Norris Trio for a decade now and playing in other groups, some with former students. From a classical music family, and a lifelong listener to the radio, he developed an agile imagination and a wide appreciation of music; whatever he does ends up sounding original. To date, he has put out eight records of the trio, most recently Tonadoda in 2016. “Each time we make a record,” he says, “many tunes are left out, because we play a lot of pieces throughout the year, our own and by other people we like—Monk, Ornette, Duke, Sun Ra. I like to think of the music we do as coming from jazz, with a lot of freedom.”
A more fundamental precursor to later improvisers in Buenos Aires, however, was the work of Movimiento Música Más, a collective formed in 1967 by the core trio of musician-composers Guillermo Gregorio, Norberto Chavarri, and Roque De Pedro, along with various artist and non-artist associates. They staged musical events and interventions throughout the city, including on public transport (in Chavarri’s 1971 piece Música para Colectivo línea 7, six musicians boarded a city bus and proceeded to turn it into a musical instrument from inside), and played improvised music in concert halls, always in a spirit of art provocations and social engagement. Whether bold or foolish, they continued to perform publicly throughout the dictatorship (that one ended in ‘73, but the worst was to come three years later). Musicians like Conde and Kaplan only became aware of MMM years after they themselves had already been playing. Kaplan eventually got to know Gregorio on visits to the States. And Conde is organizing a reunion and tribute to the collective in Buenos Aires between May and August of 2017.
While researching in advance of my trip to Argentina, I kept running across the name of Enrique Norris. Around the time of Steve Lacy’s visit to the capital, out west a day’s journey in the city of Río Cuarto (province of Córdoba), the future cornet player and pianist was in high school and acquiring his first jazz record, the Glenn Miller Story soundtrack (with two pieces by Louis Armstrong’s group). Over the next twenty years Norris studied and worked with many musicians in the region until he moved to Buenos Aires in 1985; thirty years after that, he has become a sprightly elder of improvised music, leading his own Norris Trio for a decade now and playing in other groups, some with former students. From a classical music family, and a lifelong listener to the radio, he developed an agile imagination and a wide appreciation of music; whatever he does ends up sounding original. To date, he has put out eight records of the trio, most recently Tonadoda in 2016. “Each time we make a record,” he says, “many tunes are left out, because we play a lot of pieces throughout the year, our own and by other people we like—Monk, Ornette, Duke, Sun Ra. I like to think of the music we do as coming from jazz, with a lot of freedom.”
Photo by Irene Devlin-Weiss
Norris does not own a cell phone, and only goes online every couple of days at an internet café. Still, when I mentioned in my first email that I would like to hear more about Lacy’s lost year in Buenos Aires, he replied with a substantial dossier of documents on the subject in English and Spanish and a long list of names. A month later, I discovered he lives and works in a smallish studio apartment in the Abasto area, a few blocks from Gardel’s house. The simplicity of his abode confirmed what I’d already suspected: he lives for music. I even asked younger musicians if his setup was due to economic difficulties, but they were convinced it was a personal choice.
Although he is clearly steeped in the jazz tradition, including its extensions into his own land, his music does not sound derivative; it is as alive and new as any improvised music. “If you can connect with musicians who are open, you have an enormous language. It doesn’t matter where you were born,” says Norris. “That’s fantastic, each person bringing what they know, what they can, also what they don’t know.” On our last night we saw the trio perform at the loft-like club Roseti; after leading off with a Bobby Bradford tune, they presented all originals. With their keen interplay, the crisp and flexible timing, the inventive solos, we might as well have been in the jazz capital.
Although he is clearly steeped in the jazz tradition, including its extensions into his own land, his music does not sound derivative; it is as alive and new as any improvised music. “If you can connect with musicians who are open, you have an enormous language. It doesn’t matter where you were born,” says Norris. “That’s fantastic, each person bringing what they know, what they can, also what they don’t know.” On our last night we saw the trio perform at the loft-like club Roseti; after leading off with a Bobby Bradford tune, they presented all originals. With their keen interplay, the crisp and flexible timing, the inventive solos, we might as well have been in the jazz capital.
