Horacio Borraro : 1921-2012

 Horacio "Chivo” Borraro nació el 6 de octubre de 1921. Músico (saxo tenor & clarinete), compositor, arreglador, arquitecto, pintor, fotógrafo y escritor. Una leyenda del mejor Jazz Argentino .Falleció el 30 de mayo de 2012.

 

                                       Bio-Discografia At 85, the thin, funny man with gentle manners and rasping voice embodies the whole history of Argentine jazz. His modesty would not tolerate such a statement, but what else could be said of someone who has played, since the late 1930´s up to the 1990´s every jazz style, from Dixieland, swing, be-bop, hard-bop and even free jazz? Born to a family of classical musicians (his mother was a pianist, and his father a painter who had given up a career as a violinist), Horacio “El Chivo” Borraro chose to be a jazz player at an early age. “I liked traditional jazz and, as every jazz fan, I first learned to play the clarinet by ear. I listened to a lot of Dixieland, which was quite simple to play. When I started to play in the swing style though, things hot harder: I had to play like Benny Goodman, or Artie Shaw, who were terrific players. At that stage I begun to study with a teacher, but I was already a jazz musician”, Borraro told the Herald in a recent interview. Oscar Alemán and Enrique “Mono” Villegas were already consummate and pioneering figures, while future promises like Lalo Schifrin, Leandro “Gato” Barbieri, Baby Lopez Furst or Jorge Navarro were just in their first attempts at music. In the middle, between the youngsters and the first vernacular jazz masters, was Borraro´s generation, which played a key role in capturing the revolutionary changes that had taken place in the US in the late forties and that modernized jazz in a definitive way: the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and many others, known as “Be-bop”. Although Borraro was not alone, he was one of the first Argentine boppers, and gradually an intense circle of followers joined him. “I passed the new harmonies to younger musicians, like Lalo Schifrin. He approached me once when I was playing with my quartet and asked if he could play. He learned the new idiom really fast, and rapidly became an innovator himself”. The jazz scene soon polarized between traditional jazz lovers and those who liked the modern sounds of bebop. The first ones, some of them truly reactionaries, came from the Hot Club, and they frequently rejected the modernists. Borraro and his comrades thus founded the Bop Club in the early 50´s. ("BLUES FOR AN AUTHENTIC COSMONAUT" by MIGUEL DORFFMAN ," Buenos Aires Herald" - 30-9-05)

 

 

 

 

                                 "Clarinet and Rarities " presents, for the first time on cd, recordings dating from 1951 to 1956, featuring the All-Stars from the Bop Club. Though the sound quality is rather poor, they probably are the oldest recordings available from the first modern Argentine jazzmen. The standard I Never Knew, for example, is rendered in this 1952 version by an all-star line up completed by Enrique Varela, Rubén Barbieri (Gato´s trumpeter brother), Horacio Malvicino, Lalo Schifrin, Aldo Nicolini and Rudy Lane.

The album is completed by random recordings from 1973 (a quartet and a string orchestra, with Jorge Calandrelli on piano and arrangements,, Alfredo Remus and Norberto Minichillo), 1982 (a quartet with Norberto Machline, Néstor Astarita and Jorge González) and a four-part, original suite written by Borraro for clarinet, violin, viola and cello, from 1974."

 

                                              I can't Get Started
(Teatro Coliseo, Buenos Aires, 1978)
c/Norberto Machline-piano
 Mario Nadal-cbj
 Eduardo Casalla-bateria