Néstor Ortiz Oderigo's discotheque: how does the color black sound?

“A series of sounds picked up by a wandering microphone in various parts of the word”, from the Philips label.



Another pasta album with recordings made in Bahia, Brazil, between 1941 and 1942.



Norberto Pablo Cirio


Born in Lanús (Buenos Aires) in 1966. Graduate in Cs. Anthropology (UBA, 2002) and doctoral student in the same career and university. He works at the “Carlos Vega” National Institute of Musicology and at the Research Institute in Ethnomusicology on projects on Afro-Argentine music. Since 2011 he is director of the Free Chair of Afro-Argentine and Afro-American Studies at the National University of La Plata. Since 2020, he has taught the subject Fundamentals of Afro-Argentine and Afro-Cuban music in the Bachelor's Degree in Native, Classical and Popular Music of America (UNTREF), the first public university to include them.


By Norberto Pablo Cirio *

Don Horacio Salgán, who was not exactly known for showing off his Africanism, responded to Hilda Herrera when she asked him how he came up with those rhythms that he put in the tangos: "It's the motas, Hilda, it's the motas!"[1]. Her ingenuity raises a question about raciality in record production that can be addressed by problematizing the type of hair with the black color of the records.


I don't know if anyone noticed it, but it is plausible that Gardel's gel polish mirrored the shine of the pasta disc. If he made his image part of the marketing, this should not have been coincidental. Thus, hairstyle and disco stand antithetical between the straight, typical of the Euro-descendant, and the mota, typical of the Afro-descendant, which is why Salgán's response is my starting point to address the disco of Néstor Ortiz Oderigo (1912-1996), donated by his widow in 1997 to the National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought (INAPL).


This article originated as an internal report at the request of said Institute and completes the digitization of part of this music library by the “Carlos Vega” National Institute of Musicology[2] for the project "Conservation and digitization of the INAPL Archive[3 ], financed by the Ibermemoria Sonora y Audiovisual program. Given that a good part of this disco is part of what Paul Gilroy (2014) calls the Black Atlantic, I begin by considering the criteria that Ortíz Oderigo should have taken to form it. its documentary value and finally, I consider its importance for the field of studies of the African diaspora in general, and Afro-Argentine, in particular, trying to answer the question of the title that, concatenated with the problematization of hair, seeks to elucidate if there is a link between hearing and sight.


In this way I seek to expand the main claim of Afro-descendant communities, visibility, which, although correct, leaves out other ways of perceiving Otherness, such as sound.


The collection


Ortiz Oderigo's love for African and Afro-American cultures began early, since his first articles on jazz in Fonos magazine date back to 1928 [4]. Just before genre, it is the adjective amateur because, looking at his production in perspective, I understand it as a music lover. Considering that he dedicated his entire life to it, it transcends bourgeois snobbery, especially remembering that he developed in an intellectual context that was, and to a large extent still is, hostile or, at least, refractory to thinking of Argentina as indebted to Africa for its implication in the slave trade. Although I did not get to know him and a talk would have cleared up many doubts, it is understood that passion strengthened his link with these cultures, one of the fruits of which was to form a specialized nightclub, which comes to us with a unity of meaning, which is no small thing [ 5]. I will not elaborate on the aforementioned criticism because I formulated it, as editor, in two of his posthumous books (Ortiz Oderigo 2008, 2009), which led me to a certain specialization in him to now address this collection.


In at least two books he published album lists, as complements. Both titled Discography, they are in Panorama of Afro-American Music and Aspects of African Culture in the Río de la Plata (Ortiz Oderigo 1944: 280-294; 1974: 195-200). I don't know if everything indexed was his, but a good part was, after comparing them with the collection. This highlights three issues that evaluate his work. Firstly, the effort to get many records should not have been just for money, it involved time and friendship and business relationships here and abroad, as evidenced by his letters (Ortiz Oderigo 2011). Secondly, the effort to learn about this diversity to optimize searches and evaluate the club. Finally, time for listening and analysis, since in many publications he cites and reviews albums. This shortlist also had its declining side. Following the order, I explain that, as a middle-class person, money must have been a finite resource and requests from third parties, or their promises, did not always come true. And also, being a fan, the understanding of artists, genres and styles was uneven. Consequently, sometimes his melomania led him to formulate poorly or unfounded ideas.


