2023-06-18 03:01:00
Before, a phone call was capable of changing the course of a life. He could transmit information that was not in the plans. Today it is more likely that a message of this style will arrive on WhatsApp. That it be written or that it is preceded by a fearful “Can I call you?” As if dialing a number without warning was an intrusion equivalent to asking someone how much they earn per month or going into someone else’s bathroom and opening the medicine cabinet. But before the overacting of the smartphone, calls were made to the landline phone, which rang and emitted a sound that is hardly heard anymore, a sound in extinction like that of a newsboy shouting the newspaper or like the old dial up connection. And it was served. That was what Gonzalo Palacios did one day in 1980, when he picked up the tube from his house in Palermo and heard, from the voice of Pedro, one of his best friends, a phrase that opened doors: “Come, I have something to show you.” ”. Gonzalo, who was 17 years old, tried to play rock on the flute and got very frustrated because in each recital his sound was overshadowed by the rest of the instruments, he listened and went.
“I bought this a couple of days ago,” said Pedro, while showing a saxophone that left Gonzalo almost speechless. He only managed to ask how it was played. Pedro passed it to him and gave him some instructions. He told her how to put her mouth. He told her: “Move your fingers the same as in the traverse, you’re going to go well.” He gave him few instructions because he knew that Gonzalo could master the sax very quickly. “Try not to let air escape from the sides. And it blows”. That’s when the complete change came. Gonzalo began to discover the differences between the sax and the flute. He was fascinated and shot away, as if the force that he had blown had pushed him into the future.
“I was seized by an extreme palpitation. I ran home, waited for my old lady to finish taking care of a patient and told her ‘Buy me a saxophone now’. I think my old lady sensed that she could throw me a cable with that, because my life was not on the right track, especially if you saw it from the perspective of an adult. I think she saw something very strong. And after three days I had the saxophone that I have now. It’s the saxophone I’ve played with all my life, my entire career,” says Gonzalo now, now El Gonzo, one of the founders of Los Twist, a historic backbone of legendary projects. From Soda to the Redondos, from Sumo to Charly.
El Gonzo is sixty years old today and for the first time presents an album that has him in front. Relief, published by Acqua Records, was released on March 31 and features eight instrumental songs that explore “black music”, as Gonzo himself said in other reports in which he tried to describe it. Jazz, funk, versions of Percy Mayfield, Count Basie, Horace Silver, among others, give shape to this work that is, in reality, by a band completed by Alejandro Ridilenir (guitar), Daniel Castro (bass), Fernando del Castillo ( drums) and Gustavo Ridilenir (flute and tenor sax). The name is just a decoy, a code between connoisseurs. A reference to someone who in the early 80s became part (“by chance”) of the renewal of Argentine rock.
“I didn’t want to be a saxophonist, I didn’t listen to saxophonists. I actually didn’t play like a saxophonist for quite a while. At first I wanted to play like a guitarist, I thought guitar phrases. It was more of a riff, a lot of use of long notes and stretched notes, and little jazz language”, he says, and says that in this style is the answer to a question he is asked very often: Why did you play with everyone? “And because I didn’t play jazz. When I listened to the theme I got into the theme. I wasn’t playing ‘my part of jazz’. What I proposed was according to the theme. Much more than what would have been done by musicians who objectively played much better than me”.
El Gonzo grew up in a family where music was very present. When he was five years old, while his uncle, Alfonso Fassi, was excelling as a trumpeter for The Dixielanders, he began studying flute at the Collegium Musicum. Little Gonzo loved to attend. When they sent him to look for instruments to distribute in class, he was fascinated by the corridors of the school. “They would open the showcase for you and there were lots of xylophones, lots of things, and you would carry four or five, balancing. You were passing by rooms and you were listening to different music. There was a part of musical expression, so you would see the girls in their tights, dancing. He was really very inspiring. And on the other hand there were great music educators of that time. A lot of what I learned about music, which I took with me for the rest of my life, I learned there in the first three or four years”, he says.
At home things were no less intense. His brother Diego and his sister Diana, eighteen years older than him, loaded him with information that was irresistible.
“They were lost Beatlemaniacs, especially my sister. And in real time, while The Beatles were active. A very normal game in my house was that we would grab my old man’s golf clubs and we would make phononyms on top of the records. Someone, in general it was me, would put the golf club facing to the right, because it was the only perception I had: ‘The bass is the one that is played backwards’. My old man tried to pay my sister money if he didn’t talk about The Beatles at meals. He didn’t make it,” he says of those days in the late ’60s and early ’70s when Gonzo was happy and thought he knew more than the rest of the kids his age. He tells it and seems to be describing a Mafalda strip in real life.
“It was a very 1960s thing. There was a kind of optimism among the technology, that it seemed that it was going for the best. More and more things were discovered. The hippie movement, youth movements in general, the social revolutions in Latin America, etc. At one point it seemed like there was a chance the world would change. You could believe that. And I have many memories. For example, we started going on vacation to Gesell in 1967. You don’t know what that was. A divine hipperio. Even my old man, who was an old guy for a hippie, began to grow his sideburns, began to stick flowers on Fitito. It was all so imbued with optimism. That is the perception that I have of my childhood, which was cut short very suddenly when my old man died.
