In theory jazz is about constant reinvention. In practice it is full of references to its own back history, full of musicians working out small and precise variations on well-established languages.
Sometimes it’s hard to find a new jazz group in New York that sounds as if it’s aiming naively high, straining against its knowledge and its limitations, making music that produces the reaction yes, of course; why hasn’t that happened before? Guillermo Klein’s big band, for a few years, playing in tiny clubs around New York City, sounded that way.
Yet he didn’t capitalize on the momentum that he was building in the late 1990s. He disappeared from town in 2000, moving to Argentina, his home country, and then to Barcelona, where he fit into a strong jazz scene and started a family.
New York City generally doesn’t draw the short straw like this. During his subsequent evolution we heard dispatches from Klein—three fascinating records. Meanwhile, his music—in memory, mostly—worked like a secret code in the minds of young jazz players. Nothing else in town was filling the space it had occupied.
So when Guillermo Klein returned to New York with his band, Los Guachos, to the Village Vanguard in the summer of 2006, a number of people were unusually happy to see him again. I was one.
In early 1994, Klein, a pianist and composer, arrived in New York City from Boston, where he had attended the Berklee College of Music. He was twenty-four and soon found himself at Smalls, the Greenwich Village basement club on West Tenth Street that opened the same year. Most of the members of a seventeen-piece band he had been writing for in Boston came down when he got a gig at Smalls in December; in February 1995 he was given every Sunday night at the club and kept that schedule for four years, more or less.
“He had such trust in the musicians,” the singer Luciana Souza remembered of those nights. “He would bring in a sketch, and sometimes the musicians would write their own parts, in the moment. Guillermo had an amazing pool of musicians, all soloists. Everyone was already a bandleader, and some of them already had record deals. But they were still in the spirit of this collective thing. It was like a troupe, a tribe.”
His music resembled nothing else, especially as it moved toward grooves and away from the harmonic exercises he had learned in music school. It was jazz, of a kind, but it included brass choirs, counterpoint, drones, Argentine and Cuban rhythms, and a lot of singing. Some of the musicians were given parts to sing, and Klein sang himself, in a scratchy, smoky, untrained but emotional voice. There could be echoes of Steve Reich and Astor Piazzolla on the surface of the music; deeper inside, there might be clues to other heroes: Duke Ellington, Hermeto Pascoal, Milton Nascimento, Wayne Shorter, Stravinsky, and the Argentine pop composer Luis Alberto Spinetta. None of the admixtures sounded overthought, because Klein trusted his sense of song. If it didn’t sound natural, he didn’t play it.
And if the music directed too much attention his way, he reorganized it. Klein rarely takes a solo; I can’t think of a more self-effacing bandleader who actually plays with his band on stage. (This rules out composers like Maria Schneider, who composes music for her own ensemble but only maneuvers a baton on stage.)
“I’ve written a lot of counterpoint,” he told me in one conversation, “and I think I found it kind of by accident, as a way to play fugues. I was thinking, ‘How do you deal with equality in sound? How do you make everybody equal?’ Melody is amazing; it’s the soul of the music. If I come up with a melody that I love singing, I don’t want to chop it out. So, how can you make everything a melody?”
His colleagues and admirers came to include the best of their generation: Souza, Joshua Redman, Reid Anderson, Ethan Iverson, Mark Turner, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Tony Malaby, Jenny Scheinman, Claudia Acuña. Many of them were in his bands over the years; another six players from those days—Diego Urcola, Chris Cheek, Jeff Ballard, Ben Monder, Miguel Zenón, and Bill McHenry—have subsequently formed the American version of his eleven-piece group, Los Guachos (not Los Gauchos, as it has often been rendered in the English-language press). The word guachos is a common epithet in Argentina that can be used disparagingly or admiringly. Literally, it can mean “the orphans”; idiomatically, it means “the bastards.”
