Musicians in Transit: Argentina and The
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MUSICIANS IN TRANSIT Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music matthew b. karush MUSICIANS IN TRANSIT Argentina and the Globalization of Popu lar Music matthew b. karush Duke University Press • Durham and London • 2017 © 2017 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 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 pop u lar music / Matthew B. Karush. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: 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 Amer i ca. | Music and transnationalism— Latin Amer i ca. Classifi cation: lcc ml231.5 .k37 2016 (print) | lcc ml231.5 (ebook) | ddc 780.92/282— dc23 lc rec ord 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 Acknowl edgments • ix Note about Online Resources • xi Introduction • 1 1 Black in Buenos Aires: Oscar Alemán and the Transnational History of Swing • 15 2 Argentines into Latins: The Jazz Histories of Lalo Schifrin and Gato Barbieri • 39 3 Cosmopolitan Tango: Astor Piazzolla at Home and Abroad • 70 4 The Sound of Latin Amer i ca: Sandro and the Invention of Balada • 108 5 Indigenous Argentina and Revolutionary Latin Amer i ca: Mercedes Sosa and the Multiple Meanings of Folk Music • 142 6 The Music of Globalization: Gustavo Santaolalla and the Production of Rock Latino • 179 Conclusion • 216 Notes • 221 Bibliography • 249 Index • 263 viii • Contents ac know ledg ments 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 particu- larly 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, Deb- orah 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 Hanra- han 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 effi cient and supportive as any author could want. In Mark Healey and Bryan McCann, Gisela found two terrifi c readers; they provided generous, insightful, and illu- minating 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 teach- ing obligations for a year, while the History and Art History Department and the Provost’s Offi ce 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 (Cam- bridge: 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 diff er ent 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 fi nal product. x • Ac know ledg ments 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 per for mances, 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 Switzer- land, the Argentine rock star Fito Páez was asked to consider the place of Latin American pop u lar 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 in equality that structures global cultural exchange. Popu lar music produced in the United States and Britain has been elevated to uni- versal status, a cultural product that is consumed and emulated everywhere in the world. By contrast, the music of other socie ties is of more par tic u lar, local signifi cance; 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 Jack- son, 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 counter parts? 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 com pany emi and, in fact, the same com pany that distributed the Beatles albums in South Amer i ca. In this sense, Parra’s was a typical case: corporations based in the United States and Eu rope were responsible for the majority of music record- ing and sales in Latin Amer i ca throughout the twentieth century; they forged the commercial links that allowed pop u lar music to circulate. The globalized music industry made it pos si ble for Argentines like Páez to hear both the Bea- tles 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 Amer i ca. Although Sosa shared her com pany’s desire to sell rec ords, her decision to rec ord these songs refl ected her own po liti cal ide- als: 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 eff ort 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 meta phorical border cross- ing created a new marketing opportunity for the multinationals and thereby shifted the transnational fl ow of pop u lar music. Musicians like Parra and Sosa pursued their own aesthetic and ideological goals as they traveled along cir- cuits 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 trans- national music industry, they transformed them. This book will trace the itineraries of seven infl uential musicians from Ar- gentina in the de cades 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, Eu rope, and Latin Amer i ca proved consequential. Deeply enmeshed in a transnational fi eld, their nationality nonetheless mattered: it gave them access to specifi c cultural resources, it es- tablished a par tic u lar 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 po liti cal power. They confronted genre distinctions, marketing conventions, and even ethnic 2 • Introduction or cultural identities, all of which imposed limitations but also created com- mercial and musical opportunities. Responding creatively to these opportuni- ties, they produced innovative music and achieved commercial success, but they also generated new ways of conceptualizing their national, regional, and ethnic identities.