Photo by Catu Hardoy
As with most places, improvising musicians in Buenos Aires often end up teaching, which helps to reinforce and broaden certain musical perspectives. For years Norris has taught in the jazz division of the Conservatorio Manuel de Falla; he was also Kaplan’s first teacher some twenty-five years ago, who fondly recalls Norris’s zen approach and extended discussions about music. Kaplan, in turn, has a number of amateur and professional adult students. “What I teach, first of all, is technique,” he says. “As a tool for loosening restraints. We never work with the music in front of us. Whatever we play, it’s by ear. I want them to listen.” Galante as well has private students, as does Conde, but for the past four years they have also been jointly teaching a course in the electronic arts program at the Untref (Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero), called “Sound Structures.” In their weekly four-hour course, they don’t separate theory and practice. “We’re always more concerned with questioning things than with following a certain line of thinking,” says Galante. “We try to pass on to them the widest perspective possible. Since we are people who give importance to improvised music, contemporary music, folk music, performance, sound art, somehow we try to give them a sense of all that, and how to resolve specific sound situations.”
Though they didn’t study much with Norris, pianist Paula Shocron and percussionist Pablo Díaz—partners, in their early thirties, who got to know each other through him—continue to regard him as a sort of sensei and collaborate with him on several fronts. Shocron, who also teaches at the conservatory, included Norris in her 12-piece large ensemble project of 2010 (Gran Ensamble), and four years later they performed a splendid duo concert (Sono-Psico-Cósmica) at the acclaimed Usina del Arte, a converted electrical power plant in La Boca; she even appeared as a guest on his last trio record. Díaz, who teaches at a private music school and works with children’s orchestras, is the longtime drummer in the Norris Trio and also features him in his own smart quintet alongside Shocron. His tenure in the trio became Díaz’s main education in jazz and free music, and led him to more recent improvisation experiments with Conde and many others, but he started by studying mainstream jazz as a teenager, including with Daniel Piazzolla. “Jazz,” he says, “is a music that for us Argentines is from very far away,” and so it requires an extra effort, a cultural leap of faith. “Being born here, living here, the constant contact with cultural questions of the place, Argentine music is more indelible in us than a swing pattern. Like the chacarera rhythm, though I’ve never played it, ends up being closer somehow. Because it’s already there.” Perhaps something of that distance might explain how the music always stays distinctive, though there’s not much detachment in evidence on the quintet's first record, Destemporizador (2016).
In contrast to his formation, Shocron was taking piano lessons since the age of five; as somewhat of a prodigy growing up in the provincial city of Rosario (province of Santa Fe), she was surrounded by music in her family, from classical to folk, but the early regimen of recitals and competitions took a physical toll, which led to a parallel activity in dance and movement. Studying composition in her late teens, she also began to explore improvisation on her own. “That was the place I felt I could really be what I was,” she says. By the time she moved to Buenos Aires in her early twenties and investigated the jazz tradition more fully, improvising was already second nature to her. Like their older colleagues, Díaz and Shocron maintain a thoroughly open attitude to musical possibilities, seeking at every turn to “erase a bit the dividing lines between styles and disciplines,” as she puts it. And in the last few years, they too have begun to travel—to New York each summer, where they were twice hosted under the auspices of percussionist Andrew Drury’s Continuum Culture & Arts organization, and played in his Soup & Sound house concert series; they also played and recorded with Cooper-Moore, William Parker, Daniel Carter, and Ras Moshe.
In Buenos Aires, the pair are engaged in collective initiatives as well. Creatividad en Movimiento, launched by saxophonist Miguel Crozzoli who ended up moving to Europe, devolved largely to Díaz and Shocron as an effort to generate a certain sustainability in the creative arts. Currently seeking to achieve nonprofit status, in 2016 the group produced more than twenty interdisciplinary public interventions (duo or trio improvised concerts in parks and squares, often with dance, text, voice) in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, as well as educational outreach and cultural exchanges, in addition to maintaining their website and a blog with multiple contributors reflecting on music and arts. At the same time, Shocron launched her own Proyecto IMUDA to explore the relation between music and movement. An ever widening cast of improvising musicians, dancers, and other artists have taken part in their events, in Buenos Aires, Rosario, and New York, all of it well documented on their YouTube channel.
