Jorge Lopez Ruiz - 1975 - Viejas Raices

Jorge Lopez Ruiz 

1975

Viejas Raices

01. J. M. "Pepe" - El Condor 3:38

02. Del Galope Cuadrero 3:05

03. La Rosalba Y El Guri 5:00

04. La Chiquita Esa 3:50

05. Viejas Raices - Nuevos Contextos 4:45

06. Ellos Dos - El Futuro 3:18

07. E. C. Amigo 3:55

08. Rumimus (1974 - 26 Años Después) 3:10

Bombo Indio, Tamburra Hindú, Percussion – Domingo Cura

Contrabass – Jorge López Ruiz

Drums, Percussion – Pocho Lapouble

Guitar – Ricardo Lew

Electric Piano – Víctor Díaz Vélez

Saxophone, Flute, Clarinet, Pincuyo – Hugo Pierre

Double bass player, composer, arranger, López Ruiz –another of the great Flacos of Argentine music, as Sergio Pujol once pointed out– belongs to that generation that in the 1950s traced the modernity of jazz in Argentina. Lalo Schifrin and Gato Barbieri were the lanterns of a Buenos Aires that, while receiving the first news of bebop, offered some nights in which it was possible to find Dizzy Gilespie, Tony Bennett or some other mother-tongue jazz player.

López Ruiz had started playing the trumpet, but in those emergencies on stage, where "the show must go on", one night they sent him to replace the double bassist. There he stayed. With that instrument in 1961 he recorded his first album BA Jazz, with Fats Fernández on trumpet, Baby López Furst on piano, Pichi Mazzei on drums, as well as Gato Barbieri on tenor sax. Later he joined the trio led by pianist Enrique Mono Villegas, with Eduardo Casalla on drums. And in the mid-'60s he was a regular diner at the gargantuan Folkloreishon that pianist Eduardo Lagos hosted at his house. That was a cenacle of elaborations and crosses in which people like Hugo Díaz, Oscar Alem, Oscar Cardozo Ocampo, Antonio Agri and Astor Piazzolla participated. It was the bandoneon player who recommended him to Alberto Ginastera to be his student.

In 1967 López Ruiz coincided with Arturo Jauretche in a television program hosted by Roberto Galán. On camera he animatedly criticized the Onganía dictatorship. He was the author of Manual de zonceras argentinas who immediately urged the double bass player to say what he had said, “but now with music”. This is where El grito was born, a suite for jazz orchestra composed, arranged and conducted by López Ruiz himself. From there came an unusual album for Argentine jazz: combative, but with great musical fiber. It was also the revelation of López Ruiz as arranger. The then dynamic recording industry soon gave him a place among its most versatile figures. Thus, López Ruiz became Sandro's sound architect and, later, the arranger for Leonardo Favio, Piero and, by extension,

At that beginning of the decade, in which he also joined a free jazz quartet with saxophonist Horacio Chivo Borraro, the double bassist composed Bronca Buenos Aires, on texts by José Tcherkaski, co-author of many of Piero's songs from that time. Without being the continuation of El grito nor pretending to be, Bronca Buenos Aires maintains the same spirit of rebellion, after the events of the Cordobazo and the convulsions of a country that found a lucid reflection in the music of López Ruiz; so much so that both albums were fatally banned and withdrawn from circulation. Recovered –Bronca Buenos Aires could only be heard live here in 2015–, today they are among the most intense memories of Argentine music, and not only of that time.

De prepo (1972), with Jorge López Ruiz 5, a quintet in which among others were Pocho Lapouble on drums and Hugo Pierre on sax, and the two volumes of Viejas raíces (1975 and 1976), works close to the idea of ​​fusion at that time very prolific in international jazz, they marked out a discography distinguished by its stylistic versatility and good taste. López Ruiz was a jazz player in his prime when in 1978 he composed A man from Buenos Aires, in commemoration of the 400 years of the city. There he was with Dino Saluzzi on bandoneon, Oscar López Ruiz on guitar, Domingo Cura on percussion, Pablo Ziegler on piano and Gustavo Moretto on electric piano, Andres Boiarsky on soprano sax and the singer Donna Caroll, among others. The years of the dictatorship prompted him to leave Buenos Aires to emigrate to the United States,

In 1990 he returned to Argentina and with records such as Espacios (1990) and Coincidencias (1994) he marked his own territory in the city that continued to mature his own idea of ​​jazz. A territory from which names and styles entered and left, mixed between recent tradition and the concerns of the new generations. The quartet with the guitarist Tomás Fraga, the saxophonist Jorge Cutello and the drummer Germán Boco, was the last demonstration of that open and combative spirit, to which another community of young and combative local jazz values, the Kuai Ensemble, recently paid tribute. with Permanent Solitudes, a collective work that is reflected in the spirit and gesture of Bronca Buenos Aires.

We return to jazz fusion once again and this time we go to the parts of the Río de la Plata: Jorge Lopez Ruiz, a teacher as inevitable in our collective unconscious as an Astor Piazzolla can be, except that while one was having dinner under the dictatorship with Videla, the other was censored in the contestatory works he carried out (Bronca, El grito). The dictatorship today is masked in a more subtle way, that is why from this space we also gestate subtle forms of rebellion (longing for the direct one of course, but for this we need the awakening of the people). Led by his acoustic bass, Jorge brings us Viejas Raíces which, as its name indicates, is a beautiful combination of jazz and new contexts, with the ancient artifacts that nurtured the lands of the River Plate: candombe.