The Argentimes—Updated!

The new issue of the Argentimes is out on the streets and the web. I have five pieces running: a page 3 article on Buenos Aires' new mayor and his problems with the unions, a page 8 article on corruption, a page 12 article on a controversial song, a page 26 travel piece on El Bolsón, and a Supplement page 7 interview piece with jazz guitarist Ale Demogli.

The next issue will see my debut as a Spanish writer. It should come out February 7.

DHQ

Last Saturday evening brought the incomparable Dave Holland Quintet roaring into Buenos Aires for a big gig at the Teatro Coliseo. The Quintet has had the same personnel for the last ten years—except for drummer Nate Smith, who has only been there for the last four—a rare phenomenon in today's jazz world which makes the group really shine. When I saw DHQ for the first time in Chicago, the amount of duets within the quintet setting really struck me. In Buenos Aires it was even more evident. On "Soul's Harbor," a new Chris Potter composition, there were a few such duets, including a moment in which Potter and Holland riffed off each other as the rest of the band walked off stage.

Every member of DHQ is a master, but increasingly, it's becoming Potter's band. The BA crowd burst into joyful uproar every time he finished a solo—solos which seem to be longer, knottier, and deeper than in early years—and as the crowd poured out, the buzz was that Potter had been the star. He's on the cover of this month's Down Beat, has his own major band, Underground, and seems to be omnipresent on the New York scene. In the last year or so, I've seen him with Holland, Jason Moran, Paul Motian, and his own group. He's always one of the very best parts of the night.

The saxophone is a crowd pleaser, certainly more than the trombone or the vibraphone which have a less showy intensity. Steve Nelson, Holland's vibraphonist, is the group's mad scientist, conjuring Monkish dissonance and spontaneity. When I've seen DHQ previously, always at Chicago's Jazz Showcase, Nelson has felt like the most important member of the group, the unpredictable spark who keeps everyone on their toes (fulfilling a similar to function to what drummer Paul Motian brings to his current groups).

Robin Eubanks is one of the best trombone players I know, but paired with Potter on the front lines, it's often tough for him to stand out against the saxophonist's dazzling fluency. Eubanks, it should be noted, is one of the group's main composers, and his theme, "Metamorphos," is my favorite DHQ tune.

As for drummer Nate Smith, well suffice it to say that he's brings a palpable sense of joy to the band that has made them even better than during their years with Billy Kilson.

Then there's the matter of Holland himself, who, to my mind, stands as an ideal of dignity and generosity in jazz. I've never met Holland, although all indications are that he's a thoroughly good man, but I see him as, if you'll allow me this ridiculous flight, the Gandalf of the band. Content to lead and bring out the best in others, he stands in the background and allows the music to flow through him. This isn't to say he's not active, he plays constantly, but he never calls attention to himself—the consummate teacher guiding his pupils toward the stratosphere.

But like Gandalf, when the time comes, he can kick serious ass. In Chicago, I once saw Holland burst into one of the most intense expressions of feeling I've seen in music. The notes were getting quicker and darker, when Holland slammed his foot down on the floor (an honest-to-goodness slam, shaking the club) and let out a tortured moan. Holland is an Englishman and a restrained (but certainly not repressed) sort; and when he bares himself so powerfully it means a lot more than it does for musicians who expose their depths with every solo. This deep exposure is present in every Holland solo, but rarely realized. He's the far better player for his refusal to be showy and his insistence on being honest with every note.

The following week should see a couple other jazz posts, with planned trips to see Levas Cruzadas on Sunday, and another show on Wednesday. I will also be making my debut on the Buenos Aires restaurant scene on Friday, where I'll be wielding a cooking knife at Casa Felix...

The Sweet Science: Part II

From the moment I arrived in Buenos Aires, everyone kept telling me about January in the city: “It’s a ghost town,” “The city gets abandoned,” “There’s literally no one here.” While that’s a little overboard, the city does feel noticeably vacant. For me, the most important consequence of the January flight is that it forced me to switch gyms. My old gym, Suterh, has shut its doors for the month, but by god, that doesn’t mean there’s no boxing to be had.