Though they didn’t study much with Norris, pianist Paula Shocron and percussionist Pablo Díaz—partners, in their early thirties, who got to know each other through him—continue to regard him as a sort of sensei and collaborate with him on several fronts. Shocron, who also teaches at the conservatory, included Norris in her 12-piece large ensemble project of 2010 (Gran Ensamble), and four years later they performed a splendid duo concert (Sono-Psico-Cósmica) at the acclaimed Usina del Arte, a converted electrical power plant in La Boca; she even appeared as a guest on his last trio record. Díaz, who teaches at a private music school and works with children’s orchestras, is the longtime drummer in the Norris Trio and also features him in his own smart quintet alongside Shocron. His tenure in the trio became Díaz’s main education in jazz and free music, and led him to more recent improvisation experiments with Conde and many others, but he started by studying mainstream jazz as a teenager, including with Daniel Piazzolla. “Jazz,” he says, “is a music that for us Argentines is from very far away,” and so it requires an extra effort, a cultural leap of faith. “Being born here, living here, the constant contact with cultural questions of the place, Argentine music is more indelible in us than a swing pattern. Like the chacarera rhythm, though I’ve never played it, ends up being closer somehow. Because it’s already there.” Perhaps something of that distance might explain how the music always stays distinctive, though there’s not much detachment in evidence on the quintet's first record, Destemporizador (2016).
In contrast to his formation, Shocron was taking piano lessons since the age of five; as somewhat of a prodigy growing up in the provincial city of Rosario (province of Santa Fe), she was surrounded by music in her family, from classical to folk, but the early regimen of recitals and competitions took a physical toll, which led to a parallel activity in dance and movement. Studying composition in her late teens, she also began to explore improvisation on her own. “That was the place I felt I could really be what I was,” she says. By the time she moved to Buenos Aires in her early twenties and investigated the jazz tradition more fully, improvising was already second nature to her. Like their older colleagues, Díaz and Shocron maintain a thoroughly open attitude to musical possibilities, seeking at every turn to “erase a bit the dividing lines between styles and disciplines,” as she puts it. And in the last few years, they too have begun to travel—to New York each summer, where they were twice hosted under the auspices of percussionist Andrew Drury’s Continuum Culture & Arts organization, and played in his Soup & Sound house concert series; they also played and recorded with Cooper-Moore, William Parker, Daniel Carter, and Ras Moshe.
In Buenos Aires, the pair are engaged in collective initiatives as well. Creatividad en Movimiento, launched by saxophonist Miguel Crozzoli who ended up moving to Europe, devolved largely to Díaz and Shocron as an effort to generate a certain sustainability in the creative arts. Currently seeking to achieve nonprofit status, in 2016 the group produced more than twenty interdisciplinary public interventions (duo or trio improvised concerts in parks and squares, often with dance, text, voice) in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, as well as educational outreach and cultural exchanges, in addition to maintaining their website and a blog with multiple contributors reflecting on music and arts. At the same time, Shocron launched her own Proyecto IMUDA to explore the relation between music and movement. An ever widening cast of improvising musicians, dancers, and other artists have taken part in their events, in Buenos Aires, Rosario, and New York, all of it well documented on their YouTube channel.
One of the most telling aspects of a musical culture in the modern age is its record production and there too the world of improvised music in Buenos Aires proves resourceful. Tiny musician-run labels are the norm, often with minimal packaging. Electric guitarist Subh Das’s Jardinista! Recs, with its folded paper covers in a plastic sleeve, has released several titles by Conde in the company of Perales, Galante, and others. Zelmar Garín’s Noseso Records, which lately graduated to gatefold sleeves, has likewise featured Conde in various outings, from his duo of bass clarinet and contrabass (Maquinazen) to his turn in Garín’s own free rock band Acido Canario; Noseso has lately joined with a Chilean counterpart and the British label FMR to co-produce a new project that Conde has with guitarist and longtime collaborator Ramiro Molina (a key figure in the improvised music scene in Santiago, Chile), Rulemares (Atractor Extraño). Díaz, Shocron, and Crozzoli recently launched the label Nendo Dango for their own projects, and already in the past year eight titles have come out, including their New York exploits. Norris himself came to the conclusion a decade ago that producing his own records made the only sense, on his humble label Enonane Records where every item is handcrafted and sold mostly at his concerts; these include not just the trio releases but also the marvelous madcap Discado Internacional by MuniMuni’s, his duo with protean multilingual vocalist Barbara Togander that incorporates theatrical elements, found sounds, and tape collage.
