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Serrat, melancholic, spoke of his last tour

Serrat, melancholic, spoke of his last tour

He wants to be spirited, but sometimes he seems on the verge of breaking down. “It is a tour full of nostalgia. As a defensive attitude, I have not counted the concerts I gave, nor the ones I have left to give, but I take each one as if it were the only one. With each song I sing, images arise in my head, which I don’t want to give up, but I don’t want to promote either, because it would disarm me in full function”. And he discreetly wipes away a tear when Negro Fontanarrosa is mentioned. On Saturday, at the Bar El Cairo, the people from Rosario will inaugurate the Fontanarrosa-Serrat corner with their presence. “He was one of the kindest, most generous men I have ever met. He spoke little, but very fair”.

Also his father “spoke little, and was wise.” And he remembers that childhood day “when I saw him, at the end of the street, with the tool case in one hand, and in the other a bag with the neck of a guitar sticking out of it”. Nano, as they called him, began to sing professionally in 1965, he came here for the first time in 1969, and he remembers Pipo Mancera, the carnivals, the impressive concert in the Plaza de los Dos Congresos, the affectionate young women, “who were later ladies, who have suffered damage, my gaze adjusted with them to reality, I did not think then that my love with you would last so long. Someone asks him what he learned from the Argentines. To loosen the emotion he jokingly replies “there were 22 million and now there are 44.” They pull their tongues to find out which songs are his most loved. The titles are raining, and he is slow to respond. But he mentions first of all “Those little things”. And later on, “Cançó de matinada”, a song at dawn, a beautiful painting of sunrise in the countryside.

“These are things that one learns”, he says later, “because one is not born taught, one has to learn. And he mentions friends, like teachers. “What I know about every place I go, almost everything was taught to me by my friends. To look, to listen, to understand, they taught me” He doesn’t put on airs. “I was the result of a time and a circumstance. I only took the path of my precedents: Ramón and Paco Ibáñez, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour, Georges Brassens, and the Italians of the 1960s”.

Someone reminds him that Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. What if one day they gave it to Serrat? “No, Chico Buarque deserves it first, because he has written the most moving songs. And Silvio Rodríguez, because he has written the most intelligent. And Joaquín Sabina, because he would like to receive it”. He is also smart, or reticent, when asked a political question. “I have no commitment to Lula. I am glad that she won, now we will see how her government is managed, if they let her manage it, because an electoral victory is not enough. We have to see what pacts he has made to achieve it ”. The questions pile up, but he finds a way to cheerfully bring the conversation to a close when someone asks, “What is the audience going to your recital going to find?” “With the usual, because the elephant and the exotic dancers stayed with us at Customs.”

Source: Ambito

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