Chango Spasiuk: The Charm of Chamamé press/radio
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"Bravo!" de Trad Magazine France Chango Spasiuk The Charm of
Chamamé |
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"A feast of groundbreaking accordion-led argentine music" The sounds of country cattle
followed by a wild accordion tune may not suggest that what follows
is going to be as cutting edge as it is traditional, but that's
a fair description of the music of Chango Spasiuk and group. Songlines UK, January/February 2004 Jan Fairley |
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Chango Spasiuk Everyone and everything in Argentina is borne of a mixing of bloods, cultures, trends and topographies. Everyone knows the great urban fusion tango and many have heard the Andean 'criollo' (Spanish-Indian Creole) hybrid folk sound of Mercedes Sosa and Atahualpa Yupanqui. Far less well known is the music Chango Spasiuk plays - chamamé, a warm-hearted, accordion-based rhythm that taps into native Guaraní, Spanish, Brazilian, criollo and European traditions. Its natural home is north west Argentina (Spasiuk is from the deep green province of Misiones, made famous in the Merchant Ivory film The Mission, and much visited for its awesome Iguazú waterfalls). To this multi-stranded, complex but extremely popular regional form, Spasiuk brings a daring, virtuoso accordion style and elements of his own Ukrainian family roots. It was in fact the polka that gained him a following outside the folk circuit several years ago in Argentina, and he still includes several in his live repertoire. This, his seventh album, pulls together traditional songs and some of Spasiuk's own compositions from his most recent - and best - three albums. Throughout, he explores the tropical, dance-oriented, usually upbeat chamamé genre much in the manner of Piazzolla testing and pushing the tango. Tapping into chamamé's less obvious melancholy strains on "Preludio a um beija-flor" and "La Ponzoña", Spasiuk still manages to tease out sweet, seductive strains. During track 11's polka, we've got one foot in Kiev and the other in subtropical Argentina - both are dancing. Both Piazzolla and Yupanqui are definite inspirations here _- but so are Bartok, Tchaikovsky and the great writers of classic chamamé, Cocomorola, Montiel and Martínez Riera. This rich brew of classical, folk and modern musical influences makes for a sometimes clamorous collage of phrases and no end of digressions, but chamamé's gentle, seductive swing underpins the whole. It's a complicated journey to the bottom of a musical style so unknown outside Spasiuk's home region. But it is always enjoyable, and there is a searching, quasi-mystical element in Spasiuk's whirling, wandering solos -_ he talks of a 'vacio' or 'nothingness', a place to which only music can take you (track 7, an 'improvisation', finds Spasiuk in full-on abstract, ambient mood). Others will perhaps find a more earthy quality in the sound - sourced in chamamé's easy tempo and barn-dance spirit, which springs from a community-based celebration of everyday rural life, long train journeys, family ties and a sharing of woes and wonder. Somewhere between these two extremes - the metaphysical ponderings and the mooing of cows - Chango Spasiuk is making a powerful musical case for chamamé. Strong support, in particular Sebastián Villalba on guitar and vocals, and Chacho Ruiz Guiñazú on percussion, keep the rhythm a constant delight. The disc is breezy and refreshing, and reveals an utterly new side to the Argentine soul. The accordion is hardly a fashionable instrument - but try this one. You'll surprise yourself. Reviewer: Chris Moss BBC interactive, November 2003 |
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The radio DJ's ever-mounting pile of unheard albums demands a fast and inevitably arbitrary decision-making process. Reasons not to listen are welcome, to allow time to check out those records with more allure. On the front cover of The Charm of Chamamé sits a blond accordion player whose name, Chango Spasiuk, rings no bells in my head. Finnish, perhaps, or Latvian? On the back, a daunting nineteen tracks are listed. Later, if ever, for this one, which soon disappears under the pile of the next few days' post. Among the names announced for this year's London Jazz Festival in November are those of several unfamiliar musicians, but one sends me back to that pile on the floor. Retrieved from its hiding place, Chango Spasiuk's The Charm of Chamamé proves to be a delightful revelation. If the prospect of a 19-track album by an accordion player seems overwhelming, doubts are dispelled by the first sound we hear. A cow moos. Another answers. It's impossible to avoid smiling. Wherever we thought we were, we are suddenly far away from any city. Emerging out of the farmyard noises, the accordion announces its presence, and a rumbling, surging bass picks us up and whirls us around the room. If we did not have the benefit of a useful sleeve note, my best geographical guess would have been Mexico. But it turns out that this is a selection from the first three albums by the leading accordion player from the far north of