By Eric Benson

Jazz is often called the United States’ only original art form – a music that was born in New Orleans, grew up in Chicago, and reached maturity in New York. Yet, for the last 50 years, jazz has become an increasingly international idiom, boasting significant players from every continent of the world.

As a city with a decidedly international outlook, Buenos Aires has long had a vibrant jazz culture. Some like the great Ástor Piazzolla have blended jazz and the city’s native music, tango, into an unmistakable Argentine sound; while others have stayed closer to the traditional beat, allowing Argentina to enter into the music in less direct ways.

Today, clubs, record labels, and underground jam sessions are cropping up all over Buenos Aires. In the hopes of giving a rounded impression of just what propels the jazz world here, The Argentimes looked at three very different places where the music is alive, growing, and taking risks.

The Recording Session

It’s the second six-hour day of recording and guitarist Ale Demogli and his quintet are putting the finishing touches on what will shortly become the album ‘Just Songs’. “It’s good man, but I’m tired,” Demogli says as the band takes a break between takes at the elegant Sound Rec studio in Villa Crespo.

Sound Rec is about as upscale a venue as you could expect to come across in Buenos Aires. Gleaming hardwood floors and trimmings adorn the interior, and an immaculate 7-foot Steinway grand sits in the centre recording room. There’s no clutter – just high-end audio equipment and clean lines. Yet, it’s not sterile. With a cosy couch and ample leather chairs, it looks like it could be the loft apartment of a very wealthy minimalist composer with a passion for oak.

Demogli and the rest of the quintet – Fernando Pugliese on piano, Mariano Sivori on bass, Oscar Giunta on drums, and Pablo Ledesma on saxophones – move back into the recording studio for what will be their penultimate track. Giunta, Sivori, and Ledesma all have separate soundproof rooms.

“The drums and sax are the loudest instruments, and the bass is the most delicate,” explains Axel Dross, the recording and mixing engineer who also worked with Demogli on his last album, ‘3.30’.

In the centre room, the Steinway shares space along with a soundproof fortress of eggshell-foam-covered walls that has been set up for Demogli and his guitar.

“If you have confidence, play it louder,” Dross says to the bassist Sivori, after the band has finished one of its takes.

“There are problems in the form, in the B we entered late,” the drummer Giunta adds, as the quintet prepares to begin playing again.

As the afternoon wears on, the process begins to take its toll. At 7:15pm before recording the last track, everyone stares out into the centre room where a man is suspending himself upside-down between two chairs. After a moment, we realise that it’s Demogli, a long-time yoga practitioner, preparing himself for the final push.

As the band prepares to start, Dross’s voice interrupts, “there’s an alien in the studio.” A tall English photographer scurries out of the centre room with a little red in her cheeks.

The band begins to play. After the first take, everyone seems satisfied, but Demogli insists on a second. After the second, the consensus seems to be to close, but again Demogli calls for another, determined to get it right.

“I can’t play anymore,” Ledesma says.

“Demogli, it’s a quarter to eight,” Dross pipes in.

But with the studio rented until eight o’clock sharp and the album not quite perfect, Demogli insists on more. A tired Ledesma squeaks awkwardly through the beginning of the melody, but rights himself as the band goes into the solos. By the middle of the song, the quintet is sharp as ever, ending with the kind of energetic flourish that comes with that triumphant step over the finish line. The band piles into the sound booth to relax, chat, and sip mate. “Difficult, difficult,” says the pianist Pugliese.

Sound Rec
Serrano 194
4855-5049
www.soundrec.com

The Jam

“Just ring the bell, tell them that you’re with me and everything will be okay,” read the email my friend sent me about the house in Nuñez. I’d never been to an underground jam session before and the prospect of knocking on the front door of strange house was a little scary and a little exhilarating.

The entry proved easy, and on the inside I found a packed house of twenty-somethings arranged across what normally serves as a living room floor. The area under the stairs had been turned into a full-service bar, and, with a fernet-and-coke in hand, I leaned against the back wall for a night of music.

The room had surprisingly good acoustics for an improvised performance space, complete with well-adjusted amplification that brought the bass to an audible rumble even as the sax dominated the small room.

The people there all looked like students, post-students, or would-be-students – intellectual-types who passed their Friday nights at a dimly-lit jazz hideaway rather than at a trendy club in Palermo Hollywood.

With the quartet – Leo Paganini on sax, Ariel Naon on bass, Rodriguez Reparaz on drums, and JP de Mendonça on guitar – at full-tilt, the music couldn’t help but be the focus of the room. This was a listening space after all, but a rather casual one – a place for musicians to feel free and work out the kinks.