There was an almost magical luck involved in the evolution of Klein’s work, beginning with Smalls itself, which was unusual for its direct connection to the aspirations of young musicians. Klein’s interest in self-promotion was dim at best. (It still is.) He was born in 1969. His parents weren’t hippies, but he inherited from that era some of the best generalized hippie virtues. He has an instant dislike for art or personal exchanges that feel forced or mercenary. Asked when he knew he wanted to compose for a big band, this is what he said: “When you’re young, you have more illusions. Then it’s all just what it is. It’s so much better. No expectations, just what it is and what comes your way. I don’t think I will do a lot of things that I did before, like playing in restaurants. I don’t think I will do it again. But maybe if I didn’t have money.
“My music—it just happened. I started coming up with melodies, myself. I don’t know. Playing my shit made me feel good, like I was sharing something. I felt at home with that. When I play this music, I feel nice. I feel honest and clear, a place to be.”
During his six years in New York he didn’t live on much; for the first two, his parents helped him. He and his musicians earned about fifty dollars a night at Smalls, although the opportunity to perform frequently with a big band—and to a growing audience—was lavish recompense.
He lived at a number of addresses in Manhattan and Brooklyn, including a Hell’s Kitchen squat where he really did have to squat; his bedroom ceiling was less than six feet high. He worked around a little bit. There was a spell as the pianist in Kurt Rosenwinkel’s band at Smalls, and some time playing in a trio at the East Village bistro Jules.
For four months in 1997 he took a job in Chicago, playing in a Gipsy Kings cover band with an old friend from Argentina. In September 2000, missing home and not making much of a living, he and his American wife, the photographer and teacher Kim Bacon, moved to Buenos Aires.
I visited Klein, who was in his midthirties, one afternoon in November 2005 at his small apartment in the Eixample neighborhood of Barcelona, not far from Las Ramblas, the city’s central boulevard. The night before, we had run into each other at a concert by his old friend Maria Schneider. Klein was worried, having second thoughts about having to express his ideas about music for a newspaper article. “I don’t want to do any self-glorification,” he said. I joked that I would do it for him, then. He looked even more worried.
Klein is happy to tell stories about himself and his friends, but when he starts feeling that someone may be tracing what might be called his career, he begins to worry. “If I get a hint that I am putting myself before the band, it feels bitter to me, it feels weird,” he said. “I want the life of a simple guy, a simple musician.”
During a long day stretching into evening, smoking cigarettes and listening to music, Klein talked about how he hears. He is self-effacing, honest, wary, calm, loyal, a gifted and sedentary bohemian, the kind of person that New York used to pride itself on nurturing, before hedge-fund managers restructured the supply-and-demand equation and turned Manhattan into Venice. He spoke quietly, so as not to wake his one-year-old daughter, Veronica.
His father, also named Guillermo Klein, worked as a fruit vendor during Klein’s childhood in Buenos Aires, then pushed his way to an economics degree; by the late 1980s he was president of Argentina’s telephone company, in those days run by the state.
When Klein the younger turned eleven, his father gave him a piano. A year later Klein began composing; he started an apprenticeship with a teacher at fifteen, learning Bach fugues and chorales. His first pieces, he said, were inspired by Astor Piazzolla, the composer, national hero, and prime force of the nuevo tango movement.
What was the controversy about Piazzolla’s music, to an Argentinian? “It’s kind of like what happened with bebop, in the States,” Klein said. “People stopped dancing, and some of the swingers resented it. He’s the Monk, the Charlie Parker, the Mingus, the Dizzy, all together. Well, he was studying Stravinsky and Bartók; he studied with Nadia Boulanger, so he was using a lot of new harmonies from the start. He kept calling his music ‘tango,’ and a lot of people would say, ‘Man, that’s not tango.’ And he would insist that it was.
“He went to study in France in the early fifties. He came back, he did an octet in ’55. From then on, he was back and forth, out of Argentina, coming back,” he said. “He had very wide recognition outside of Argentina. Very common, no? No man is a prophet in his own land. For example, he did this one song that made him very popular, called ‘Balada Para Un Loco.’ It’s like a tango ballad, a pop tango. A lot of people reacted very negatively. They put it on a soap opera on TV, so you watch TV, you hear his music. We, the younger kids, didn’t like tango. To a kid, it sounded cartoonish.”
Like a caricature of the past?
