“Rock between dictatorships”, recover songs with symphonic rhythm

(By Genaro Press) The Juan De Dios Filiberto Orchestra in its rock version, conducted by Laura Cmet, and joined as singers by Celsa Mel Gowland, Isabel de Sebastián and Rubén Goldín, presented last night at the National Auditorium of the Kirchner Culture Center ( CCK) “Rock between dictatorships. 1973-1976″, a concert created by Juan “Pollo” Raffo, with songs by Charly García, Luis Alberto Spinetta, Lito Nebbia and Norberto “Pappo” Napolitano, among other singer-songwriters, to claim and recover songs from a particular era in Argentina .

Conceived and curated by Raffo, co-director of the Orchestra, the reason for the concert was to rescue “that moment, the return of a democracy without proscriptions and the idea that the revolution was just around the corner” when “artists and audiences who had starred in the birth of Argentine rock during the previous decade now reached a state of young maturity”.

“That balance between impulse and experience -invited the previous call- generated a corpus of music and lyrics that, in tune with the spirit of the time, challenged the conventional and challenges us today from a place of risk.”

Before the concert begins, and with the orchestra on stage, Raffo highlighted that the chosen era combined “a youthful impulse and at the same time depth of experience” covered by the musicians who, in those years, were between 25 and 27 years. At the same time, he stressed that there was “a certain idea of ​​musical liberation” so that the melodies were not in the songs to support the lyrics. Finally, he stressed that it was not difficult to “translate” the original songs into their orchestral version because they responded to the global trend of progressive rock.

At the start, they played “La casa de la mente”, a 1975 song by the band Espíritu, made up of Osvaldo Favrot, Francisco Bergé, Gustavo Fedel, Carlos Goler and Claudio Martínez, heavily influenced by the group Yes, which was followed by “Aire (suggestive)”, a 1975 song by the group Alas and composed by Gustavo Moretto: to later move on to an instrumental version of “Tango en segunda”, which Charly García composed in 1974 for Sui Generis, which he integrated with Nito Mestre, and which was part of the duo’s third album, “Small anecdotes about institutions”.

Celsa Mel Gowland and Isabel de Sebastián (both singers of the band Metrópoli along with Ulises Butrón and Richard Coleman) and Rubén Goldín, one of the members of the Rosario trova led by Juan Carlos Baglietto in the 1980s, together made a version of “Instituciones”, also from the Sui Generis album.

Although the power and color of the voices of the three singers are known, the sound was unbalanced and left them in the background with respect to the music, an inconvenience that was overcome towards the middle of the show.

With “Azafata del tren fantasma”, a song from 1974 by Invisible, the group made up of Spinetta, Machi and Pomo, which gained a lot of strength thanks to the jazzy rhythm of the arrangement and a formidable job by the drums and percussion of the orchestra. Then came “Humanoides”, a song by Rinaldo Raffinelli, a member of Color Humano along with Edelmiro Molinari and David Lebón.

Then came one of the highlights of the night: visibly moved, Goldín noticed that Emilio del Guercio was in the audience, author of “Milagro del pueblo”, the theme of Aquelarre from 1974 from the album “Brumas”. At the end of the song, the first ovation from the public arrived, which was followed by a pure blues instrumental version of “Stratocaster Boogie”, a song by Pappo’s Blues from 1973, which also caused the spectators to burst into applause.

Isabel de Sebastián was in charge of a careful and sensitive version of “La lección del viajero”, which belongs to “Melopea”, a 1973 album that was the solo debut of Litto Nebbia, who composed all the songs on that plate together with Mirtha Defilpo. Then, Goldín shone with “Para Victoria”, which Roque Narvaja composed in 1975 for his album “Chimango”, and Celsa Mel Gowland captivated with her voice in “Hombre de mala sangre”, by Lebón and Liliana Lagarde.

The orchestra vibrated with “Tarka y Ocarina”, by the Chilean group Los Jaivas, which they joined with “Los chacareros de dragones”, which León Gieco composed in 1976 for his album “El fantasma de Canterville”. “The idea of ​​assembling these two themes is because Gieco’s talks about the coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, about the repression, by Víctor Jara, and because Los Jaivas were in exile in Argentina at that time and because live they were a great group ”, Raffo explained to Télam days before the concert.

The end was with “Cantata de los puentes amarillos”, perhaps one of Spinetta’s masterpieces, which is part of the list of “Artaud”, a 1973 album. The power of the orchestra, added to the voices of Mel Gowland, from Sebastián y Goldín caused the audience, in the best rock recital style, to applaud standing up and ask for “another one”. The encore was with Raffo on the piano so that the singers surprised with a version of “Natural”, by Tanguito, a song out of the period that framed the night, but without the harshness of the original guitar, it became a moving piece. .

Although the “translations” of popular music themes into a symphonic version often end with unhappy results, Raffo’s arrangements and orchestrations fit perfectly in each of the songs that made up the concert list. As if that spirit of liberation had been transferred to the National Auditorium of the CCK.

The other success was to summon Laura Cmet. His direction gave solidity and forcefulness to the Filiberto orchestra, and at the same time he knew how to give it freshness and the rock imprint that was needed to value this group of songs that, despite having been released for almost five decades, seem to have been written today.