Mapping the Music of Chile
By Jan Fairley
‘If you go to Chile, I beg you pass by the place my loved one lives. It’s a small house, pretty and tiny, by the side of a weeping willow.’
So run the first lines of the classic song ‘Si vas para Chile’. Today, while those wonderfully sentimental lines are still sung, if you go to Chile, you might want to track down the vivid history of what survives of the seminal nueva canción, the new song movement.
Chile is famous for new song, part of a much broader movement throughout the Americas, involving such singers as Argentina’s Mercedes Sosa, Nicaragua’s Carlos And Luís Mejía Godoy, Brazil’s Chico Buarque, and Cuba’s Pablo Milanés and Silvio Rodriguez.
‘New song’ in Chile began back in the 1960’s. The hot spot was to be found in the centre of Santiago, at Calle Carmen 340. Here in 1965 Angel and Isabel Parra opened the crucible of it all, the Peña de los Parra. Everyone went there, from locals to diplomats, MP’s and artists to tourists. For a small price you got a glass of wine, a Chilean empanada and a night of brilliant music from the Parras and everyone from Victor Jara to Patricio Manns. A key inspiration was the Parras’ mother, Violeta, who had travelled around the country collecting old songs from rural singers and teaching them to a whole new generation who had grown up in the cities.
The groups Inti Illimani and Quilapayún formed in the universities. They wore the poncho of the peasant, and played indigenous Andean bamboo panpipes, wooden quena flutes and the little armadillo shelled small charango (a mini ukelele-guitar), in their search for broader, less parochial Latin American music. Their songs were of love for people, stories of everyday life and they sang them everywhere from clubs to factories to meetings, with street songs such as ‘Venceremos’ (We Will Win) and ‘El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido’. (The People United, Will Never Be Defeated) extremely popular at demonstrations.
The 1973 military coup d’etat found them travelling abroad as the Popular Unity Government’s cultural ambassadors. For the Intis, a planned absence of three months became a seemingly never ending tour of 15 years 54 days, until they were eventually allowed home from exile.
They arrived on 18th September 1988, Chile’s National Day, when Chileans party wildly, celebrating independence from colonial Spain, with everyone spiritedly dancing traditional cuecas, drinking pisco sour, and enjoying asado barbecues.
New song first thrived during the 1960’s, the years leading up to and during the government of Salvador Allende. Its most famous martyr was cantoautor, Victor Jara, composer of such songs as ‘Te recuerdo Amada’ - I Remember you Amanda, a love story with a twist at the end, as haunting as The Beatles Eleanor Rigby; ‘Plegaría a un labrador’ - (Prayer to a worker), which won the first festival of Chilean New Song. A charismatic singer, songwriter and theatre director, Jara experimented with pop and rock as well as folk. He was arrested at the place of his work, the Technical University on 11th September, the day of the coup, taken with thousands of others to an improvised prison camp in the football stadium in central downtown Santiago, the last place he was seen alive. His body was found along the boundary wall of Santiago’s Metropolitan cemetery on 16th September.
It’s well worth making a pilgrimage to the stadium where he wrote his last words, ‘Ay canto, que mal me sales’ - (Oh how hard it is to sing), set to music in 1976 by an exiled Isabel Parra. The stadium was purified of its horrific past on 9th April 1991, in a 24-hour ritual ceremony involving hundreds of musicians, actors and the relatives of those who died. You might also visit the cemetery, to find his grave on one of the far walls. It’s in a small niche in the wall, in contrast to Allende’s grand, but still moving mausoleum, in the cemetery’s avenue for past presidents.
Jara’s memory lives on everywhere, including the shanty town immortalised in the album made with the help of its inhabitants, La Población (Herminda La Victoria). Sting, Peter Gabriel, Youssou N’Dour, Bruce Springsteen, all sang Jara’s songs when they were on the South American leg of their groundbreaking Amnesty Tour. But Jara survives most tangibly today in the work of the dance centre, Espiral, in downtown Santiago’s Plaza Brasil, founded by his widow, the British born ballet dancer Joan Turner Jara. The same building houses the Victor Jara Foundation, whose sponsors include Peter Gabriel, John Williams and Emma Thompson who is presently attempting to write a film script of Joan Jara’s book, ‘Victor: An Unfinished Song’.
In September 1997, to commemorate the anniversary of the death of the sixties revolutionary icon, Che Guevara, 70,000 Chileans came to hear Cuba’s Silvio Rodriguez and Vicente Feliu, Uruguay’s Viglietti, Chile’s Patricio Manns, Schwenke y Nilo and Angel Parra, playing there with his equally famous musician children, Angel, Javiera and niece Tita. During the event, there was a screening of the bombing of the Moneda Palace, on the day of the coup, when Allende was still alive inside, to the haunting soundtrack of Pablo Milanés’s exquisite ‘Yo pisaré las calles nuevamente/de lo que fue Santiago ensangrentada’ (I will walk the streets again/of what was bloody Santiago).
For many in the stadium, perhaps not yet born, or only children in 1973, it was one of the first public opportunities to see what had happened in their country.
With Milanés’ concerts throughout Chile in April 1998, Inti Illimani at home working with Patricio Manns on new songs, bands Illapu and Congreso and others like them who kept the canto nuevo going during the dark military years, the scene is slowly bubbling again. Scan the newspapers closely, especially the listings magazine La Noche and check out concerts at the theatres and the clubs in the Bellavista area. You may catch some of these musicians in action.
Jan Fairley is a journalist who specialises in Latin American music.