I give an example of each of these questions. Regarding the first, in a letter to Edmundo Zaldívar (s.), from 1971, which is not in his epistolary, he says he has completed the book Africa in the Río de la Plata [6], for which he asks for a hard disk. with his work Ritmo Caliente, since his broke. He doesn't even want me to give it to him as a gift, just to lend it to him so he can make a copy and, in gratitude, make another one, and closes by saying that he encloses a book of his (which is where the letter was found) [7]. Regarding the second, in Afroporteño music he did not qualitatively differentiate primary sources from secondary sources, the specialized bibliography of the back covers of commercial music records, the common sense of the oral memory of the Afroporteños he interviewed, and that of any material from/ about the Afro that came to him from any place and time. That is why the main word that appears in his candombe, bariló or guariló (Cirio 2015), is not in his dictionary (Ortiz Oderigo 2007) and a comment supports this. Although he frequented the Shimmy Club - an Afro-Porteño entity that gave carnival dances at Casa Switzerland - (Cirio 2019), where it was performed, he disdained documenting it because of the decadence that he understood with respect to the rosista era, when it should have been "pure", because "it "The only thing that remains of candombe are some drum noises" (Simpson 1967: 81).


Considering the media, this collection is mostly made up of 33⅓ rpm vinyl LP records. However, the 78 rpm pulp ones and the 33⅓ and 45 rpm single vinyl and cardboard ones are considerable. Although almost all of them are commercial editions, I highlight some non-commercial, therefore unique, 33⅓ and 78 rpm acetate LPs. Due to their content, there are three types: 1) His compilations of pasta records, for which he had to take them to a recorder; 2) Ethnographic recordings of Afro-Brazilian music; 3) Recording of part of a radio program of his, some of whose scripts I published as an Appendix in Outline of Afro-Argentine music (Ortiz Oderigo 2008: 346-419); and 4) ¼” open tapes. According to INAPL inventories, the total figure is around 400 items.


In the commercial records there are national and foreign ones, although the difference was not only due to the audible. Thus, I highlight local editions of jazz recordings made in the United States of America with additional information on the back cover or when opening the cover, on some pages. It is in Spanish and bears his signature, which shows that he energized the formation of his club not only as a consumer, but also by generating content for the marketing of foreign records, dealing with the subsidiaries of his labels in Buenos Aires and the parent companies. .


From the theme, although commercial music predominates -of which I highlight several pasta with recordings of mistrels and American jazz-, there are editions with ethnographically documented South Saharan and African-American music.


If the discographies that he published indicate that even then his discotheque was extensive (always inferring that all or most of it was his own), he must have had it in constant formation until he died. Thus, it is understandable that the condition of the discs is uneven, especially considering that a quarter of a century has already passed since his donation. This made Zelmar Garín, INM sound technician, apply ultrasound washing (on the pasta ones), microfiber brushing (on the acetate ones) and airing (on the open tapes) before digitization.


Heritage value of some records


After publishing the book with CD Gabino Ezeiza, Payador Nacional (1858-1916): (in)complete musical works (Cirio 2022), Garín gave me the digitization of an acetate disc for having, among others, commercial recordings by Gabino Ezeiza. My surprise was that of the 8 works by him, 6 I didn't know. Since Ortiz Oderigo had not recorded his information, I made the identification that it was Ezeiza because they were other versions of his recordings that he knew and, in the others, because of his voice and style. These are the inferred titles (with an asterisk in the referred versions): Adelante!* (song), The Silence of the Tombs* (song), El triste (style), La muerte de mi madre* (milonga), La resfalosa (resfalosa ) and [A Young Man of Great Honor] (song). Thus, the quality of (in)completeness that I considered in the title confirms how much I still do not know about the production of the country's greatest payador, at the time Afro-Argentine from the colonial stock.


Gabino Ezeiza, the Argentine payador.


Two acetate LP records with unpublished ethnographic records, sent to Ortiz Oderigo by Théo Brandão (1907-1981), a Brazilian doctor and folklorist who, by donating his art collection to the Universidade Federal de Alagoas, created the Museu Théo Brandão de Antropologia e Folklore in Maceió. The recordings were made at the São Jerónimo African Center in the Ponta Grossa neighborhood, Maceió, capital of Alagoas (Brazil), titled Xangô. For its analysis I turned to the specialist Fabio Sambartolomeo [8], who corroborated their value and established the criteria to catalog them by their organic nature and handwriting. The lack of other information on the albums than what Brandão wrote on the label on side A of the first and what he said at the beginning, plus the lack of letters with Ortiz Oderigo in his epistolary, makes it impossible to understand why he had them, but I infer which was at his request.