Argentina, close to the border with Brazil, where at the start of the last century a substantial number of immigrants from Eastern Europe went to work in the jungle plantations. Two of Chango's grandparents were from Ukraine. By the time the album has finished, it feels as if we have heard references to every genre that was ever based around the accordion, including Louisiana Cajun waltzes, Polish mazurkas and Mexican border rancheros. But for each tune that has a vaguely familiar form, there are two others in styles that are new to me. Among three vocal tracks, Mercedes Sosa is featured on the final 'Solo Para Mi', but most of the tunes are instrumentals at varying tempos from whirlwind fast to stand-still slow, several finishing with applause. Justifying that billing in the London Jazz Festival, there's a strong sense of interplay between Chango and the other members of the small group (guitar, violin, stand-up bass, brushed drums). But although there's no doubt that Chango Spasiuk is a virtuoso with plenty of what the Americans call 'chops', this is not a jazz album and never becomes simply a demonstration of his technique. The aim is always to generate an atmosphere, not to impress us into awestruck reverence. The result is a record that will fill your living room with light or make you wish your car journey was long enough to hear the entire album in one sitting. Charlie Gillett Post-script: This review was written for the Observer Music Monthly and first published in the edition of November 16th. Since then, I have witnessed the debut concert by Chango and his band at the Purcell Rooms, and come face to face with their mastery when they played two songs live on my radio show on Saturday 22nd. Amazingly enough, considering my high expectations, they turned out to be even better than I dared hope. Be sure to catch when they return to Europe, and meanwhile look for this album. I defy you not to smile. |
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Chamamé is rustic, upbeat, and reveals a side of Argentina quite unlike the great urban form, tango. Chris Moss talks to accordionist Chango Spasiuk. My first experience of chamame
was Raul Barboza (the King of Chamame) playing at La Trastienda
in Buenos Aires. Then, in 1999, two friends inspired me to check
out Chango Spasiuk, an incredible accordionist creating a potent
hybrid of polka, folkloric, and this half forgotten country dance
music, chamamé. Talking to Spasiuk at London's
South Bank, I can only just keep up with his pace and erudition.
He talks like he plays, fluidly and forcefully, sometimes fierily.
He pours scorn on ex-president Menem and his frivolous politics
in the 90s, analyses the current economic crises, and he drops
in quotes from Gurdjieff, Jung and Bela Bartok, and from Piazzolla
and Yupanqui as if he read them all the night before. But above
all, he provides me with a multifaceted answer to the question:
what is chamamé? "People think of chamamé
as happy, lightweight music, but it's not that at all. It's over
300 years old and it's the product of a complex racial mixing
[mestizaje in Spanish],"' Spasiuk was already playing
the accordion by the time he was 11. His father, Lucas, worked
as a carpenter, but also played a mean violin; his uncle Marcos
was a singer. They would jam together in their patios. "I
was taught violin and I'd play Ukrainian music on that at first,"
recalls Spasiuk, "but on the radio they were playing chamamé
so I began to listen out for that, keep an eye on other musicians
in the region and learn from them." "It was never a question
of written music. There's something in chamamé that you
can't study - you are born and you live in a place where it's
always 40 degrees celsius, where after your siesta you go out
and everything around you looks out of focus. The earth is deep
red. You have to live with these impressions for a long time
and then learn to express them with an instrument. I am very
intuitive, almost never writing down the music I play." In his teens, he absorbed the
music of modern chamamé's founding fathers: Transito Cocomarola,
Isaco Abitbol, Ernesto Montiel and Bias Martinez Riera. He still
considers them the pillars of the genre - but insists that the
form needs taking forward and must not get grounded by fond nostalgia
for some idyllic 'folky' past. This he expresses in totally personal
terms: "I play to reveal what is around us now. I play to
search for beauty. But I play to arrive at something which is
in the future. Instead of saying 'I was,' I say 'I am'." He tells me "chamamé
is a style of music that existed before immigrants arrived -
the main contribution made by immigrants was the accordion. The
deepest roots go back to the Mbya Guarani, the natives who lived
in north-east Argentina before the arrival of the Spaniards.
Next came the Jesuits, who tried to educate the indigenous Guarani
through baroque music. After that, it's the turn of the criollos
- the creole people of European descent born on American
soil - which in my region mixes in turn with the Guarani." On Spasiuk's six Argentinian
solo albums - and on the The Charm of Chamame compilation
released in the UK last year - you can hear all the strands.