The last musician I met on my journey was saxophonist Pablo Ledesma. I first encountered his name over a decade ago, when I read of him playing Lacy’s music. In 2000, he gave the first all-Lacy concert in Argentina, in a quartet with Enrique Norris; subsequently, he released the duo record Memorial: Steve Lacy (2007) with pianist Pepe Angelillo. These days, he often plays with Leonel Kaplan and Mono Hurtado on string bass, who comes more from folk music and tango, and occasionally with Luis Conde. Another who came from afar, Ledesma grew up way in the interior of the province of Buenos Aires, in Henderson, a town on the pampas, where as a teenager in the early ‘70s he listened to British rock, which led him to Miles and Coltrane. He took up the saxophone while studying in La Plata, some sixty kilometers southeast of Buenos Aires, where he devoted himself completely to academic study and played in the symphony orchestra. But he was also playing jazz, and focused increasingly on improvised music. “Argentina is a very isolated country,” he says. “Things always arrive slowly here. I began to hear about improvised music in the 1980s, but here there was nothing like it. So, when Lacy arrived in 1966, it must have had a strong impact, because that didn’t exist here.”
Ledesma has taught at the conservatory in La Plata for thirty years now; he got into Lacy’s music by way of Italian pianist Gianni Lenoci, who was visiting in ‘95. Later, he toured Britain several times, and also recorded some far-reaching improvised encounters with Spanish pianist Agustí Fernández (Improvocaciones). Like the others, however faraway he may have felt from the tradition of improvised music, he has made it his own and turned it in new ways.
At the moment, the primary conundrum for free music in Buenos Aires remains where to play. Improvised music, not being consumer-oriented, tends toward smaller spaces, but in recent years the city government has cracked down on the modest cultural clubs found in many neighborhoods where a mix of artistic events would be held, regulating them instead on the same terms as larger, single-purpose venues. Many places had to close, while others became more clandestine. So, it is common enough these days to hear of a concert by word of mouth and then have to call someone to get the address; or, as with Roseti in the Chacarita district and La Pipa de la Pepa in Recoleta, which both have a Facebook presence, you ring the bell at the street door for someone to come let you in. And of course there are more concerts in musicians’ own apartments and studios. In a dynamic new video tightly shot by Murat in Conde and Galante’s place, they can be seen performing with Díaz and Shocron, the upright and the baby grand from Galante’s family enjoying a rare dialogue, while people stand along every wall intently listening.
The last musician I met on my journey was saxophonist Pablo Ledesma. I first encountered his name over a decade ago, when I read of him playing Lacy’s music. In 2000, he gave the first all-Lacy concert in Argentina, in a quartet with Enrique Norris; subsequently, he released the duo record Memorial: Steve Lacy (2007) with pianist Pepe Angelillo. These days, he often plays with Leonel Kaplan and Mono Hurtado on string bass, who comes more from folk music and tango, and occasionally with Luis Conde. Another who came from afar, Ledesma grew up way in the interior of the province of Buenos Aires, in Henderson, a town on the pampas, where as a teenager in the early ‘70s he listened to British rock, which led him to Miles and Coltrane. He took up the saxophone while studying in La Plata, some sixty kilometers southeast of Buenos Aires, where he devoted himself completely to academic study and played in the symphony orchestra. But he was also playing jazz, and focused increasingly on improvised music. “Argentina is a very isolated country,” he says. “Things always arrive slowly here. I began to hear about improvised music in the 1980s, but here there was nothing like it. So, when Lacy arrived in 1966, it must have had a strong impact, because that didn’t exist here.”
Ledesma has taught at the conservatory in La Plata for thirty years now; he got into Lacy’s music by way of Italian pianist Gianni Lenoci, who was visiting in ‘95. Later, he toured Britain several times, and also recorded some far-reaching improvised encounters with Spanish pianist Agustí Fernández (Improvocaciones). Like the others, however faraway he may have felt from the tradition of improvised music, he has made it his own and turned it in new ways.
At the moment, the primary conundrum for free music in Buenos Aires remains where to play. Improvised music, not being consumer-oriented, tends toward smaller spaces, but in recent years the city government has cracked down on the modest cultural clubs found in many neighborhoods where a mix of artistic events would be held, regulating them instead on the same terms as larger, single-purpose venues. Many places had to close, while others became more clandestine. So, it is common enough these days to hear of a concert by word of mouth and then have to call someone to get the address; or, as with Roseti in the Chacarita district and La Pipa de la Pepa in Recoleta, which both have a Facebook presence, you ring the bell at the street door for someone to come let you in. And of course there are more concerts in musicians’ own apartments and studios. In a dynamic new video tightly shot by Murat in Conde and Galante’s place, they can be seen performing with Díaz and Shocron, the upright and the baby grand from Galante’s family enjoying a rare dialogue, while people stand along every wall intently listening.