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6Chapter One:9 To be continued . . .By JOHN McCLAVE ’75CHAPTER ONE: LATIN AMERICA. By Gato Barbieri. ABC Impulse. $5.98 (list).North Americans and Europeans have labeledArgentine saxophonist Gato Barbieri a jazz musician, and Down Beat magazine’s 1973 critic’s poll saw him ranked with the top tenor players in the world. But he has always had a sound all his own, and is as unmistakable as a musician can be. He established himself through his performances and recordings with first-rate jazz men. But his latest effort, “Chapter One: Latin America” has him in his best musical setting ever, and one can’t help sensing that his entire career has been leading up to it. “Chapter One” is a beautiful tribute to the people of Latin America. It also signals a turning point for one of the most exciting musicians we have today—Barbieri has refined as a performer, matured as a composer, and developed a whole new base to build from.Gato, who recognizes himself as a musical spokesman for the Third World, has assembled what the album’s notes call “an astonishing aggregation of Third World musicians” to play a variety of unusual Latin American reed, string, and percussion instruments. These instruments complement the “jazz combo” basics for a sound that is new to the North American ear, and goes beyond what we recognize as jazz. Most of the LP was recorded in Buenos Aires, withthe closing section done in Rio de Janeiro.Jazz festival Big Band sound“Chapter One” is the latest (and last, it seems) of five albums released this year, each of which captures Gato in a different musical guise. The United Artists sound track from “Last Tango in Paris,” which he wrote and performed, is little more than movie music, with all its limitations, lost without the film (although I wish Hollywood would get more Barbieris and less Mancinis.) Oliver Nelson’s “Swiss Suite,” released last spring by Flying Dutchman, features Gato’s finest recorded solo, the climax to a soaring extended piecewritten by Nelson for a star-studded “big band” at the1971 Montreaux jazz festival. Gato’s last two albums for Flying Dutchman, “Under Fire” and “Bolivia,” had him walking the line between “accessible” treatments of his characteristically challenging delivery and Latino-pop pieces bordering on “easy listening,” and it almost appeared that the latter would take over. His Impulse debut shows quite clearly that that did not happen; it’s his most ambitious project to date.The record’s opening piece, “Encuentros,”deepens as it flows, utilizing the array of instruments to the fullest. The focus is on Gato who, as always, drifts from dream-like smooth flowing lines to fiery intensity without jolting the listener in transition. His control ofthe energy of the song sets a tone of primitive beauty that is sustained through the rest of the album. “India” is a hauntingly evocative piece built around Raul Mercado’s performance on a quena, an Indian flute. Side two is dominated by the four movement “La China. . .” that begins with an ominous dialogue between Gato and the percussion instruments, then shifts to end with two driving jams on which the band, to put it in the perspective of North American musical values, cooks. Unfortunately, these short jams give us only, glimpses of what these guys can do when they really get going, all at once. But they put the listener under quite a spell, however brief.Aside from its aesthetic qualities, “Chapter One” exposes us to an unexplored side of popular Latin American music, what we might think of as the “progressive” side. The possibilities for the instruments of the land in the hands of innovative musicians is exciting. What has always been sold to us as Latin American music has never broken from the commercial “easy listening” mold—Sergio Mendes with a “bossanova” rendition of “Fool on the Hill” and the like. Even though numerous Brazilian pop musicians have tried working out of the confines of commercial demand, their material gets to us in poorly-translated palpable forms by such people as Eumir Deodato. Even Gato isn’t entirely free from sleazy tendencies—“Nunca Mas,” the last full piece on “Chapter One,” could be a standard for the Baja Marimba Band. This easy tune focuses on Dino Saluzzi’s bandoneon, a button ac-cordian. I’m convinced the accordian is generally%misused, aad someone somewhere is playing a far-out accordian. But not Saluzzi. It’s a catchy tune, though, and doesn’t weaken the well mastered end-to-flow of the album.In the “To Be Continued” section, Gato takes the mike and does us the unexpected favor of identifying each instrument by its sound. He closes with a promise: “Hasta mi proxime album, “Chapter Two: Latin America. . .” and gives a fade-out farewell on his saxophone. “Chapter One” is satisfying in itself, but it is not the crystallization of all Barbieri’s designs.“Hastael proxime,” indeed. Gato and his friends have a great deal to tell us about their land, and “Chapter One” is an enticing introduction.
Newspaper Details
Princeton Daily Princetonian
Princeton, New Jersey, US
Wed, Oct 24, 1973
Page 6
Full Page
Clipped by
University O.
TX, USA 27 Sep 2022
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