Chango Spasiuk - The Charm of Chamamé (2003)

Artista: Chango Spasiuk
Álbum: The Charm of Chamamé
Año: 2003
Género: Chamamé fusión
Nacionalidad: Argentina

Lista de Temas:
1.- Governador Virasoro
2.- Song for Nande Reta
3.- Prelude for a Humming Bird
4.- Poison
5.- Chamamé en mi bemol
6.- Saint George
7.- Improvisation for the Hoshiuv Virgin
8.- The Happiness that makes you cry
9.- Besela Doroha
10.- Starosta
11.- Ivanco
12.- Posadas
13.- Pynandy
14.- Scenes of the Life on the Edge
15.- Good Bye Beatriz
16.- Dark Cat
17.- Josefina
18.- Misiones
19.- Sólo Para mi

Alineación:
- Sebastian Villaba / Guitarra y voz
- Marcos Villalba / Percusión y guitarra
- Victor Renaudeau / Violín
- Heleen DeJong / Cello
- Juan Pablo Navarro / Contrabajo
- Alejandro Oliva / Percusión
- Marcelo dellamea / Guitarra
- Tilo Escobar / Acordeón
- Hector Chavez / Voz principal
- Pablo Lopez / Violín
- Chango Spasiuk / Acordeón

"To this multi-stranded, complex but extremely popular regional form, Spasiuk brings a..."
"Este es un álbum con muchas aristas, complejo pero localmente es muy popular..."

El Chango Spasiuk nació en Misiones, provincia de Argentina, nieto de inmigrantes ucranianos. Su papá carpintero y violinista, los patios de tierra colorada, la selva subtropical, el río, los agricultores, los yerbales son parte del mundo que hay en su música y su acordeón. Hereda la tradición de las polcas rurales, pero es en el chamamé donde desarrolla su búsqueda y en donde despliega su mayor actividad interpretativa y compositiva de una fusión donde se van perdiendo los límites y surge una nueva manera de interpretar y entender lo tradicional.
Tanto es así que dudo si etiquetar el post como Folk o Folk progresivo... veremos...
Este álbum es una recopilación de temas editado en Alemania en el 2003.

Everyone and everything in Argentina is borne of a mixing of bloods, cultures, trends and topographies. Everyone knows the great urban fusiontangoand many have heard the Andean 'criollo' (Spanish-Indian Creole) hybrid folk sound of Mercedes Sosa and Atahualpa Yupanqui.
Far less well known is the music Chango Spasiuk plays- chamamé, a warm-hearted, accordion-based rhythm that taps into native Guaraní, Spanish, Brazilian, criollo and European traditions. Its natural home is north west Argentina (Spasiuk is from the deep green province of Misiones, made famous in the Merchant Ivory film The Mission, and much visited for its awesome Iguazú waterfalls).
To this multi-stranded, complex but extremely popular regional form, Spasiuk brings a daring, virtuoso accordion style and elements of his own Ukrainian family roots. It was in fact the polka that gained him a following outside the folk circuit several years ago in Argentina, and he still includes several in his live repertoire.
This, his seventh album, pulls together traditional songs and some of Spasiuk's own compositions from his most recent - and best - three albums. Throughout, he explores the tropical, dance-oriented, usually upbeat chamamé genre much in the manner of Piazzolla testing and pushing the tango. Tapping into chamamé's less obvious melancholy strains on "Preludio a um beija-flor" and "La Ponzoña", Spasiuk still manages to tease out sweet, seductive strains. During track 11's polka, we've got one foot in Kiev and the other in subtropical Argentina - both are dancing.
Both Piazzolla and Yupanqui are definite inspirations here - but so are Bartok, Tchaikovsky and the great writers of classic chamamé, Cocomorola, Montiel and Martínez Riera. This rich brew of classical, folk and modern musical influences makes for a sometimes clamorous collage of phrases and no end of digressions, but chamamé's gentle, seductive swing underpins the whole.
It's a complicated journey to the bottom of a musical style so unknown outside Spasiuk's home region. But it is always enjoyable, and there is a searching, quasi-mystical element in Spasiuk's whirling, wandering solos - he talks of a 'vacio' or 'nothingness', a place to which only music can take you (track 7, an 'improvisation', finds Spasiuk in full-on abstract, ambient mood).
Others will perhaps find a more earthy quality in the sound - sourced in chamamé's easy tempo and barn-dance spirit, which springs from a community-based celebration of everyday rural life, long train journeys, family ties and a sharing of woes and wonder. Somewhere between these two extremes - the metaphysical ponderings and the mooing of cows - Chango Spasiuk is making a powerful musical case for chamamé.
Strong support, in particular Sebastián Villalba on guitar and vocals, and Chacho Ruiz Guiñazú on percussion, keep the rhythm a constant delight. The disc is breezy and refreshing, and reveals an utterly new side to the Argentine soul. The accordion is hardly a fashionable instrument - but try this one. You'll surprise yourself.
Chris Moss - BBC Review (2003-12-03)

