The link above is, to share with those interested, a haunting, elemental introduction to the caja. Even in the first few seconds, the mountain landscape, the wind, the sparse vegetation, the sky, and the sound of the caja evoke so much about this music that is such a part of that paisaje.
I have had occasional, wonderful dances in milongas but more enduringly, tango led me to try to understand its lyrics. I stepped further into Spanish because the vocabulary in the tangos is largely circumscribed by anguish and loss. From there I moved to salsa in Dundee and - virtually - Colombia. There were a series of coincidences, if that's how you see them. I wanted to dance more locally and knew there was salsa in that nearby city. I didn't want to go alone and I didn't want to go to classes. It turned out a local friend could dance. For the few months that it lasted, before it was contaminated by that harm that seemed to spread out from that city like a poisonous oil slick, it was great.
At that time I had an online Spanish conversation exchange partner whose father, it turned out, was a famous writer, journalist and broadcaster about predominantly salsa but also other genres like bolero. He had had a club that just about any salsa aficionado in Bogotá has heard of or had been to. I have stumbled across it, completely randomly, in books about Colombia. Anyone I talked to who had been there spoke of it with great affection. El Goce Pagano seems to be something of an institution. So we chatted, all too briefly, about salsa.
Spotify told me that this year the place where people most listen to what I listen to is Cali. That Colombian city is known as the salsa capital of the world - their festival is on right now. Later, I found myself listening to the roots of salsa which transported me, still virtually, to Cuba and Puerto Rico and into folk and indigenous music of South America. This took me back to Argentina, to music by Atahualpa Yupanqui, Jorge Cafrune, Facundo Cabral, Alberto Merlo, Mercedes Sosa and to less well known inheritors of a certain part of that folk tradition that appeals to me: Orlando Vera Cruz, Hector del Valle, Omar Moreno Palacios and, to some extent, Raul Barboza. Later it took me to more modern interpreters like Soledad, Chango Spasiuk, who directed a documentary I referenced recently, on the coplas, and more recently, Milena Salamanca.
The extraordinary music diversity just within the folk tradition of this huge country began to dawn on me. I had begun by assuming that the chacarera we sometimes see in the milongas was Argentina's folk dance, before realising that it has siblings like zamba, chamamé, gato, payada and many more. If anything, zamba is the more emblematic of Argentina's music and dance. Much Argentinian music features the guitar and so that country has a plethora of accomplished guitarists / composers like Roberto Grela, Juanjo Dominguez, Victor Velazquez, Carlos Martínez, Carlos Moscardini, Cacho Tirao, Lucio Yanel, Jose Luis Merlin, Argentino Luna.
Actually, there is huge diversity within folk music in just one part of Argentina. There is such variety because of the country's size, the many different geographies and cultures within it and because, until the age of recording and radio, nearly all music was folk music. I was listening today to a past episode of Argentina Canta Así, by Gonzalo Guzman, broadcast by Radio Salta. He could fill two hours on music from the region just in homage to the moon and related interviews.
Musically, Argentina's northwest fascinates me most, just now. In 2016, with next to no Spanish, I tried to avoid taking the bus in Buenos Aires, in case I got lost. A trip on two or three buses out to a milonga on the ring road was a nerve-wracking expedition. The idea of taking the ferry to Montevideo was beyond me. Tigre, beloved of many tourists, I now know to be a mere 30km away. At the time, it could have been in the Brazilian Amazon so exotic and dangerous did it seem, or perhaps I meant my fear of trying to get there. Decidedly, the downtown milongas were as much of a challenge as I could manage. I had no concept of the extent nor the variety of Argentina's geography, not even that it reached Chile.
Now, through music, I am a little more familiar with it, so that words like Catamarca no longer just mean great danceable tangos by Di Sarli and Lomuto but a place of plains and mountains bordered by Tucumán, so beloved by Atahualpa, and bordered by its neighbours Santiago del Estero and Salta. I wonder if I will be able to visit and I am sure this would be a journey of music and connection and of inevitably the places these are tied to. This is the land of the caja and the copla where music seems more essential, more sacred, of a different order. It is music preserved, outside the lived tradition of singing it, most famously in recordings by Leda Valladares and her collaborators.
I invite you to listen to the contemporary bagualero Marcos Arjona. He says the copla is not like the zamba or other folk forms in that it doesn't have an author, it comes from the pueblo, the people. He says it is passed on from one generation to another although now, few sing the coplas. When asked if it can be learned by someone who was not born in to the tradition, gracefully he says querer es poder - where there's a will there's a way and that you just need to learn the coplas. Yet it is clear a voice like his and the power behind it is one with the landscape he has grown up with, his feeling for that and for his heritage, for all that he sings of. The songs are pure feeling he says and that I think is what exerts their spell. There is nothing trite, nothing affected, nothing fawning or prostrated about them. And yet they can be funny too. Here, I think he is singing about not wanting to get married when everyone is telling him he should.
At this point, the music seems less associated with a country, and more with a geography. This music of course predated the lines that were later drawn on maps so it is no surprise that this tradition is found in the Andean regions of Chile, Bolivia, Peru. Aca Seca, an Argentinian trio plays and sings music like the vidala Canto en la Rama. This song is also associated with the northwest. Songs like these have themes related to nature, spirituality, and the daily life of indigenous communities. These are songs of ritual or ceremony, commonly with improvisation and community participation. The opening lines of another documentary El origen de las especies: canto con caja restate this:
El canto con caja es una especia folclórica de nuestro país pero es sobre todo un elemento esencial en los ritos sagrados y festivos de los comunidades andines.
I don't recall that I spoke with my compañero much about folk music. We never really got round to that. We did talk about salsa, which is also a modern music of the people, of many peoples. Those from his country or from Venezuela have told me that they listen to salsa from infancy. They learn to dance it in the family, they have danced it desde siempre, todo la vida. The importance of this Argentinian music to community rememinded me of something similar he said about salsa: a great portion of salsa music, if not all, is intended for people who dance, chiefly as an expression of community life and the joy of seeing and meeting people, spending time together, and sharing common spaces and traditions.
Aca Seca's Pobre mi negra is another vidala. Both remind me simultaneously of the raw power of this music from Argentina's northwest and at the same time of music from the early Western sacred tradition.
Not all music of this area is so serious or so spiritual. This music is part of festivities and social times. Salta's peñas are the folk equivalent of the milongas. The author of that piece was struck by the same idea I wrote about recently. In her words: the peñas in Argentina’s north feel like an integral part of life, not just an entertaining performance. Banning Eyre's writes a light-hearted take on a trip to discover this music. He talks of a coplero who had those attuned to the language in stitches. His account came out subsequently in a BBC World Routes musical version.
Though I have barely scratched the surface I know more about Argentina's folk music than I do about the Scottish folk tradition. As a result of these explorations and since good tango dancing is hard to find, requires travel, and even good non-dancing social times at the milongas can be sparse, I have been out to only two milongas since Barcelona. But life with music and dance is infinitely better and since there is, apparently, plenty of traditional Scottish music on the doorstep perhaps that is where to go next. I heard an Argentinian once say that tango is like a mirror. Perhaps tango ultimately is leading me back to the music where I live.
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