June 9 is...Guillermo Klein Day

A quick post to let T&T readers know that not only has my interview with Argentine pianist and band leader Guillermo Klein been published at All About Jazz, but also the site has taken the opportunity to assemble an entire Guillermo Klein Day. Accompanying my interview are John Kelman's review of Guillermo's new album, Filtros, which will be released tomorrow, and a free MP3 download of the opening track, "Va Roman."

Guillermo and his band, Los Guachos, open tomorrow night at the Village Vanguard, where they'll play through Sunday. If you're in the New York area, I strongly recommend a trip.

El Padrino

Today, All About Jazz published my interview with Dino and Jose Saluzzi, a father and son musician team whose work straddles jazz, tango, folklore, and classical music. Dino, at 73, is considered by many to be the world's premier bandoneonist (the bandoneon is the large accordian used in tango) and has a recording contract with the immaculately tasteful German label ECM.

My friend Ale Demogli told me an anecdote about Dino that has prompted Ale and to start referring to him as "El Padrino" (The Godfather). Ale, Jose, and Dino went to a computer store to buy Dino a Mac. Ale and Jose arrived early and started to question the salesperson about what computer would suit a 73-year-old not particularly computer literate world-class bandoneonist. Then, the great man himself arrived and made his request: "give me the most expensive!"

This isn't to say that Dino is some kind of materialistic snob; rather, after a long career of serious artistry he enjoys his role as patriarch. I think some of this comes across in the interview, which is filled with Dino's thunderous and insightful pronouncements.

A note on ECM: I started working with ECM three years ago when, as a green college jazz writer, I requested the then-upcoming Lovano/Motian/Frisell release I Have The Room Above Her. Not only did I get the CD, but I was placed on the official "journalist" list by the company's director of US publicity, Tina Pelikan. Tina is, by leaps and bounds, the best in the business that I've encountered. She's a professional in every way, seems genuinely excited about the music, and doesn't seem to care if you're a sophomore at University of Chicago or Nat Henthoff. I think largely due to Tina's work, ECM gets a lot of love in the jazz press, especially from less mainstream outlets like All About Jazz.

Trying to get a CD from Blue Note is like pulling teeth, involving phone calls, unanswered emails, and a endless stream of publicists and outside media consultants. In my experience, Blue Note CDs arrive about half the time, and often late.

ECM also may be the only record label in jazz today that has a distinct sound and style. ECM records are tranquil and pristine in their fidelity, and searching and open in their musical approach. If you're looking for bebop fire, ECM is definitely not your place. If you're more into Kind of Blue with an international slant, then ECM is chock-full of offerings.

I'm generally attracted to jazz that's a little hotter than a typical ECM album, but through the tremendous access I've been given (as a perk of being on their "journalist" list, I can download legally every new ECM release) I've come to have a deep respect for what they do. There's a lack of personality in much of the contemporary jazz world: Mainstream publications are sterile; labels are a hodge-podge and have lost a lot of their status; and clubs often lack a coherent program. People responsible for promoting jazz (the press, labels, clubs) would do well to make their marketing of the music shine with as much spunk as the music itself. ECM with its hip black and white photographs, minimalist style, and distinctive sound does this; and, for that, deserves a lot of praise.

Lunching with Carrizo

It took me about thirty seconds to realize why Antonio Carrizo had become a star. At 82, Carrizo is still dressed to the nines with charisma, from his omnipresent beret to the rye smiles and winks that he uses to color his thoughts on everything from the mastery of Joyce to the
genius of Argentine striker Carlos Tevez.

Antonio Carrizo is one of Argentina's most famous radio and television personalities, an interviewer-gentleman who probably finds his closest American analog in Charlie Rose. I shared lunch with Carrizo and several other members of my Borges class earlier today (as well as last Saturday) to discuss a project in which he has asked us to participate.
Over his career, Carrizo interviewed Borges twenty five times, and compiled the interviews into a book a few years back. Now, he wants to release a new edition that uses transcripts of the edited radio segments instead of the raw unedited conversation. Carrizo has asked the 12 or so members of the class to do the transcription work.

