Artist Profile: Gato Barbieri
In my high school jazz ensemble days, while the trumpeters obsessed
over Maynard and Mangione, and the trombonists worshiped at the shiny bell of
Bill Watrous, George Edison and I were playing the hell out of Gato Barbieri’s Caliente!
The Herb Alpert-produced blast furnace of saxophonic passion
was a perfect slice of its time (made in 1976): a “sellout” to many fans who preferred
the man’s timeless Impulse! albums, but to us SoCal suburb rats in the early 80s
it was manna from heaven and a blessed antidote to Styx.
That tone! That range!
That breath control! I’m sure George and I drove our parents nuts as we strove for
some approximation of that incomparable sound. I know I never found it. (As it turns out, part of Barbieri's secret was the shoddy quality of his pieced-together tenor: a narrow Selmer neck on a Conn horn, and a paper-thin #1 reed that most players probably couldn't coax a decent sound out of. The rest was all Gato.)
Then I picked up the 1968 album Confluence, with the estimable South African pianist Dollar Brand (before
he was called Abdullah Ibrahim). It gave me some more “oh, shit!” moments,
although it was radically different from the A&M Records best-seller. Confluence showed us there was a lot more to the man than his chart-topping cover of Santana's "Europa (Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile)".
It took me a while (late college, really) to dig much
further into Barbieri’s discography. I had checked out Ruby Ruby, but it
seemed glossier yet than the sheen of Caliente! Getting into the 80s work was
a little easier; a bit commercial, not so fiery, still very Latin. But I wanted
more. This was a guy who had played with Lalo Schifrin and Charlie Haden, for
Pete’s sake, and had been a major star on Impulse! Records (I couldn’t find any of
those albums at the time, but I had read a lot about Gato’s earlier labors.) Where
was the stuff that would light my fire again?
In time I found the answer, on one of those elusive Impulse!
records. I added more vinyl to my collection and explored new facets of
the man’s talent. In time I understood.
Above: "Europa (Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile)", from Gato Barbieri's album Caliente!
Leandro “Gato” Barbieri was born into an Argentine musical
family in 1932. He was surrounded by the sounds of tango and the huge bandoneon
accordions, but hearing Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time” was what ignited his
interest in playing. He took up the clarinet and switched to alto sax, then later tenor sax, after he
was hired by pianist Lalo Schifrin, five months his senior. The two young men worked together in the small
jazz scene of Buenos Aires for a few years before heading off to the
ostensibly greener pastures of Europe, as so many North American jazzmen had done.
While Schifrin meshed with the American bebop scene
via Dizzy Gillespie (and later became a legendary composer of TV and movie themes),
Barbieri leaned towards more exploratory musical forms. He played in Rome with
trumpeter Don Cherry, who introduced him to composer Carla Bley and bassist
Charlie Haden. Barbieri took part in Bley’s landmark free-jazz-rock-opera, Escalator
Over the Hill, and in Haden’s first ventures with the Liberation Music
Orchestra.
Barbieri cut his first session as a leader, In Search of the Mystery,
for the tiny but iconic free-jazz label ESP-Disk in 1967. The band was an unusual quartet with drummer Bobby Kapp, bassist Norris Jones (later called Sirone), and cellist Calo Scott. It was forceful as hell, not quite coherent in focus all the time, but an important step forward for the saxophonist.
During this period Barbieri’s approach to music underwent significant
changes. While he embraced the energetic aesthetic of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders (an ESP and Impulse! label-mate with whom he’s been compared stylistically at times) and carved a rougher,
buzzsaw edge into his tenor sax tone, Barbieri also began reaching back to his
roots. He started incorporating Latin American elements – melody, harmony, rhythm,
instrumentation – into his work, acknowledging all the paths he had taken in
his musical evolution. By the time he recorded the score for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in 1972, Gato had truly made a niche for himself at the forefront of Latin jazz.
Above: Barbieri's theme for Last Tango in Paris, orchestrated by Oliver Nelson.
A good place to start one’s investigation of Gato Barbieri
is the “Chapters” series of albums he made for Impulse! Records between 1973
and ’75. These are some of the most rewarding recordings of his discography, with their deft mix of free-leaning energy jazz and Latin
traditionalism.
Highlights of Chapter One: Latin America are the spare
quartet of “Nunca Mas”, with Dino Saluzzi’s bandoneon conjuring visions of
smoky tango clubs, and the massed percussion of “To Be Continued”. Despite his
furious, jagged tone, Barbieri does a masterful job of blending in with the
traditional drums for a unified whole. And don’t miss the ironic “India”, with Raul
Mercado’s queña flute hovering over
it all. Chapter Two: Hasta Siempre shares many of the same personnel but broadens
the scope a bit with Brazilian samba-school percussion on "Marissea" and the long but engaging
“Encontros”.
Chapter Three: Viva Emiliano Zapata (inspired, no doubt,
by Charlie Haden’s sociopolitical bent with the Liberation Music Orchestra)
adds an American horn section that includes Howard Johnson on bass clarinet and
bari sax, trombonist Buddy Morrow, and trumpeter Randy Brecker among others. This
album was the money shot that opened my eyes to Gato Barbieri’s full glory.
Specifically the track “Milonga Triste”, where his tenor sax roars into full
flame after a few brittle measures of acoustic guitar and bass. I find this to
be one of the most cathartic, soul-lifting tracks in my entire collection; I still listen to it over and over again. “Cuando Vuelva A Tu Lado” (“What a Difference
a Day Makes”) leans heavily in the direction of what Pharoah Sanders was also
doing, with an almost hypnotic rhythmic groove beneath the instantly identifiable
melody. "El Sublime" and the title nod to Mexican revolutionary Zapata are
other standout tracks.
Above: "Milonga Triste" from Barbieri's album Chapter Three: Viva Emiliano Zapata.
Chapter Four: Alive in New York is perhaps a step down, if
only for the smaller ensemble. However, Ron Carter's electric
bass and the returning Howard Johnson are key factors in the success of the
session, and the sound quality is quite good. It includes the four-part suite “La China Leoncia” and another version
of “Milonga Triste” that isn’t quite as rapturous as that on Chapter Three but works well enough in the context. The high point is Ary Barroso's "Bahia", with some brilliant interaction between tenor and tuba during the floating intro before the hard groove kicks in.
Many of the Impulse! tracks mentioned above are collected
on a 2006 CD entitled Gato Barbieri: The Impulse! Story, which is a good enough
place to start exploring.
A wider range of tracks, with a couple of overlaps with the
Impulse! collection above, can be found on the 2000 Verve compilation Gato Barbieri’s
Finest Hour. It includes the hit cover of Santana’s “Europa” from Caliente!; Santana himself on “Latin Lady” from 1978’s Tropico; the Stevie Wonder-penned “Ngiculela – Es Una Historia – I am Singing”
from Ruby Ruby; and a slightly dated but irrepressibly funky version of Kurt Weill’s “Speak
Low” from 1979’s Euphoria.
The tragic death of Barbieri’s wife, Michelle, took him off the
scene for a while. But he returned in strong form with 1997’s smooth Que Pasa.
He appeared in the 2000 film Calle 54, a celebration of the Latin jazz
community, and cut several more albums before his passing from pneumonia in April
2016. He was an absolutely unique voice in the world of jazz who, thankfully,
left a large legacy of recordings for us to ponder and love.
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