The Festival

The El Bolsón Jazz Festival was a musician’s event through and through. I’ve always liked going to jazz gigs where musicians are in the audience. For a non-musician like myself, it gives the show a stamp of instant authenticity—this is what the people who really know are checking out. In El Bolsón, nearly every musician went to every show, both as an act of mutual support and as a sign of genuine interest.

There was never more than one show going on at a time in El Bolsón, and the festival's vibe was that of a migratory herd rather than a sedentary audience. At 12:30 p.m., the first gig of the day would start at the outdoor garden of a grill called Tsunami 70. Not everyone would show up right on time, but by the end, the space would be packed.

Part of this communal spirit was purely logistical. Everyone, including yours truly, was fed by the festival, and if you wanted a free lunch, you had to show up to Tsunami by about 2. Yet, there were other shows with nothing to do with free meals that drew seemingly every player that had been invited to the festival.

Not only did musicians support each other by sitting in the audience, they often played with each other too. Bands invited the members of other bands up onto the stage with them, adding funky horns to afro-peruvian rhythms, or beefing a trio up to a quartet or quintet. (The festival’s most able pianist, a really good guy named Ariel who bore a striking resemblance to Levon Helm, played in three different groups, even though he only came with, and presumably was only paid by, one.)

Both Saturday and Sunday night ended with jam sessions that stretched into the early morning. I’ve been into jazz since I heard Kind of Blue when I was 12-years-old, but I’d never been to a real jam session. It was a lot of fun. The sessions amplified the intermingling of the festival, as a musical chairs of players carved through Blue Note-era standards like “Canteloupe Island” and more standard standards like “All The Things You Are.”

Most of the jazz at the festival was innovative to the point that Eduardo, the bassist of the Ale Dimogli Trio, said to me, “this is a jazz festival sin swing.” He didn’t mean that as an insult or a compliment, just as a statement, and it was dead on. Few of the groups, and none of the best groups, were fully straight-ahead. Everyone was trying for a new sound, which surprised and excited me. I’d worried that Argentine jazz might be stuck in a bebop, or worse, high-school “jazz combo”, tradition. The best Argentine bands are doing what the best American bands are doing, pushing the music in different directions, which is what the best have always done.

The jam sessions though, were a refreshing return to jazz’s swinging roots. Guys who were trying out new things with their own bands, showed that they could still blow over changes. Hanging out with these guys until far into the madrugada was a pleasure, and I relished my totally alien, but totally comfortable, position in the festival—a newbie gringo, seven weeks off the plane, somehow hanging out in the Patagonian Andes with a bunch of musicians from Buenos Aires.

A few short videos from the festival:



Levas Cruzadas, a jazz-funk outfit who wear hazmat suits when they perform, was one of the most exhilarating bands at the festival. They're all very young—between 25 and 30—and they're full of energy and swagger. The guys in Levas caught every show and were all over the jam sessions.



My friend Ale Dimogli with his trio + the aforementioned pianist, Ariel. Ale is a virtuoso on guitar and his band was one of the most rooted in the jazz of the moment. They could easily be playing a fine gig at Small's or the Jazz Gallery. Ale and his group were also big at the jam sessions. Ale went to Berklee College of Music and lived in the States playing with people like Richard Davis and Bob Moses, and he's clearly very comfortable in a jam session setting.


If there was a star of the festival though, it was Los Negros de Miércoles. They're an Afro-Peruvian band not a jazz band, but they're energy and charisma were extraordinary. They closed out the festival with a raucous midnight show on Sunday which saw the first few rows of chairs cleared out and transformed into a make-shift dance floor. This video shows them at their outdoor show earlier in the day, and unfortunately doesn't do them justice.