Argentine popular music encompasses different genres. From jazz and rock to balada, folk music and tango, a lot of Argentine musicians set up links with Europe and North America audiences during the 20th century. Globalisation and recorded music fostered integration and transnational interconnectedness. This book shows how some Argentine musicians built their national identities under the influence of the rest of the world. Taking this aim into account, Karush considers their condition as consumers as well as producers. On the one hand, Argentine musicians performed local music genres for foreign audiences. On the other hand, musicians adopted foreign genres and were leaders of the Latin-American market.
Divided into an introduction, six chapters and a conclusion, Musicians in Transit… describes the itineraries of seven Argentine musicians – Oscar Alemán, Lalo Schiffrin, Leandro ‘Gato’ Barbieri, Astor Piazzolla, Sandro, Mercedes Sosa and Gustavo Santaolalla – who ‘reimagine Argentina's relationship to the rest of the world’ (p. 3).
Oscar Alemán (1909–1980) is the first case, a jazz guitarist who specialised in swing, and whose Afro-Argentine dark complexion was associated first with the native and rural culture of Argentina (the criollismo), and then, in Europe and the United States, with jazz. He set foot on the Parisian music scene in the 1930s, and returned 10 years later when the Nazis invaded Paris. His blackness helped him and was decisive because in Argentina jazz music was viewed through the lens of race.
The pianist Lalo Schifrin (1932–) and the saxophonist Leandro ‘Gato’ Barbieri (1932–2016) represent Latin identity and revolutionary third worldism respectively. They coincide in their itineraries, first to Europe and then to the United States. Schifrin transformed jazz, introducing the ‘modern hybrid of samba and cool jazz aesthetics to North American audiences’ (p. 47). On his side, Barbieri innovated in free-jazz style, giving all Latin Americans ‘a subaltern social position parallel to that of African Americans’ (p. 59). Both ‘exemplify the ideological processes that work to embed unequal power relationships within the popular music of the Americas’ (p. 69).
The fourth emblematic musician is Astor Piazzolla (1921–92), a tango representative bandoneonist. Whereas tango fans felt he was corrupting the genre, he tried to transform it into a very innovative style, and did so all his life, despite the fact that he failed to capture a significant audience until the 1980s. At his death he was, ‘both at home and abroad, a powerful symbol of a cosmopolitan Argentine national identity’ (p. 107).
Roberto Sánchez, well known as Sandro (1945–2010), ‘helped invent the new genre [the balada] and personified the identity that it made possible’ (p. 108). He was a very clear example of a star in the Spanish-speaking world in United States. Imitating Elvis Presley's performance, Sandro sang Spanish-language versions of rock and roll. He was also part of a constructed regional style identified with Latin America. Unlike Piazzolla, in the 1980s Sandro lost prominence and audience, but in the following decade he came back and his musical style impacted ‘on patterns of identity formation in Latin America in general and in Argentina in particular’ (p. 140).
The only case of a woman in this book is Mercedes Sosa (1935–2009). She was an avant-garde singer, who sang folk music that attracted an urban, middle-class audience interested in a cosmopolitan version of Argentine nationalism. In the 1970s, ‘Sosa also emerged as an icon of revolutionary Latin Americanism, a politicised version of the Latin American identity Sandro was forging at the same time’ (p. 143). After her exile because she was banned from performing during the last Argentine dictatorship, she ‘built a bridge to the rock audience, including it within a new, more inclusive vision of the Argentine nation’ (p. 175).
The last musician of the book is Gustavo Santaolalla (1951–), a rock guitarist who migrated to the United States after the creation of a local rock band called Arco Iris. From the 1990s up to the present, ‘Santaolalla became the most important and successful producer of rock latino’ (p. 181). Since then, he has become the gatekeeper and kingmaker of this genre, immersed in the global music industry.
Along the book, Karush looks through these seven musical experiences that are different but all of them are analysed from the relationship between Latin America and Europe and the United States: Karush is thus able to carry out the tricky task of accounting for the history of local musics in a global dimension. He recognises four patterns of this interaction: ‘Oscar Alemán and Arco Iris [Santaolalla's band] created versions of foreign genres for consumption by domestic audiences. Lalo Schifrin and Gato Barbieri also worked in foreign genres, but they aimed their products primarily at the North American market. Astor Piazzolla and Mercedes Sosa were specialists in Argentine musical forms who incorporated foreign influences to attract audiences both at home and abroad. Finally, Sandro and Gustavo Santaolalla invented new genres or subgenres that appealed to audiences throughout Latin America’ (p. 216).
To sum up, during the 20th century Argentine popular music was part of a Latin identification that was not always determined by the global music industry. On the contrary, some of these musicians were key intermediaries in the creation of local music that fits into a global culture.
