Víctor Jara

Víctor Jara represents a rare case of a non-English-speaking singer-songwriter who inadvertently became famous among music lovers all over the world. The event that turned him into a legend of such proportions is, unfortunately, a tragic one: he was in fact one of the first and most notorious victims of Augusto Pinochet's regime. He was killed just five days after the coup, having been interned in Chile's national stadium in Santiago (he was one of forty thousand people who passed through it during the two months it was used as a concentration camp for political dissidents).

After being tortured, he was shot dead by a squad of soldiers under the command of officer Edwin Dimter Bianchi, and his body was then thrown into a ravine. When his wife, Joan Turner, was called to identify him a few days later, she found herself facing a mutilated corpse, covered in lacerations, stab wounds, and shredded clothes.

Given the enormous political outcry that Pinochet's coup sparked internationally, particularly in Europe, it's no surprise that Jara became one of the symbols of the affair. Without his physical elimination, his legend would probably be smaller today, much as other great socialist singer-songwriters who were politically active across Latin America in that era remain little known outside Spanish-speaking audiences, from Argentina's Atahualpa Yupanqui to Cuba's Silvio Rodríguez. The fact that, in order to gain recognition beyond one's own linguistic sphere without singing in English, one practically has to end up a victim of one of the most tragic political events of the twentieth century is a sad indictment of the cultural colonialism to which the post-war world remains subject. Luckily for us, Jara was, even before becoming a symbol, an artist of the highest calibre.

Released in 1971, "El derecho de vivir en paz" is Jara's sixth album, and stands out for being almost entirely self-penned, whereas in previous records at least half the space had been occupied by traditional songs or covers of other singer-songwriters. Jara was thus shedding his role as keeper of local folk heritage to take on that of the modern singer-songwriter.

Before approaching his work without knowing its context, it's worth remembering that Jara was a member of the Communist Party of Chile and was active in its youth wing. His ideology was steeped in the values that communism helped spread throughout South America, and was therefore firmly anti-imperialist. One should be careful before dismissing it as naive: communism, as a movement of global scope, has gone through a wide range of interpretations and has found itself interacting with very different situations.

Just as it could already mean different things within the same country (consider the distance between Lenin and Stalin), from one continent to another it could take on even opposite meanings, at least in certain areas. While in Maoist China the revaluation of folk heritage was in fact subordinated to the indoctrination of the masses, seeing its forms and content altered, in South America, conversely, singers close to the communist party rediscovered the folk repertoire with genuine conviction, working to have it supplant the modern music coming from the United States, seen as a symbol of capitalist imperialism.

Of course, even while operating through seemingly opposite means, both communist China and its Chilean counterpart made clear that capitalism was seen as a problem: the difference lay in the state apparatus. China's proved solid, partly thanks to the country's enormous human capital, allowing for the construction of an authoritarian government capable of exercising tight control over its vast territory. Chile, on the other hand, leaned toward a more moderate interpretation, which on one hand produced a rare example of a Marxist-inspired government with a democratic structure, but on the other proved particularly fragile and vulnerable to the influence of US intelligence services, which ultimately managed to bring it down by backing Pinochet's rise to power.

For this reason, it's understandable that, in a situation where the West effectively represented a source of instability for his own country, Jara would open one of his songs with an apologetic tribute to the figure of Hồ Chí Minh: a choice that, decades later and stripped of its context, might seem questionable, but which at the time was perfectly natural for a politically committed singer-songwriter who had grown up in the countryside around Santiago, Chile.

The song in question is the title track of the album: “El derecho de vivir en paz.”

The right to live,

poet Hờ Chí Minh,

who shakes all humanity

from Vietnam,

no cannon will erase

the furrow of your rice paddies,

the right to live in peace.

It isn't entirely clear who plays what on the record, though Jara was certainly capable of handling the guitar as well as various South American stringed instruments, such as the tiple and the charango, with their characteristic high-pitched sound.

In the album's credits, the artist thanks “Celso Garrido-Lecca, Ángel Parra, Patricio Castillo, Inti-Illimani, los Blops y el técnico Ángel Araos.” The Víctor Jara Foundation, established by his widow, has tried to reconstruct the exact credits through research into documents and testimonies, establishing with certainty the presence of Blops and Parra (son of Violeta, the pillar of Chilean folk music) on the title track, Blops again on “Abre la ventana,” the well-known Inti-Illimani on “La partida,” and fellow singer-songwriter Castillo (a former member of Quilapayún) on “Plegaria de un labrador.” Pianist and scholar of South American folklore Garrido-Lecca, on the other hand, seems not to have been present at the recording sessions, though he is credited as co-author of “Vamos por ancho camino.”

“El derecho de vivir en paz” is the only song on the record strongly marked by the presence of electric instruments, courtesy of Blops. The band, led by singer-songwriter Eduardo Gatti, was one of the leading names of the emerging Andean folk-rock scene. The fusion of tradition and rock unfolds in a surprisingly experimental way: the song opens with an acoustic introduction, while the other instruments are gradually layered in, building up an accumulation that seems to slowly unravel its own progression, until a chaotic finale dominated by clashing cymbals and intersecting electric guitar solos.

No other track is as extreme, although “Abre la ventana” also features a lavish array of percussion and an electric bass pushed well forward in the mix.

In “La partida” and “Vamos por ancho camino” a pan flute makes an appearance, while “El niño yuntero” rests almost entirely on voice and guitar. “A Cuba,” dedicated to Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and José Martí, moves to the rhythm of a typical son cubano, propelled by Afro-Cuban percussion. The re-recording of his own “Plegaria a un labrador,” originally a 1969 single, stands out for its sudden shifts in tone (from mournful to triumphant) and tempo (from funeral lament to march), while “B.R.P.” is dedicated to Ramona Parra (a communist militant killed in 1946, at nineteen, during a protest brutally repressed by the police) and closes the album to the sound of a military parade, complete with martial drums.

The record thus offers a catalogue of every possible variation on the local political song, immediately christened Chilean nueva canción (in line with similar national movements emerging across the Spanish-speaking world). Jara's crystalline voice adapts equally well to the most minimalist track and the most structured one, to the most placid and the most impetuous, to the purest and the most hybrid. His angelic timbre is so proud that one can almost grasp the words of his wife, when she dwells on the expression in his eyes – left wide open – that she had to confront while identifying his body.

The songs, so deeply steeped in the spirit of the Chilean people — both in the music and in the lyrics that championed their freedom and pride — struck an immediate chord. Once again, it's Joan Turner's words that best illuminate what this album meant for Chile:

Víctor's exuberant voice burst onto the radio at that very moment, with a catchy chorus accusing certain people of being nothing at all, "neither chicha nor lemonade"*, and inviting them to join him, "where the potatoes burn". Listeners were captivated and sang along.

(* Title of the tenth song on the tracklist. Chicha is a local alcoholic drink, and the expression can loosely be understood as "neither fish nor fowl", meaning uncommitted. "Where the potatoes burn", meanwhile, is an obvious reference to the country's poorest social classes).

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

29/11/2020