The coach at Suterh, the boxing guru Pedro Cabrera, has his own gym in the neighboring barrio of Barracas. It’s a basement affair that’s bigger, better equipped, and almost as charmingly dingy as the Suterh. I’ve also been training with a new coach, who while shorter on boxing mystique than Pedro, is more willing to give serious instruction to a gringo who isn’t going to be contending for the cruiser weight title anytime soon.

I don’t begrudge Pedro his laconic nature (or at least laconic attitude toward me), but I’ve been making bigger strides under the tutelage of my new coach, Profesor Tomás. One of Tomas’s somewhat loopy, but incredible, training methods is to have me work out without shoes. He told me it’s so I don’t rip up the floor, but that’s just him being cagey. After two days in a row of jumping rope, hitting the heavy bag, and shadow punching with my bare feet, my calves have never been so sore.

Down Beat

While it's unlikely to lead to a major book deal, it's never bad to see a piece of yours in print. My short write-up of the El Bolsón Jazz Festival, the subject of the earlier blog entry 'The 100-word assignment' has made it into the February issue of Down Beat. What's more, the story was published on page 19. For those readers who grasp the significance of that fact, let's just say that it opens up the possibility that the Chicagoland-based jazz magazine may have an uncredited Rockville, VA-based paginator.

I don't expect the piece will ever be available on Down Beat's website (they publish excerpts of the main stories and leave the rest to paying customers), but if you're dying to see my name in a glossy, you can certainly hike down to your local bookstore and browse the magazine section. If you just want to read the content and see the accompanying picture—yes, I'm now a published photographer as well—I've posted it below:


FESTIVAL IN ARGENTINE ANDES PUTS JAZZ ON HIGH PLATEAU

Staged in a picturesque valley in the midst of Argentina’s Patagonian Andes, the seventh annual El Bolsón Jazz Festival brought some of the country's best players to this bohemian mountain town from Nov. 30—Dec. 2, 2007.

The festival, directed by local guitarist Alejandro Aranda and drummer Juan Merlo, was heavy on community spirit. Students packed the late morning clinics with some of the festival’s best known stars; fans, festival organizers, and musicians ate together at daily barbecues.

Veteran trumpeter Roberto “Fats” Fernandez, the festival’s honoree, held court for the first two nights. But younger artists like the jazz-funk pranksters of Levas Cruzadas, the guitar virtuoso Ale Demogli and the charismatic Afro-Peruvian collective Los Negros de Miércoles provided the fiery improvisations that sparked the festival to life. Every night, open-to-the-public jam sessions roared until dawn, joyfully blending straight-ahead rhythm sections, African percussion and brash young horns.

—Eric Benson

Dog Days bring lethargy, strikes, and a site update

Buenos Aires is hot these days—stifling hot. Last week, temperatures rose perilously close to 100 degrees and power outages plagued large parts of the country, although here in San Telmo the fans kept on running. These are the kind of heavy-aired days that keep you in a constant state of discomfort. Sleep promises only drowsiness and sweat, and moving around knocks you into an unhappily lethargic state.

Luckily, a big storm on Thursday night cut the temperature by close to 20 degrees farenheit, but the city remains sticky and, in some neighborhoods, close to abandoned. (Searching for an open restaurant last night in the upscale Palermo Chico district turned into an hour-long odyssey that netted me four empanadas and an upset stomach.)

Aside from dealing with the heat, I've begun to take Spanish classes three hours a day, Monday-Friday in the hopes of reaching my goal of fluency more quickly. I'm the only American in a class of fourteen which boasts representatives from South Korea, Austria, Brazil and many other nations in between. The multinational, multiracial dynamic of the class is unlike any of which I've ever been a part—a Buenos Aires equivalent of movie depictions of English classes for US immigrants. (I'm thinking right now of Harold Ramis's class at the beginning of "Stripes".) Our lingua franca is Spanish, not English, and while I'd be lying if I said the language level of the students was especially high, it seems like a serious group that genuinely wants to learn.

At the Argentimes, I'm in the midst of the lead news story on the turbulent first month of Buenos Aires' new center-right mayor Mauricio Macri. Macri has opened his tenure by taking on the unions and state health care, he's overreached (strikes and anti-Macri demonstrations have broken out all over the city), but last week he negotiated a very favorable (for him) truce with the biggest city workers union and looks to be well on his way to realizing the first wave of his plan to "modernize" the city government. I'll post the article here as soon as it's gone to press.