Gonzo’s father died in 1971, after a prolonged agony that caused pain and debt. It was the end of one stage and the beginning of another, grayer, indoors, which deepened in 1976, when the dictatorship arrived.
“I was waiting to be thirteen years old to go out into the world and all that was closed to me. It was reduced to this group of friends that we all came from more or less the same. A very closed-door socialization began. We didn’t go to clubs, at most we went to bars to chat. But the socialization was inside houses. Lots of records. You met someone and the first thing you did was look at their library and their record collection. That’s where you took the file, ”he says.
It was thanks to these meetings behind closed doors in the second half of the seventies that the Gonzo began to shape its future. He continued with the flute, he was a fan of the Stones (“they were in rebellion against my brothers”) and he played in some underground groups, like Astrid, which was “a very acoustic thing”, with “lots of superimposed guitar arpeggios, flutes on top and many voices.
El Gonzo remembers that Astrid “had certain connections with the Ring Club”, one of the antecedents of Los Twist, a project in which Daniel Melingo, a future companion of musical routes, was involved.
“Melingo was the boyfriend of the daughter of a colleague of my mother,” he says. The relationship that Gonzo established with the progressive environment in which his psychoanalyst mother moved was decisive. There he met several of his closest friends. Among them, Pedro, the one who told him “blow” one afternoon in 1980.
In a very short time, Gonzo went from discovering the sax to being part of the new breed of Argentine rock artists. Three years after that initial blow he was on the stage of Luna Park as a member of Charly’s band, in full swing of Modern Clicks, a series of shows carried out in full transition towards democracy. El Gonzo remembers those nights of December 1983 as a difficult experience to transfer.
“They were historic moments. But in terms of the personal and emotional charge that was in those concerts, it was tremendous. It was tremendous. There was a celebratory question of having survived, somehow. I am not referring strictly to surviving physically, vitally, but as minds. It was ‘it’s over’. A very black night is over, ”he says.
In Charly’s band there were also Melingo and Fabiana Cantilo, Gonzo’s companions in Los Twist, the group that had fascinated Charly to the point of producing bliss in motion, the band’s debut album, released that year. Garcia liked the project so much that he, as he told it in an old Rolling Stone magazine, he used the master’s degree in Do not cry for me ArgentinaSerú Girán’s farewell album, for recording.
“The Twists were made little by little -says the Gonzo-. They were put together from a basic idea of Dani, which in turn was an extract of what the Ring Club was. In the end, in the last Ring Club shows there was like a part that was, if you want, a proto Twist, that we were Cachorro López, Fabiana Cantilo, Melingo, me, and we did songs like that, a bit of revivals, a very fifties thing. And from that idea, and the arrival of the new wave, it gradually evolved into something that was Dani and me and musicians that passed by all the time. Not even Fabi was as a physical character.
El Gonzo remembers that one Sunday, in Plaza Dorrego, while he and Melingo were acting as guests of San Pedro Telmo, they detected “a very strange character.” “A red-haired boy with long curls who was missing several teeth. A totally crazy face, dressed in summer with a pilotin, shirt and tie, a cockade and a Primicia briefcase ”, he says and he is talking, of course, about Pipo Cipolatti.
“He opened his briefcase and took out a collection of books, dolls, a lot of things like that, artistic and random. We started to chat, Pipo grabbed a guitar and began to show us songs. He was the character we were missing to round off the idea. From there everything began to happen quite quickly, ”he says.
The speed seems typical of the eighties, years in which the Gonzo also played with Los Redondos, when the band of Indio, Skay and Poli said goodbye to performative performances and headed towards the recording of Gulp!his debut album from 1985. He also collaborated with Sumo on arriving the monkeys, the 1986 album. “It was an initiative of Roberto (Pettinato). A morning call. “Che, Gonzo, I need your funk for two songs that I want to record for two saxes. In fifteen I’ll pick you up in a taxi and we’ll go to Panda’”, he says of his participation in “Los viejos vinagres” and “Que me pisan”.
Those were times when the Gonzo alto sax was in great demand. Only a few months before the recording with Sumo, made in the fall of ’86, had been published Nothing personal, the second album by Soda Stereo. There the Gonzo is heard in a solitary plan, pure improvisation during the beginning of “I am blue”. He also collaborated with Memphis La Blusera and was part of Fricción.
The 21st century was for Gonzo the one of reunion with the Spanish roots of his maternal family. He went there in 2002. He spent almost eight years in Madrid. He now lives in Menorca, where he works in hotels and nightclubs. In the low season he usually returns to Argentina, where he spends several months playing live, giving interviews, talking about his life and his saxophone, the same one who has been blowing for more than forty years, a Yamaha YAS-62 that his mother bought him in installments.
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