Transcription is a real pain of which I've had plenty of experience over the last two months while preparing my articles for All About Jazz. (Speaking of which, since my last post, AAJ has published two more. You can find them here and here.) Sharing lunch with Carrizo, however, was a pleasure.

In the great tradition of autodidacts, Carrizo never finished high school, but has a razor sharp mind and command of seemingly every subject. During an impromptu lecture on Joyce, which was a sidebar from a discussion on the campo crisis, Carrizo managed to simultaneously watch a match between Racing and Independiente, heckling one of the waiters at a missed goal opportunity. He's not the kind of celebrity that prompts people in the cafe to stop what they are doing and gawk, but as he walked out and chided a group of Racing fans, I heard a few emphatic whispers, "that's Carrizo!"

Babel

Today, I had the most linguistically bizarre conversation of my life—and it was wonderful. On one side sat Wilson Garzon, the publisher of the Brazilian jazz website Clube de Jazz, who speaks only Portuguese. I sat on the other side, speaking my still-in-development Spanish. Wilson and I spoke for an hour and a half about jazz in Brazil, jazz in Buenos Aires, and quite a few other things that I didn't quite understand—at one point, I think he explained the organization of the municipal government in Belo Horizonte, but I'm not really sure about that.

Regular readers of Type and Tonic will remember my dour post of a few weeks ago, "The Language Issue, Revisted." This conversation was the carnivalesque satire of everything I wrote. Suddenly, I was the Spanish expert, and I was competent enough to understand at least the gist of what was being said in a language that is similar to, but decidedly not, Spanish. Suffice it to say, I've never felt more confident in my Spanish ability than I during that hour and a half and the glow that followed. I'd never realized before that as a side benefit of learning one language, I was gaining at least a base-level comprehension of another.

More Jazz Sharks

All About Jazz has published my profile of Pipi Piazzolla, drummer, bandleader, and sometime shark fisherman. I saw Pipi play last night with the 18-piece Inmigrantes Big Band, and he was incredibly on point—definitely a guy who could go toe-to-toe with a lot of American jazz heavyweights.

Pipi was a big help as well, in putting me in touch with Guillermo Klein (pictured), an Argentine pianist living in Barcelona and an international jazz star. Klein will be playing at the Vanguard next month with his powerful ensemble, Los Guachos, and will also be featured at the Newport Jazz Festival. I had the pleasure of talking with him last week, and an article will be forthcoming—likely pegged to Klein's New York appearance.

Right now, I have a backlog of interview material that I'll arranging into articles over the next week. "Tango Town Swing" is due to pick up some steam...

Long in the fang

I've heard it said that meeting writers is often a disappointment; the charm and eloquence that they possess on the page frequently doesn't translate to the physical world. I didn't meet Tom Wolfe this afternoon, but after listening to him talk for an hour, I'm not sure I want to.

I haven't read much of Tom Wolfe's work, but what I have—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and parts of his first collection Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby—I've really liked. I hear The Right Stuff and many of his shorter non-fiction pieces are exceptional. Last spring, I took a course with the non-fiction writer Ron Rosenbaum in which a number of guest writers visited to talk about their craft. When people in the class asked Ron or the guests which current writer they thought was really exceptional, Wolfe was always mentioned first or second. When it came to a writer with chops, someone who could seduce you to keep turning the page, whether that page was about the Bauhaus or the space program, Wolfe was the man.

What a disappointment then, that Wolfe might have been the least seductive speaker I have ever heard. A speech like a piece of writing, needs to keep you interested and involved. Wolfe's delivery was plodding, his organization meandering, and I got the feeling not so much that I was listening to a brilliant and incisive writer as I was to an unprepared, pretentious, and out-of-touch man ramble on about his view of America.