Théo Brandão, Xangô, in a private edition, recorded in 1951. Ortiz Oderigo Disco, National Institute of Anthropology and Latin American Thought, Buenos Aires.


It appears, yes, in his second Discography (Ortiz Oderigo 1974: 199) but without reference to Brandão. Apparently he did not take advantage of them either, given the absence of them in the book dedicated to the subject (Ortiz Oderigo 1991), in fact, he does not even cite them. For reasons of space I limit myself to giving the first four: Candomblé (Yoruba); All for Exú on the nagó line; All for Esigbó; Toada for all the days of umbanda (caboclo), all in soloist-choir and the trio of sacred drums (rum, rumpí and lê) and bell (gã). As these albums were recorded live, they can be considered among the first of this music with the ethnographic method, the oldest being made by Mario de Andrade (1893-1945) in 1938 during the Missão de Pesquísas Folclóricas in the north and northeast of the country.


From the records in South Saharan Africa I highlight a 75 rpm single with a bicontinental selection that has no other connection than the decision of the label, Philips. It is the seventh in the series “Song and Sound the Word Around”, with the subtitle “A series of sounds picked up by a wandering microphone in various parts of the word”, an early declaration of what, at the end of the millennium, will be baptized Word Music by the recording industry. The simple one is titled Spain-Africa and my appreciation is by the person who made the selection, Alan Lomax, American ethnomusicologist, creator in 1962 of Cantometrix (Lomax 1976), a method to compare, with the then novel application of the computer to the sciences. social, of world music, quantifying certain aspects of their performances in 37 parameters (the maximum of that computer science). Side A has six records from Spain (Mallorca, Seville -2-, Santander, Jerez de la Frontera and Asturias) and side B five from Africa (Uganda -2-, Congo, Tanganyika and Madagascar). Within the brief space on the back cover the works are explained and, of those of interest here, only two have the year and author or expedition that recorded them, so the rest I infer that Lomax documented them. For added perplexity, the cover has a photograph by the Dutchman Cas Oorthuys (1908-1975), in black and white, of women with hijab, typical of the Islamized Maghreb countries. The album was released in Holland, without a year, and has the advertising of the first two in the series, Cyprus and India.


Among the notable albums I add The Fisk Jubilee Singers, from the beginning of the 20th century. It is the first African-American solo voice ensemble, made up of students from Fisk University in Nashville and which emerged in the 1860s (who emerged at that time? The university, the African-American solo voice ensemble?), as well such as the collection of four albums published by The Library of Congress (USA), with work songs, Christian worship, games and blues that the enslaved people practiced and the aforementioned Alan Lomax compiled among his contemporary descendants.


Finally, if we take the records as artistic units, the design is not a minor aspect when highlighting Ortiz Oderigo's nightclub. Thus, the covers of five 45 rpm singles from Pioneers of Jazz that he has (the series is twenty), from Coral Records (a subsidiary of Deutsche Gramaphon), from 1962, are illustrated by Klaus Voormann (Berlin, 1938), an artist who He gained international fame for designing Revolver (1966), The Beatles' seventh LP, for EMI Studios, London, based on their friendship when they performed in Hamburg and he showed them the cover he designed for a single by his group, The Eyes ( Voormann 2018).


If listening is cultural, what does the color black sound like?


In the introduction I raised the possibility that hairstyle and music can be analyzed relationally, for which I gave an anecdote about Horacio Salgán and an interpretation about how Gardel's gel polish mirrored the black shine of pasta records. It is true that the followers of many types of music have their signature hairstyles, usually emulated from their references: punk, reggae, the rock and roll of The Beatles... About this group, in fact, their hairdresser had so much to say that he published a book (Cavendish 2018).


On Radio El Mundo, Oscar Aleman and Horacio Salgán shake hands in the mid-20th century.



What has been said leads, in this final section, to inquire about the cultural quality of listening, insofar as the decoding that each individual can do in their context is sui generis, therefore, difficult to extrapolate to others and, for musicologists, it is one of the Gordian knots when we try to understand the listening of the past and of cultures that are not ours without falling into ethnocentric value judgments. At this crossroads I want to start with a provocative question: what does the color black sound like? That is, problematize the link between hearing and sight to expand the main claim of Afro-descendant communities, visibility, to that of sound, since it is not enough for them to be seen, they must also be heard, especially when their decades of claims continue. falling on deaf ears regarding its inclusion in History.