La música de Spasiuk tiene una gracia y un romanticismo que la hacen irresistible, con piezas hermosamente coloridas y animadas, no solo por el acordeón sino también por el conjunto que generalmente lo acompaña.
Otro comentario (si quieren ver hay más aquí)

Chamamé is rustic, upbeat, and reveals a side of Argentina quite unlike the great urban form, tango. Chris Moss talks to accordionist Chango Spasiuk.
My first experience of chamame was Raul Barboza (the King of Chamame) playing at La Trastienda in Buenos Aires. Then, in 1999, two friends inspired me to check out Chango Spasiuk, an incredible accordionist creating a potent hybrid of polka, folkloric, and this half forgotten country dance music, chamamé.
Talking to Spasiuk at London's South Bank, I can only just keep up with his pace and erudition. He talks like he plays, fluidly and forcefully, sometimes fierily. He pours scorn on ex-president Menem and his frivolous politics in the 90s, analyses the current economic crises, and he drops in quotes from Gurdjieff, Jung and Bela Bartok, and from Piazzolla and Yupanqui as if he read them all the night before. But above all, he provides me with a multifaceted answer to the question: what is chamamé?
"People think of chamamé as happy, lightweight music, but it's not that at all. It's over 300 years old and it's the product of a complex racial mixing [mestizaje in Spanish],"'
"Chamame is powerful; but its sound is also melancholy. It's been marginalised and undervalued, not because of how it sounds, but because for some people it represents workers who came to Argentina in the period of its industrialisation and poor people from the country." (...)
He tells me "chamamé is a style of music that existed before immigrants arrived - the main contribution made by immigrants was the accordion. The deepest roots go back to the Mbya Guarani, the natives who lived in north-east Argentina before the arrival of the Spaniards. Next came the Jesuits, who tried to educate the indigenous Guarani through baroque music. After that, it's the turn of the criollos - the creole people of European descent born on American soil - which in my region mixes in turn with the Guarani."
When Spasiuk talks about immigrants he means the great wave of Europeans who arrived in Argentina in the first quarter of the 19th century. He says that "inside a radius of 90km from Apostotes, you have the Brazilian and Paraguayan borders, the Parana and Paraguay rivers, Guaranis, Germans, Poles, Swiss communities." Little wonder that his own music, which feeds off his Ukrainian heritage, as well as all the above, is so complex, multi-stranded, and hard to define.
On Spasiuk's six Argentinian solo albums - and on the The Charm of Chamame compilation released in the UK last year - you can hear all the strands. You can hear cows mooing, church bells ringing, steam trains passing beyond the fields - all these both literally and figuratively - and you hear a fiddle played for a funeral or a fiesta. There are the rhythms of work songs. There are also slap bass guitar and rock riffs in there - Spasiuk is a fan of Hendrix and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and has played with Divididos as well as less well-known rock bands who do gigs in the underground rock circuit in Buenos Aires, where he now lives. One Canadian critic commented that everyone can hear their own folk music in Spasiuk's chamamés. But there is always great artistry, the marriage of virtuoso talents and a deeply rooted affinity with his music. Spasiuk is always searching and his Béla Bartok quote. serves as a kind of mantra: "Thrust yourself into the unknown from what is already known but unbearable." Sometimes, indeed, he seems to have fused the experimental rigour of classical geniuses like Bartok with the basic, primal sound of ancient folk. It's not quite 'Variations on a Theme from Knees Up Mother Brown', but it's almost there.
In addition to being Argentina's leading chamamecero, Spasiuk is credited with reviving the polka in his work. If he berates urban intellectuals for pigeonholing chamame as country fun, he is no softer on folk purists. "People from the region where I was born believe they can 'consume' the polka music because it's very traditional, it's something they've heard before. It's a bad habit which has become widespread throughout Argentina, to, think that what is different is solely for intellectuals."
In some ways, a couple of hours with Chango Spasiuk is a bit like going to therapy. You feel sorted and more confused at the same time - certainly more alert to music, culture and life in general. But for all the mental meanderings and issues unearthed, we constantly return to a search for definitions, which brings out,a missionary zeal in Spasiuk. But it goes way beyond definitions: "Chamamé is a music which is defined, but which is waiting to be developed. It's not an extinct aesthetic in the way that tango is.' Transformation is the end purpose - you have to do something,break it, and do it again." Chamamé is, he believes, like Latin America, "an open wound -nothing is closed."
Chris Moss, Songlines July/August 2004

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