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| 3.726 Ft
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| 1. | Nunca Mas
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| 2. | India
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| 3. | Encontros
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| 4. | Latino America
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| 5. | Gato Gato
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| 6. | Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado
What a Difference a Day Makes
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| 7. | Viva Emiliano Zapata
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| 8. | El Sublime
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| 9. | Milonga Triste
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| 10. | To Be Continued
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Jazz / Latin Jazz; Jazz-Pop
In 1972, at the age of thirty-eight, Leandro J. Barbieri, the Argentina-born saxophonist best known as Gato, was suddenly shining brightly, a new jazz star for an era when musical categories were crumbling and bridges were being built between styles long thought unconnected.
That year, Barbieri was lured to Impulse after gaining notoriety and a Grammy nomination for his sensuous soundtrack to an erotically charged cinematic sensation starring Marlon Brando. "He was signed because of Last Tango in Paris," recalls Impulse producer Ed Michel.
Barbieri seemed destined for Impulse from the start. Born in 1934 and blossoming early, he had fallen under the spell of John Coltrane, the label's leading light, while still in Argentina. He had visited Europe, falling in with avant-garde jazz players like trumpeter Don Cherry. He then moved to New York, where he recorded as a leader for the modest ESP-Disk label (as had Impulse leaders like Albert Ayler and Marion Brown) and played on Charlie Haden's sole Impulse album, Liberation Music Orchestra, as well as Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill. In 1969, he was hand-picked by producer Bob Thiele, who had just departed Impulse Records, as one of the first artists on his fledgling Flying Dutchman label.
On saxophone, Barbieri possessed a gentle growl that - to Michel and many others - was reminiscent of another who had found success on Impulse. "Gato and Pharoah [Sanders] were very similar in the way they shaped musical forms," Michel says. "Pharoah would take an R&B lick and shake it until it vibrated to death, into freedom, and let it coalesce over a long time. Gato was not dissimilar." In addition, the two favored lengthy jams, percussion suggesting far-off lands, and spirited saxophone solos with a leonine tone.
There was one other point of consideration for Barbieri's jump to Impulse (preceded by a brief legal tug of wills between Thiele and his former higher-ups at ABC Records, parent company to Impulse). As Michel recalls: "Gato was keen for it, explaining to me that he wanted to record for Coltrane's label."
Barbieri's four discs for Impulse, titled Chapter One through Chapter Four, served as a virtual South American tour. The saxophonist himself speaks of them with pride and a still-thick accent. "I leave Flying Dutchman and I go to Impulse - four albums. I think it was my idea; maybe it was Michelle, my ex-wife. What I wanted to do is to touch on the most important music of Latin America. So I'll go to Buenos Aires and pick musicians. I'll go to Brazil. . . ."
Paying for a big band is one thing. ABC's decision to invest in Barbieri was generous even by rock standards. The company eventually bankrolled the overseas recording sessions, and flew musicians up from South America for a European tour. "The Big Dogs [at ABC] went for it," Michel related in his liner notes to the CD collection Latino America. "There were bucks in South America (from the label's foreign licensees), and record companies down there would know something about the whereabouts of good recording studios."
At first, the venture was worthy of Job, facing a battery of challenges that included in rapid succession: a band walkout, a dearth of professional recording tape, and a power outage deliberately caused by a local electricians guild. Then there was the general political unrest endemic to South America. And that was just the first week.
The first stop was Buenos Aires, where well-placed grease of the folding variety, and a few well-placed friends, eventually allowed three days of recording with an Argentinean folkloric group. "I record some of my songs and some other songs from the Indians," Barbieri states, referring to the indigenous musicians in the ten-piece lineup. "There are three or four drummers, a regular rhythm section, electric bass, and drums. Three different guitars and Indian harp that has only one tonality, and the quena [wooden flute], the charango [a small ten-string guitar made from an armadillo shell], the bombo indio [goatskin-headed tom-tom drums]. They are very . . . not just brilliant. They are, 'Boom!'"