You can hear cows mooing, church bells ringing, steam trains
passing beyond the fields - all these both literally and figuratively
- and you hear a fiddle played for a funeral or a fiesta. There
are the rhythms of work songs. There are also slap bass guitar
and rock riffs in there - Spasiuk is a fan of Hendrix and Emerson,
Lake and Palmer, and has played with Divididos as well as less
well-known rock bands who do gigs in the underground rock circuit
in Buenos Aires, where he now lives. One Canadian critic commented
that everyone can hear their own folk music in Spasiuk's chamamés.
But there is always great artistry, the marriage of virtuoso
talents and a deeply rooted affinity with his music. Spasiuk
is always searching and his Béla Bartok quote. serves
as a kind of mantra: "Thrust yourself into the unknown from
what is already known but unbearable." Sometimes, indeed,
he seems to have fused the experimental rigour of classical geniuses
like Bartok with the basic, primal sound of ancient folk. It's
not quite 'Variations on a Theme from Knees Up Mother Brown',
but it's almost there. In addition to being Argentina's
leading chamamecero, Spasiuk is credited with reviving the polka
in his work. If he berates urban intellectuals for pigeonholing
chamame as country fun, he is no softer on folk purists. "People
from the region where I was born believe they can 'consume' the
polka music because it's very traditional, it's something they've
heard before. It's a bad habit which has become widespread throughout
Argentina, to, think that what is different is solely for intellectuals." In some ways, a couple of hours with Chango Spasiuk is a bit like going to therapy. You feel sorted and more confused at the same time - certainly more alert to music, culture and life in general. But for all the mental meanderings and issues unearthed, we constantly return to a search for definitions, which brings out,a missionary zeal in Spasiuk. But it goes way beyond definitions: "Chamamé is a music which is defined, but which is waiting to be developed. It's not an extinct aesthetic in the way that tango is.' Transformation is the end purpose - you have to do something,break it, and do it again." Chamamé is, he believes, like Latin America, "an open wound -nothing is closed." Chris Moss, Songlines July/August 2004 |
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Chango Spasiuk is wearing
light khaki bombachas. Like long baggy cotton plus fours,
they are the trousers of the Gaucho horsemen of Argentina who
traditionally herded cattle across the vast plains. "They're
comfy," he tells me, "I wear them all the time, on
and off stage,"~ They are what you might expect a man to
wear whose album opens with the sound of mooing cows. "I
recorded those cows about 20 kilometres from where I was born,
and the horses and birds and church bells on the disc, from the
places I grew up." Spasiuk plays the swingy emotional
dance music of the area called chamamé, its 6/8
rhythms full of criss-crossing movement for feet and hips. Unlike
tango and other Argentinian music played on the square bandoneon,
chamamé is played on the accordeon. It is, he tells me,
not music of an urban landscape but, "Of the country, deep
country." Misiones was populated by an
unusual mix of first the original Guarani people, then the Portuguese
and the Spanish who came with the idealist Jesuits, who fought
the iniquities of the conquest by setting up socialist missions
in the area for freed Indians and runaway slaves. They established
garden economies and lived respecting local language and custom
until they were expelled in 1767, their legacy the ideal of a
caring community. At the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th
century, a new group of immigrants arrived including Spasiuk's
Ukrainian grandparents: "Six Ukrainian and six Polish families
came in 1897 to the village where I was born and one of those
families was my grandparents. My father Lucas was born there
and he and my uncle Marcos grew up with the music of his family
and those immigrants, with polkas and waltzes and schottishes.
My father played them on the violin, my uncle sang them. Then
it was purely immigrant music: today it is the music of everyone,
the music you play for weddings, a baptism, a party." "You learn chamamé
by playing it live in the places where people come to hear it
and dance to it. I began to play accordeon when I was 11; I learned
from my dad and my uncle and most of what I learned from them
were rural polkas. I heard chamamé on radio and at dances
where the Where does the name chamamé
come from? "Chamamé means everything and nothing
really - no one is really sure of its origin, but it has a Guarani
rhythmic ring to it and also an African percussive quality. Some
say it was music that Guarani played, which I think is a little
far-fetched as their civilisation is ancient and they undoubtedly
had their own music and myths. Some say it is a deformation of
a Guarani word meaning doy sombra a menudo (I give
shade from time to time) , because chamamé was always
danced in these outdoor patios with red earth floors and plaited
roofs to shade you from the sun. There are various theories and
I reckon they are all valid." The Charm Of Chama me, the first Spasiuk disc available in
Europe, is a compilation of pieces chosen from his last three
CDs, including La Ponzona (The Gift, 1996); Polcas
de Mi Tierra {Polkas Of My Country,1999); and Chamame
Crudo (Raw Chamame, 2000). It features traditional, even
sentimental pieces from the northeast like Besela Doroha and
Starosta, as well as the characterful Gato Negro, a
local folk "Quite a lot are pieces
my father taught me which were originally Ukrainian. We recorded
them live in places in the countryside where the people get together,
actually at the time of the annual fiestas patronales, the
village patron saint festivals. The people work hard and then
enjoy the party. When you are close to the people you play for,
you get what I call the feeling of 'skin' in the music, that
you can never get in the studio even though the audio may be
good. Chamamé songs blend melancholy and happiness together
as one. So it is like a wild and energetic music with many sad
histories in it, of people who have passed through many situations.
