Chilean Jazz History

(Cristian Medina)

On the west , Chile is limited by the world’s largest ocean. On the north it is separated from Peru by one of the world’s largest desert. On th east, one of the world’s highest chains of mountains marks its borders with Bolivia and Argentina. Its southern limit is the Antarctic. Thus until the advent of massive commercial air travel, it was practically an island, and a remote one that. In spite of its 500 kilometers of length, because neither the desert, the arid coast, the mountains, or the rainy and cold southern forest were of agricultural use, most of its population concentrated in relatively small valley area spread along less than 1000 kilometers between La Serena, in the north and Los Angeles in the south.
Chile´s original inhabitants, the araucanians, were hunting and fighting nomads. Neither the almighty Inca empire nor the Spaniards were able to conquer them. They continued to fight the Chileans army well into the nineteenth century. As a result they were pitilessly decimated and left almost no cultural heritage. Dallying with the Indian women, the Spanish conquistadores and laters arrival from the Iberian peninsula fathered the first meztizo contingent. Many further immigrations from the old world completed the population. When compared with other American countries, the mixture appears quite homogenous because the Chileans were isolated and concentrated in an area that wasn’t very large. Lacking strong Indian traditions, but marked nevertheless by Chile’s powerful geographical features, the country’s people modified their old world heritage and slowly established their eclectic national identity.
Jazz or least what went for jazz at the time, had reached Chileans shores by the mid twenties, as witnessed by musicologist and critic Pablo Garrido in Recuento Integral del Jazz en Chile, an article which appeared in “Para Todos Magazine”, 10 June 1935 : “Les’s turn the clock back to the middle of 1924, when I assembled what was then considered to be a jazz orchestra. It considered three violins, three saxophones, one clarinet, two trumpets, one trombone, tuba, banjo, drums and piano. With this line up, which I called “The Royal Orchestra”, I gave a concert audition at the Vidor hall in Valparaiso, the city where I had made my career, and besides, several shows at the Colon theatre. With my brother Juan, we started forming a sizable nucleus of jazz, many of whom are today among the best-known Chileans professionals in the field. Interest for jazz was the awakening through records and especially, by the constantly growing prestige of the famous Paul Whiteman. However, as our Latin spirit is no well attuned to the Saxon muse, we fell inevitably into “pastiche” or parody of jazz. Thus, as jazz ensembles started to appear (and I’m not speaking only for Chile), their performances were musical assassinations!. Few were the bands with played with a American instrumentations, almost all were making do with simple piano parts, resulting in the melody being triplicated and even quadruplicated by the various instruments. You have a bear in mind that the only way to hear real jazz was from records, as we had yet neither sound movies nor radio (1925) there was a dance hall in Valparaiso which is memorable for ist place in the history of jazz, the well-known “Baños del Parque”, in those day it was the most brilliant venue on the pacific coast. It had the shimmering atmosphere of great capital cities, of cosmopolitans centre. You listened there to everybody who was somebody and you heard the hits of the world almost simultaneously with the great urban canters, where they originated: fox trots, Charleston, tangos, etc. And at Baños del Paruqe we sometimes heard musicians from north American an English ships, who gave freely of their time to enliven even more joyful and dreamy atmosphere. In those days we all listened and little by little, we all learned”
Jazz is very volatile, most of it is created on the spur of the moment, even recording, the only way of preserving a performance, is inadequated, because is shows only part of the picture. Thus, most jazz history is lost forever. Many artist never recorded. Many did not make recordings that were representative of their best efforts. And, even for those whose work has been extensively documented, the greatest moments probably went unrecorded. The reason for this is that, comparated to the many, many hours of an artist’s public performances, the proportion of time that has been documented is negligible. However, for those od us who were not there recordings are all we have. We shall probably never learn the name of legendary chilenas musicians like pianist “chancho” martínez or cornetist Jumbito Pérez. We shall probably never learn the name of the extraordinary jazz player who takes the trumpet solo on “I Tenía Un Lunar”. It’s very lucky however that we have somo o the work pioneers like Huaso Aranguiz and Mario Escobar available on this CD. For this we should be grateful to visionary organizers (like Rene Eyheralde, who masterminded the Ases Chilenos del Jazz Victor sessions) as they gave us the chance to catch al least an echoe of the music that was being played in Chile at the time.