“Exactly, claro. My father would listen to a tango, and he would get his eyes wet. I would listen to it at eight years old, and I would think it was funny.
“There are people that love Astor’s fifties and sixties and seventies music,” Klein explained. “But I love his very late work, from the eighties. I always listen as a composer. I need to hear the piece; I want to be inside the work. With this late period, his message was complete. I can hear it from beginning to end without wondering about form.”
We heard “Contrabajísimo,” a ten-minute piece from Piazzolla’s record Tango: Zero Hour, which many consider his peak achievement. It was made with his New Tango Quintet, a band that was unusual for its jazz-trained musicians: the violinist Fernando Suarez Paz and the guitarist Horacio Malvicino. Typically for Piazzolla, it has a rugged theme, surging with conviction. (Piazzolla didn’t engineer rhythmic flourishes into his music; his scores were written simply, and the players improvised conservatively but forcefully within them.) Then it grows soft and sentimental. “If you heard this section by a medium player,” Klein pointed out, “it would be corny. It’s flowery.”
The piece returned to the aggressive main section. “Time goes by, and I cannot hear the chords,” Klein said admiringly. “He makes you hear what he hears. It’s so simple, the way it develops. Very obsessive. For me it’s like an image of stepping very strongly along the earth and grabbing things, to go forward, clinging to them. Every step is really hard, taking you to a place that you didn’t know you were going to reach.”
The piece skidded to a stop. “Astor is like a friend that scolds you,” Klein said. “He knows who you are, that kind of thing. If you write a good song, the first thing you think is, ‘What would Astor think about this?’ ”
When Klein was eighteen, his father invited his piano teacher home for dinner, to ask whether it was practical for his son to pursue music. “The guy said, ‘Yeah, definitely,’ ” Klein remembered. “ ‘But he needs more than me. He should leave the country.’ ”
He had graduated from high school and played guitar in a rock band, covering Stones and Beatles songs. His mother read something in the newspaper about the Berklee College of Music; subsequently, the jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton, then a dean at Berklee, visited Buenos Aires to speak to music students. Klein attended the lecture and was struck by Burton’s comment that performing with Astor Piazzolla was a high point in his musical life. Soon Klein was in Boston.
He loved Stravinsky, and his first thought was to study classical music. He knew very little about jazz, having heard it only by accident in shopping malls. He was under the impression that “Take the A Train” was a Rolling Stones song. (The Stones used a recorded version of the Ellington-Strayhorn tune as entrance music on their 1981 tour; Klein had seen the film made about the tour, Let’s Spend the Night Together.) He had a poor command of English, and not much idea what he was doing in Boston.
“I showed the head of the classical department some fugues I had written, and he couldn’t care less,” he recalled, laughing. “Then I met some guys, like Diego Urcola”—a trumpeter around his age, also from Buenos Aires—“who were talking with so much passion about jazz.”
A month later he started listening to the Wayne Shorter record Speak No Evil, and something opened up. As a composer, Shorter is a genius of harmony in jazz; it is harder to parse his music in the scientific terms that music school can impose. Not very good at sight-reading and passionate about learning and composing by ear, Klein liked to find his way to voicings and harmonic motion that sounded as freshly discovered as possible; he sensed the same in Shorter.
Later, on holiday, he went to a Milton Nascimento concert in Argentina, which moved him to tears. He made his way to the mid-1970s collaboration between Shorter and Nascimento, Native Dancer, and he connected the dots between the two musicians.
We listened to “Miracle of the Fishes” from Native Dancer. It is a scary piece of music: first a brisk, three-beat figure on guitar, with descending harmonic movement, under Nascimento’s tremulous voice, with a melody that sounds as if it starts from the middle. After fifteen seconds, everything begins to explode. An electric piano insinuates itself, and about two minutes in, Shorter appears, playing a great, gargly tenor-saxophone solo, slicing eccentrically phrased passageways through the chopping rhythm.
“I got very into this record,” Klein said. “Maybe it was the fact of Milton and some grooves, also, which I felt close to, like kind of family.” He made a few more passes at explaining his attraction to it, then gave up. “I don’t know. The harmonies didn’t feel like chords; they were like an orchestra.