Michel Pastoreau is known for the historical and social study of colors, dedicating a book to black (Pastoreau 2009). There he addresses how it has been used, since prehistory, in its functional, social and, above all, symbolic facets, while humanity, with the nuances relevant to different times and contexts, associates it with death, misfortune and the unknown. This explains why, in Argentine Spanish, phrases like “I had a black day”, “black dollar” or “black work” carry a racism that sinks its logic in slavery and, precisely, Afro-descendants struggle because they do not continue to be used, to the point that they even urged a first-rate public entity, such as the Ministry of Labor, Employment and Social Security, to hold an academic event to address the last mentioned (AA. VV. 2011).


Ergo, there is a lot to work on for a listening that opens new sensitivities when we are faced with historically soundproofed groups, Afro-descendants in general, and Afro-Argentines of the colonial trunk, in particular, both for their demands and for their music, if we understand these not as mere entertainment but as a cultural expression, often of resistance, as a counterdiscourse, as an alternative way of historicizing. They have been doing the same thing for centuries with hair braiding when they encrypted messages, maps and food to escape and that only they knew how to decode. Currently, the treatment of their hair, which includes shaving and wearing turbans, is a political position as an aesthetic that challenges the hegemonic fashion from which curling is usually branded as undesirable, bad and unmanageable. in favor of straight (Johnson 2016).


It is notable that when publishing my book on the recording production of Gabino Ezeiza, I was unaware of six of the eight works collected; I will include them in the digital edition of it that the INM plans for 2024. Likewise, the unreleased albums with Afro-Brazilian religious music by Théo Brandão, due to their age and originality, expand knowledge about it. This not only concerns Brazilian researchers, but also Argentines because the beginning of this religion in Buenos Aires occurred at the end of the 20th century with the arrival of cultists from Brazil and Uruguay, but it may have an autochthonous substratum that went unnoticed. until, precisely, 2023. In fact, on August 5, I interviewed Ana Lidia Yannone (78), an Afro-Porteño who claims to be descended from the first enslaved people brought to the city. As a teenager she learned a song for Olifin in Portuguese and Yoruba from an Afro-Porteño friend. For José Luis de Carvalho and Rita Laura Segato (1987: 17) this orixá may be a variety of Orinsala, about which little is known. In fact, the only image they documented is in Agua Fria (Bahía) and can only be seen by initiates.


Afro-Argentines from the colonial stock, which the academy began to practice a few decades ago and unevenly, given the size of the country and the reluctance to leave the comfort zone. This record, although unique in time, also invites us to revisit with sources from the 16th to 19th centuries the presence of enslaved Portuguese speakers, such as a certain Francisco, “short, with good meat, and his Portuguese language,” who escaped in 1817. after his master died (anonymous 1817). In addition to his language, he could have brought his religiosity. The truth is that the song that Ana learned goes back to the beginning of these religions. In fact, at the beginning of Argentina they already had media coverage, although loaded with racism (Lynch 1947).


The enhancement and selective digitization of the Ortiz Oderigo collection opens the possibility that the educational community, the academy and the general public can enrich their knowledge about styles and genres that are little or nothing known in and about the country.



Notes:

[1] Edgar Ferrer, personal communication, 2023.

[2] Hereinafter INM.

[3] Hereinafter INAPL.

[4] For his autobiography, see Ortiz Oderigo (2011: 381-383).

[5] However, it is incomplete, since at least “Candombe, El, private recording made by the author of the elderly drummer of San Telmo Rubén Pereyra (deceased)” is missing, and Fiesta en San Telmo, private recording made by the author, in San Telmo, during the celebrations of its 150th anniversary (Ortiz Oderigo 1974: 196, 197). This is a significant blow to those of us who study Buenos Aires candombe, although there is filming of the second in a private archive.

[6] He did not publish it. Like all of his unpublished production, it is at the University of Tres de Febrero, donated by his niece, Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, as heir.

[7] From how he introduced himself, “anthropologist and musicologist,” and the summary of his interests and his radio programs, I infer it was the first. I thank Manu Altamirano, who acquired it by chance when buying a book by Ortiz Oderigo that, evidently, belonged to Zaldívar.

[8] Director of Afro Sounds and Movements (IUNA), he has been a teaching trainer in DNEI EIB modality and a teacher at the IUNA and the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (UBA).


* Special for Hilario. Arts Letters Trades


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