A couple at my feet, interested in each other more than the quartet’s rendition of Wayne Shorter’s ‘JuJu’, locked lips; others splayed out on couches exchanged a few words over the music’s propulsive dance.

The quartet finished its set and, shortly thereafter, a jam session commenced. A whole new cast of musicians took the stage, with guitars trading off solos and the drumming chair changing hands several times.

Paganini hopped off the bandstand only to be drafted into work as a bartender. The rest of the quartet greeted friends and checked out the music that was now roiling the place.

By 2:30am the music had stopped. “They’re worried about the neighbours complaining,” Paganini explained. I left but the house was still full. Maybe after a pause, the music would start up again with a smaller crowd and less amplification.

On this night though, I wouldn’t find out. Trudging back along the tree-lined streets the music still hummed.

The Clubs

Clubs are the central showcases of the jazz world, the places where players earn the majority of their usually humble incomes, and the venues where the public is let in on the process. Seeing a jazz group in a concert hall or an outdoor festival pales by comparison to seeing one in the right club setting. It’s an intimate music, and a good club allows a listener to feel part of the improvisatory process.

Buenos Aires has plenty of jazz clubs. There’s Perro Andaluz and Kebaytina in San Telmo, Notorious in Barrio Norte, and Virasoro Bar in Palermo. Clubs like No Avestruz and Eter Club feature jazz acts several nights a week. Bookstores like Clasica y Moderna host jazz groups with regularity.
All of these places are valuable venues, but if I had one night to see jazz in the world’s pre-eminent tango town, there’s no doubt that I would go to Thelonious. Begun in 2000, by musician brothers Ezequiel and Lucas Cutaia, Thelonious has quickly become the most important jazz club in the city. The Cutaia Brothers champion daring jazz that is solidly based in the music’s tradition, attracting a group of highly educated, forward-looking musicians who make up the core of the new Argentina jazz.

The musicians who play at Thelonious are a distinct jazz community. Many of them studied in the US at Berklee College of Music in Boston, or at instrument specific institutions in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles; they revere the jazz tradition but also look to local musical idioms like tango and folkloric music for inspiration; they play in each other’s groups, forming a network of small combos and big bands with many members in common. The musicians who play at Thelonious also hang out there. On any night, you’re bound to find musicians in the audience, checking out what their fellow musician’s are up to.

There are several small attributes that most good jazz clubs share – limited or no food service (you don’t want a waiter bugging you in the middle of a solo), intimacy, and isolation (a basement or second-floor location is usually a lot quieter than a store-front venue). Thelonious has all of these attributes along with its own bit of high-ceilinged, funky-chandeliered quirkiness.

Throughout jazz history, musical movements have had certain clubs that have fostered their existence – be it Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem helping give birth to bop, or the Half Note in the West Village serving as home turf for the avant-garde. The new Argentine jazz isn’t quite a movement – although the next few years could see it develop into one – but it’s clear that Thelonious is the place in which the music is happening and growing.

Thelonious may be at the centre of the Buenos Aires jazz world, but it is by no means the only club at which creative music is happening. Notorious, the city’s most luxurious jazz club, is a bit stuffy; it’s expensive, has a decidedly older clientele than Thelonious, and features an annoyingly loud coffee grinder along with the music – but it also hosts some of the very best jazz acts in Argentina. It’s not a place to hang-out like Thelonious, but much of its programming is beyond reproach.

Eter Club – a small, new venue in the suburban neighbourhood of Villa del Parque – deserves more notoriety. Eter hosts a Thursday night jam session that attracts many of the same young, engaged musicians that play at the private jam session house. On other nights, Eter hosts both jazz and other varieties of music. For groups that haven’t quite made it to the level of notoriety necessary to pack Thelonious, Eter is a crucial space for nurturing talent.

When I arrived in Buenos Aires, I expected the jazz scene to be quaint and imitative. What I found was a serious jazz culture that was determined to leave its mark. Buenos Aires may never be the jazz hotbed that New York or Chicago is, but it is nonetheless becoming a vital force on the international jazz scene. In the recording studios, jam sessions, and clubs of Buenos Aires there is a creative music that is pulsing with the rhythm of the streets and the soul of Argentine musicians who have made a foreign music into something that is very much their own.

Thelonious
Salguero 1884, 1st Floor (Corner of Güemes)
Palermo
4829-1562
www.theloniousclub.com.ar