In other Argentimes news, the site has finally been updated. I have articles in the PDFs of issues 28, 29, and 30. If you don't want to sift through three issues of content in search of my byline, I'd direct you towards my page 3 news story in issue 28, which gives a summary of the Argentine presidential elections. It's not a dazzling or original piece of work, but I think it does a fine job of distilling the always topsy-turvy political life of the country.

If you're looking for the best story we've published, I'd direct you towards the feature article in issue 29, in which the prodigiously talented Kate Granville-Jones delves into madness, mental health, and state prejudice through the lens of a weekly radio show in which patients at the city's oldest mental hospital air their hopes and frustrations.

And while I know I've plugged it a bunch already, let me say that if you are at all jazz-inclined I cannot think of a better place to get into new music than Destination:OUT. Geri Allen's rendition of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Women" is a quietly smoldering revelation, and the year-end sampling platter of ten tracks is uniformly excellent.

Uruguay

Here’s the key moment from my Uruguay trip; the moment in which the trip became something of an adventure:

It’s 4:45 a.m. and I’m lying half-asleep on a coach bus winding its way along the Atlantic coast from Montevideo. I’ve been told that the bus will arrive at Fortaleza Santa Teresa, my destination, at around 7 a.m. and that I’ll have to walk five kilometers once I arrive until I hit the camping areas by the beach.

So when the bus stops at 4:45 a.m. I think to myself, there’s no possible way this could be Fortaleza, but an extra-cautious spirit propels me to ask, and turns out to be well heeded. So along with two other people, I’m dumped out on a traffic circle in the middle of what I’ll find out later is a national park, with an 8 a.m. rendezvous at the area’s one restaurant being my only instructions for finding my friends.

They’ve told me in which campground they’re staying though so I ask for directions from the other people who’ve been dropped off with me, and start what I assume will be a five kilometer walk. Five minutes later, without finding any campgrounds, I’m on a barren beach—stars glistening, waves breaking. I walk up a few of the paths that spread over the dunes, but they lead to nothing more than a “No Pasa” sign and a lot of dead-ends.

Realizing at this point that the directions might have been wrong, I trudge back up to the traffic circle and start following the road signs which lead me in an entirely different direction, and have me in the middle of a sprawling camping area within minutes. My hope had been to surprise my friends, find their tents, and ideally have them wake with me sipping a mate while sitting besides the perfectly smoldering cooking fire I’d have made for breakfast. The darkness and the scope of the campsite, though, rendered this fantasy impossible.

So with nothing to do and exhaustion setting in, I decide that I’ll sleep for a couple hours and that the beach is a far better place to do that than the concrete deck of the restaurant. (I should add at this point that I had some fears that I got off at the wrong stop even though all the beach names were the ones I expected to find and the restaurant was right in the traffic circle, as I’d been advised. Those facts added up, but the length of the bus ride and the fact that I never had to walk anything close to one kilometer much less five left me wary.)

As I walked toward the beach, a trickle of drunks were rising from the just-closed bar and after walking a suitable distance away from the few stragglers, I laid down my pack, took a moment to savor the surroundings, and fell asleep. I woke up about an hour and a half later with the sun rising in my eyes and sand flies pecking at my legs. Rising to walk back up to the restaurant and the traffic circle, the drunks had all vanished and had been replaced by a grandfather and grandson out of an Uruguayan Norman Rockwell painting, carrying finishing rods down to the rocks.

I met up with my friends as planned, had a wonderful three days on the beach complete with roaring campfires (the last of which was my attempt to challenge Final Campfire) and excellent food (crab meat tamales were a special highlight). If you ever have the opportunity, do as I did, and go camping with a chef.

A couple extras:

My New Year’s resolution is to drink more mate. I don’t have a mate gourd and have at this point relied entirely on Argentines for my mate consumption. I’ve been here for three months now, it’s high time to get right this essential part of Argentine life.

I didn’t bring my camera to the beach, but I happened to be there with a number of very serious photographers. I’ll get their pictures and put them up within the next couple of days.