A mystery of Latin jazz

As a child in a family of musicians, he learned the clarinet. When he moved to Buenos Aires as a 13-year-old he took up the alto sax and by 1953 he was a featured soloist in Lalo Schifrin’s band. He switched to tenor, formed his own quartet and by the early ’60s he had moved to Rome, then to Paris, where he joined Pocket trumpeter Don Cherry’s band with whom he cut two Blue Note albums - Complete Communion (1965) and Symphony For Improvisers (1966).

Gato’s harsh, guttural and roaring sound, alongside Cherry’s association with the quasi-notorious Ornette Coleman Quartet, soon made him a hero of the avant-garde. But his 1969 album for the Flying Dutchman label titled The Third World, along with subsequent albums like El Pampero (1971), Under Fire (1971) and Bolivia (1973), gave him a new identity as a jazz tribune of the third world.

Later albums for the Impulse! label, in particular the powerful Viva Emiliano Zapata!, consolidated that role with Barbieri combining with some of south America’s most skilful and committed musicians. It seemed that jazz had found its true Latin American radical voice.

He changed course in 1972 with the soundtrack for Last Tango In Paris - and perhaps it was this success that caused him to dilute and finally all but abandon his true provenances for commercial success.

So the reissue of his quarter album of 1968 In Search Of The Mystery, recorded for the unqualifyingly avant-garde label ESP DISC, takes the listener back to Gato’s early vanguard years. Recorded in New York, he is very much a roaring boy in the tradition of Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders and his confreres are pioneers of the form.

Bassist Sirone, born in Atlanta in 1940, had powerful avant-garde credentials and played with pianist Cecil Taylor as well as Ayler and Sun Ra, and was to become a long-standing member of the Revolutionary Ensemble. Also on hand were cellist Calo Scott and drummer Bobby Kapp.

There are two double-tracks, with the title tune as the opener, leading into another theme called Michelle. As soon as Barbieri begins to blow, with mournful sounds and the eternal rasp of his horn, you feel that this was a new sound in jazz stemming up from the far limits of the south American cone. The music is harsh, unremitting in its grating intensity, and when Gato reaches his first crescendo it is only to give way to Sirone’s menacing bowed bass. This is a sound of the Americas, but not of the United States of America. It is jazz born in a huge elsewhere of the continents.

In Gato’s notes a different American history was being sounded in jazz, and in the decade to come the blood of the people was to be spilled by successive tyrannical coups. Brazil had fallen in April 1964, Chile was to follow in 1973 and Gato’s own country was also to come under military dictatorship in 1976. And he was recording this album in the all-powerful nation that was fostering all these cruel usurpations.

The second track begins with the harrowing Obsession No.2 and moves pungently into Cinemateque - a title which suggests that Gato already had ideas of moving towards music for film. The interaction between cello and bass - an unusual enough combination in jazz - becomes a haunting foundation for Barbieri’s saxophone cries, and Kapp’s crashing drums foment a percussion storm which creates a furious framework for his confreres.

This is intensely free music, but doubtlessly music of its epoch. Such sounds call out to the listener for meaning and interpretation, and perhaps that is the “mystery” that the musicians themselves are struggling to resolve.

But jazz is music of the real world and in 1968 Sirone and his US contemporaries were struggling for huge changes in their lives in Georgia, Mississippi, Chicago and Soledad as Gato’s compatriots and neighbours all throughout south America were also struggling for theirs. This music was their commentary.