The next stop was Rio de Janeiro, where the sessions were filled with the sonorities of another native folkloric tradition. "We go to many places to find musicians, especially not playing the bossa nova," remembers Barbieri. "Musicians of escolas de sambas - schools of samba. It was so beautiful in Rio in those days." The resulting samba-jazz mix was more traditional in instrumentation and song forms than the sophisticated bossa nova of the mid-Seventies, and yet more edgy and modern as well, as Barbieri's tenor bristled with a proud avant-garde edge.
The two-week trip brought forth Chapter One: Latin America and most of the follow-up Chapter Two: Hasta Siempre. As Michel put it, the two albums succeeded in making "the combination of South American culture and post-Coltrane jazz sensibility a functional reality."
"Please keep in mind that in the early Seventies, the idea of 'world music' was not a hot button," the producer added, explaining that nonetheless this was "Gato's initial vision. He wanted to do a combination of what he referred to as folkloric music and tango and samba and record it all with players who weren't studio players, guys who played naturally in their tradition."
The first album sold exceedingly well, enough to warrant flying up an Argentinean group to record further tracks in the US in late 1973 for Chapter Two, holding sessions in Los Angeles in 1974, and hiring a Latin jazz orchestra led by the legendary arranger-bandleader Chico O'Farrill, generating Chapter Three: Viva Emiliano Zapata, with a more familiar Latin big-band jazz sound on tracks like "El Sublime" and "Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado" ("What a Difference a Day Makes" in its original Latin guise).
In 1974, six days of recording at the Bottom Line nightclub in New York - with, among others, Ron Carter on bass and Howard Johnson on various instruments - yielded Chapter Four: Alive in New York, reworkings of various originals like the tango "Milonga Triste," and a close to Barbieri's relationship with the label.
Before the Seventies drew to a close, Barbieri began recording for A&M Records, where he adopted a mellower sound that dovetailed with the good-feeling jazz then leaping onto the popular LP charts. It's a bit of a mind-boggle to consider that he had progressed so far, so fast - from edgy avant-gardista to tango maestro to South American adventurer to pop-jazz crossover in ten short years. Certainly other jazzmen had amazed with their speed of progress - think of Coltrane from '57 to '67 - but it's difficult to imagine any other Impulse star appearing on an LP cover reclining on a tropical beach in a white outfit with tenor at hand (as Barbieri did in 1978).
Of his success at Impulse, Barbieri remains proud of the individual sound he was able to find. "If you listen in retrospective, it's incredible. But in those days the jazz people they don't consider me a jazz musician. If I am Latin, they don't consider me Latin. So I am here in the middle. . . . It's a good thing! You know why? Because they say, 'What do you play?' I say, 'I play my music - Gato Barbieri.' I don't owe anything to anybody."
---Ashley Kahn, February 2006
Gato Barbieri - Tenor Saxophone
Adalberto Cevasco - (1-2, 4) Bass
Raul Mercado - (2) Quena
Antonio Pantoja - (2, 4) Anapa
Amadeo Monges - (2, 4) Arpa India
Quelo Palacios - (2, 4) Acoustic Guitar
El Zurdo Roizner - (2, 4) Percussion
Domingo Cura - (2, 4) Bombo Indio
Novelli - (3, 10) Bass
Raul Mercado - (4) Quena
Ricardo Lew - (4) Electric Guitar
John Pisano - (5) Acoustic Guitar
Lee Ritenour - (5) Electric Guitar
Jim Hughart - (5) Bass
Randy Brecker - (6) Trumpet, Flugelhorn
Bob McCoy - (6) Trumpet, Flugelhorn
Victor Paz - (6) Trumpet, Flugelhorn
Buddy Morrow - (6) Trombone
Alan Raph - (6-8) Bass Trombone
Ray Alonge - (6-8) French Horn
Jimmy Buffington - (6-8) French Horn
Seldon Powell - (6-8) Flute
Howard Johnson - (6-9) Bass Clarinet
Eddie Martinez - (6-9) Piano, Keyboards
George Davis - (6) Acoustic Guitar
Ron Carter - (6-9) Bass
Ray Armando - (6-9) Percussion
Luis Mangual - (6-8) Percussion
Ray Mantilla - (6-8) Percussion
Grady Tate - (6-8) Drums |
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