Many of Wolfe's statements rang false as well. His first whopper—one I think I'd read before in the press around I am Charlotte Simmons—was that in American universities fellatio is not considered a sexual act, rather it's akin to kissing. Really? I know the University of Chicago is known as the school where "fun comes to die," but even so, that sounds like the gross overstatement of an isolated old man wagging his finger at "the youth," rather than anything that has to do with the truth.

Tom Wolfe has a very personal relationship with fact and history. He chastised New York and San Francisco intellectuals for forgetting god and the solid values of NASCAR-loving Southern folk. (Wolfe also called stock car racing, "the biggest sport in America." I'm not sure what measure he was using, but I'm pretty sure you'd have to play with the numbers for a while to come up with that conclusion.) He spent five minutes praising America's forgotten ethnic group, the Scotch-Irish, who, according to Wolfe have been the key fighters in every American war from the Revolution to Iraq. He called Thomas Jefferson's campaign against aristocracy, the most important moment in American history.

Responding to a question about racial issues, Wolfe said that America had had an apartheid, but that it had ended shortly after World War II. I'm not sure what he considered the end of that era: Brown v. Board of Ed, maybe? The Civil Rights movement seems a little too late to be considered "shortly after World War II," and regardless, how could a responsible speaker not note that while conditions have improved markedly, a gulf still exists between much of Black America and much of White America.

I knew before the speech that Wolfe was a conservative. What I didn't know was how uncritically he thought about the world. Appearing at the invitation of the US Embassy, Wolfe seemed like a caricature of the worst of the Bush administration's talking points. I'm a pretty unabashed fan of the United States, but if your central worry about the country is that there's too much oral sex on college campuses and that the urban elites are losing their ties to religion, then you're not looking very hard.

Tom Wolfe is famous for being a phenomenal writer and reporter. He implores young writers to get out and see the world, and stop writing self-indulgent works about the miseries of growing up in the suburbs. Yet, I think the America that he sees is a country that exists for only one man. If Wolfe looks at the world anymore, it's just to confirm his simplistic view of it. The intrepid reporter has turned in his pen and paper for a sheltered and lofty existence of white suits and well-earned celebrity. I would be fine with this, the man is 78 after all, if he wasn't so deluded to think that he still had a pulse on what was going on in "the Real America."

I would have been very excited to hear Wolfe talk about his craft, reminisce about Ken Kesey and Chuck Yeager, or wax on about the differences between writing novels and non-fiction. Instead, Wolfe fell into the trap of celebrity in which a famous person becomes an expert on all things, and turns form a sharp thinker into a blowhard.

A few more thoughts: Listening to Wolfe was pretty excruciating, but it paled in comparison to the introductory remarks delivered by the US Ambassador to Argentina, Earl Anthony Wayne. It wasn't anything Wayne said, rather it was the way he said it. Wayne speaks Spanish very, very poorly. It wasn't just his pronunciation. Reading from a prepared statement, it was clear that he didn't grasp the basic fundamentals of the language. Is it possible that in a country of tens of millions of Spanish speakers, the State Department couldn't find an equally qualified person who spoke at least passable Spanish?

The Language Issue, Revisited

I just reread my second-ever Type and Tonic post, "Yo Hablo Español?," and, being in a reflective mood, want to, well, reflect.

More than anything else, the slow-and-painful process that is learning another language has been my obsession and my cross in Buenos Aires. In my "Yo Hablo Español?" entry, written in October 2007 during my first week in Buenos Aires, I realized that my vision of a quick and painless immersion in the language—which would result in total fluency—had been a pipe dream. Working at an English-language newspaper, as I realized immediately, is not a very good way to learn another language. You're surrounded by the mother tongue, your friends are native English-language speakers, and you end up speaking mostly English. Yes, the paper is also a community that reaches Argentines—all my non-jazz-related Argentine friends come from offshoots of this network—but you have to work against the grain to make real inroads into their worlds.