“It felt good to be in there,” he said, motioning toward the speakers. “It’s very different to the tritone thing, I think.”
This was another kick against music school. He was referring to the common substitute chords that are the basics of harmonic progression in jazz. Klein doesn’t want to hear either hackneyed or overly fussy harmony. “I don’t see the point,” he complained. “A composer plays these voicings, writes down the names of the voicings, and then harmonically he has all these weird relationships. And then if you try to solo over that, you would never find it through the ears; instead, you find it through the eyes. E-flat seven sharp nine, going to A-minor seven flat five—how do you fit that through your ears, if it’s just a voicing that you played on the piano? That’s a very risky place, man. I hear that a lot, unfortunately. I get very bored.”
I asked if his problem with a kind of official language of jazz harmony goes back to bebop. “No, no,” he protested, “bebop is incredible. Charlie Parker is very clear to me. Bud Powell, too. They shape the harmony through the horn or through the piano, and you can hear exactly what harmony it needs. Bebop is one of the most important things in the twentieth century, and Stravinsky, you know.”
He paused. “Secretly it has to do with the heart,” he said. “How you feel in your heart. I bet Milton and everybody in that record was really moved, and they knew they were doing something really clear and honest.”
He said that he and Reid Anderson, the American jazz bassist who spent some time living in Barcelona, had been talking about style and decided that it was all a construct. “You don’t look for style,” he said. “If something’s going to be authentic, it will come out. I say, man, do your thing. What you’re doing when you get with your friends—that thing becomes a style of its own.
“Like, we are filled with mediocrity, and some spots of inevitability,” he continued. “When you hear Bach, you get the sensation that the whole thing was inevitable. It’s an attempt to live every note. You feel part of something inevitable.”
What might have been inevitable in 2000, when Klein and his wife relocated to Buenos Aires with five hundred dollars to tide them over, was the country’s impending economic collapse. (His father, predicting the crisis, had warned him against moving back home.) He started to teach music and got a gig at a new club called Thelonious, where his band ended up playing every Wednesday night, eventually filling the club each week.
By the middle of 2001, the school where Klein taught wasn’t issuing paychecks. By December, there was a freeze on bank withdrawals. On December 19 the band played a gig to about forty people at Thelonious, and when they finished, Klein was told by the owner that not one person had paid. The day after, there were riots in Buenos Aires.
“Nobody had any money,” he said. “There was trading. People didn’t have money to pay for lessons, so they would pay with food or a bicycle. You went walking everywhere. The thing is, there were people really listening at the club where we played, because it was such a crazy time that people needed to go out.”
What came to Klein’s rescue was a record deal with his American label, Sunnyside. In the middle of this mess, he made a record, Una Nave, which was finally released in 2005. It turned out to be a special record—one of the best of the year. In 2002 he moved to Barcelona, where he is finally making ends meet with regular local gigs and a teaching position in San Sebastián. Shortly after we spoke, he was finally given the honor of an invitation to play at the Vanguard, where he had never brought his band before.
For Klein’s wedding in Begues, a mountain village south of Barcelona, some of his musician friends played an arrangement of the Billy Strayhorn song “Daydream,” first recorded by Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1940.
We listened to the original version of the piece, not the slower, more tragic-sounding version recorded by the band shortly after Strayhorn’s death in 1967. Klein wanted to demonstrate how one can come by jazz harmony honestly, rather than by following academic convention. What he zeroed in on was the bridge section of the song, where Johnny Hodges’s throbbing alto saxophone works against Ellington’s piano chords. “The changes are chromatic two-fives,” he said—the ii-V module moving chromatically, half-step by half-step. “I had heard them before, like in some Charlie Parker blues, or in ‘Darn That Dream.’ But when I heard this, I didn’t realize they were chromatic two-fives. I was so into the song.