It's a music with many levels: like an onion, you peel off the
layers and find real lives inside it. My own pieces tell the
stories of the latest generation of our popular music who are The album is a flow of atmospheres:
romantic couple dances, twirling polkas, lively waltzes and compelling
chama me pieces like Adios Beatriz. At the soundcheck
Spasiuk played Kilometre 11 by Coco Marola. "It's
a piece which blesses the stage, it is so beautiful," he
tells me when I ask about it. Dancing chamamé itself involves
sweeping the feet in half circles as you move forwards and backwards
while For polkas like Alegria
casi /lorar (Almost Crying With Happi- These days Spasiuk, after moving
to Buenos Aires at the age of 20 and living there for 10 years
while he developed his career, now lives 60 kilometres outside
the capital, in the countryside in General Rodriguez. His CV
includes working with the great Mercedes Sosa (she sings the
haunting ballad 5olo par Mi for which Spasiuk wrote the
music and folk-rock hero Victor Heredia the lyrics). More recently
he's worked with percussionist Cyro Baptista on an album produced
by John Zorn with Greg Cohen, Marc Ribot, Romero Lubambo, Nana
Vasconcelos and Vanessa Falabell. I imagined we might talk about
growing up around the carpenter's shop his father managed, but
Spasiuk's chat turns spiritual very quickly when talking about
creating his own music. "I don't feel any need to show myself
off as a virtuoso accordeonist. I don't need to do that: my need
is to play myself. I am not a vanguardist but I am trying to
be honest to tradition while searching for a new sound, an original
one of my own, creating textures and singing them. I think maybe,
above all, I am searching to make a space in my music, almost
an emptiness for things to develop in, both for me and those
who are listening; something more abstract. I was really influenced
by reading Kandinsky's book, He reckons Escenas de la Frontera, his favourite piece of music, more or less sums him up. If he could play only one piece tonight it would be that. The title is translated as 'Scenes Of Life On The Edge', but maybe he thinks 'edge' might be better translated as 'frontier' or 'border', for he's talking about the cultural diversity of the lives of those who live in that frontier community. "I composed that music for a film documentary. The borders are not just geographical, because it also means the frontiers and borders inside yourself, who you are. My way of looking at it is like the beads in your necklace." He is looking at a necklace I am wearing around my neck, with small interlinked circles of red, yellow, brown, blue, green, white: "That's what the culture is like in Misiones. There are many points in common and they all touch and look good together, but it's a complex ethnic mix with many colours and they don't all become one colour. My music comes out of that; it takes on all those colours." He tells me that great musical
and spiritual influence has come from legendary 20th-century
Argentine poet, singer-composer Atahulapa Yupanqui. For Spasiuk,
Yupanqui is above all a philosopher: "Yupanqui had a way
of thinking which really influenced me. He asked many questions.
In one of his books he says, 'The art and light which illuminate
the heart of the artist is a torch people can use to see the
beauty on their pathway'. My piece Busqueda (Search) is
about the possibility of people finding themselves by getting
closer to beauty. I think there is a difference between searching
for beauty and entertaining yourself - yet they can be the same.
And I am trying to play, leaving space for things to happen,
so my head stops functioning and I am just playing and leaving
space for something of a subtle spiritual quality to corne in.
And I am also trying to keep it simple! I like simplicity, I
would rather take out things and make it simple than overwrite
it." One of Spasiuk's closest collaborators
is his percussionist, Chacho Ruiz Guinazu. They've been working
together for almost 10 years. Among an array of percussion, Ruiz
plays Peruvian cajon; a large bombo parche drum which
has a string inside it; the Brazilian berimbau; and dark mellow-toned
wooden-tongued cajas Africanas (African boxes). Ruiz also
invents his own instruments to make the sounds he wants. He plays
everything by hand: "I prefer to use my skin on instruments
as the sound is much warmer; I like to invent things. For me,
music is a game and if you approach it with the head of a playful
child, you can learn from playing playfully. Chango and I are
good friends and often we just search for sounds. We can play
for hours like that and the music that comes is very vital. It's
not even tiring because we are playing while we play! There are
no words for that." |