Buenos Aires, like any other big city in the world, is filled with a lot of busy people who have scant time to take a Spanish-mangling foreigner under their wing. I've heard many people who travel say things like, "oh, the people are so friendly," "it's so easy to get to know people there," and other smiley phrases that make the residents of a given place seem like happy-go-lucky idiots who have nothing better to do than to stop their lives for the benefit of the eager American or European backpacker.

I should soften my last sentence. First, away from cities, people do tend to be friendlier and more welcoming. (That is unless it's one of those towns where no one "from away" is welcome.) Second, if you're just traveling through, it's easy to put up with you for a night; if what you want is a more lasting friendship, than that's an issue that takes time and sacrifice and interest and many other things. I don't think anyone owes anyone else friendship, and frankly the people of Buenos Aires are probably more open to befriending a foreigner than the people of New York would be. What I want to say is, in short, that believing I could just move to a place, immediately make local friends, and learn to speak the language perfectly in the space of a few months was impossibly naive.

What I have gotten has taken time. There's no doubt my Spanish has improved. I feel like it flows now. When I speak it, I speak it without translation. Yet, I'm also aware that there are many nuances to this thing called fluency. I am now regularly interviewing people in Spanish, I live with an Argentine, I carry about most of my daily business in Spanish, I am researching two (hopefully) feature-length articles in Spanish. However, it's not natural, and I don't think it ever will be. When I read literature, I'm reading the dictionary constantly. When I hang out with a bunch of Argentines, I get lost when they speak to one another. I could get past these obstacles eventually, but I'd need more time than I'm willing to spend. I'd need there to be a more compelling reason for me to be here than simply learning the language. I'll try my damn hardest for the rest of my time here to keep advancing, and I'll leave fluent but far from perfect.

Because learning the language is such an important part of my life here, I get irrationally offended when anyone maligns my ability to speak and irrationally happy whenever anyone compliments it.

On Monday night, I was in a bar in the oh-so-trendy Palermo Hollywood neighborhood of Buenos Aires and almost lost it. I was sitting at a table with one of my roommates and started to order, when the waitress said, "I can speak English," to which I replied, "bueno, prefiero hablar castellano." Now, the waitress was polite about it and spoke with me in Spanish, but the damage was done. I've been in this country for six months, and this woman was demeaning my ability to do something as simple as order food. The bar was loud and packed, and I can see how a waitress might tire of a yankee accent in that setting—but it ruined my night. I was ready to pull a Jack Nicholson-in-Five Easy Pieces, and throw everything off the table as I sneered, "between your knees."

Those are the worst moments I have in Buenos Aires—even writing about it now makes me feel bad—because they seem to undermine everything I've done here. It's as if she said, "the last six months of your life were spent in a worthless pursuit and the longer you stay here, the more worthless it will be. Go back to New York, pretend you never came here, and don't come back again."

Learning a language is humiliating, especially when you care deeply about succeeding at it. I look back on the many fits and starts of learning this damned thing, and I have regrets. Why didn't I spend a summer when I was younger in a Spanish speaking country? Why didn't I take a year in college and study abroad in Spain, where I would have been surrounded by other students and could have integrated into Spanish-speaking life much more easily?

These regrets, luckily, are passing. I wouldn't go back and change much. It's just up to me now to keep plugging along at this involving, ever-so-frustrating process.

Update: Immediately after posting, I was surfing the web and suddenly had a desire to hear what David Foster Wallace sounded like (I've read some of his stuff and seen his pony-tailed image, but never heard him). That took me immediately to this video which has Wallace addressing the humiliation that comes with not knowing the native language. (My humiliation has more to do with failure at learning it, but the themes resonate nonetheless.) I think I'll resolve from now on, as Wallace quotes Beckett, to "fail better."