“If you see the music on paper in the Real Book,” he said—referring to the common cheat-sheet book of jazz standards that a musician might take to a pickup gig—“and you play the chords, this sounds like a typical jazz record. But if you hear the voicings they play, it’s like, they are not chords. It’s like a triad that goes to another triad, and the bass moves. It’s just like a chorale, you know. See, an F-major chord, going to an F7 chord—it’s like a can of soup. But if you do this voicing—A goes to G, E goes to E-flat, bass goes to C—you get all these new sounds. I mean, you can call it F7 if you want, but . . . the way they played that, it feels like they were discovering it. Like it wasn’t done before.
“That’s the thing about Duke; he makes the players play,” Klein continued. “He makes them have fun. And he makes the writers write. I’m not a scholar of Duke at all; it’s just that he brings me happiness. How could it be that you hear ‘I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good’ by everybody else, and it’s okay, and then you hear it by Duke with Johnny Hodges playing and it’s just, like whoa! It makes you fly; it makes you travel. I didn’t read a lot about Duke, but I think he’s my friend; I feel like he’s my friend.”
There are other stories to tell about Klein’s horror of self-glorification. When Klein’s Una Nave was released in the United States, for instance, it came with an unusual press release. “Guillermo Klein prefers that his music be judged without emphasis on biographical or historical context,” it read. “Therefore, he has requested that a project biography not be written for the release of Una Nave. However, Guillermo did wish to relate that the music, recorded while living in Argentina, was passionately made and well rehearsed.”
But he took to the project of listening and talking much the same way that the other musicians did, and more deeply than most. It suited his long attention span and brought out some longstanding feelings. Above all, he liked talking about how music moves through time, the mechanics that can make it seem, at best, unmechanical.
A year later, I saw Klein when he returned to play at the Vanguard again with his American band. He came upstairs between sets for a cigarette break outside the pizza parlor on the corner of Waverly Place and told me that he had been thinking about things he wished we had listened to together: specifically, a song by Luis Alberto Spinetta, the Argentinian pop star, that gave him courage a long time ago. “He is my folklore,” he said. I agreed that we could do it on the phone when he got back to Barcelona.
Like, for instance, Peter Gabriel, Spinetta started out as a fairly oddball artist before he became a mass-pop celebrity. He formed a band called Pescado Rabioso, which made three albums before he left; in 1972, he then made a solo album, Artaud, inspired by the French writer Antonin Artaud. It was credited to Pescado Rabioso, even though it was almost entirely Spinetta’s own work.
Klein chose “Por,” a short and beautiful voice-and-acoustic-guitar song from Artaud. There is a sense of ongoing discovery in this song. Its words are a series of images, each one separated by a comma: “arbol, oja, salto, luz, aproximación/mueble, lana, gusto, pie, té, marcas, miradas” (tree, eye, jump, light, approximation/furniture, wool, taste, foot, tea, prints, gazes).
“I remember that song specifically,” Klein said. “Each word was like a little world for me. That was a strong thing for me—a sense of possibilities, but beyond thinking as a musician, just as a listener. Without thinking whether I would use it or not.
“A friend of mine was playing with him once, and he said that Spinetta would name each chord with people’s names—like, for an A, he’d say, ‘Play a Horacio chord.’ He’s very intuitive, very heavy. He came to see Los Guachos once, when we played in ’98 in New York, at the Argentinian consulate. I saw him, and I couldn’t avoid giving him a big hug. He told me that I was from Mars. I was like, wow, man. After Artaud, how can you say that to me? Maybe he meant from Mars, in some astrological sense. It was a deep day.
“He also encouraged me. I mean, I was talking to a musician, beyond the style. A true musician. He said that he liked the bridges of a couple of my songs. Tangible things. He liked ‘Viva,’ this very old song I wrote. Funny that he said that; when I wrote it, I thought of him. Harmonically free and very lyrical. It was my Spinetta moment.”
Set List
Astor Piazzolla, “Contrabajísimo,” from Tango: Zero Hour (Nonesuch), recorded 1986.
Wayne Shorter, “Miracle of the Fishes,” from Native Dancer (Columbia), recorded 1974.
Duke Ellington, “Daydream,” from The Best of the Duke Ellington Centennial Edition (RCA/BMG), recorded 1940.
Luis Alberto Spinetta/Pescado Rabioso, “Por,” from Artaud (Sony/BMG Europe), recorded 1973.