Susan Alcorn & Septeto del Sur
Canto
Relative Pitch Record
With Canto, pedal steel guitar virtuoso Susan Alcorn took inspiration from the music and people of Chile. For this project, Alcorn assembled a new group of collaborators, Septeto Del Sur, a group made up of Chilean musicians well versed in improvisation and folk music. Alcorn’s starting point is the nueva canción movement. Nueva canción is a hybrid socially-aware style of Latin American folk music, popularized in the 1960s by luminaries Victor Jara and Violeta Parra and snuffed out in Chile by the Pinochet coup in 1973. Jara was brutally murdered by the police, folk instruments such as the quena and charango were banned, and many nueva canción artists in Chile spent decades in exile.
The core of the album is the “Canto” suite, which pays homage to the victims of the Pinochet regime. The first section is called “¿Dónde Están?,” taking its name from the phrase chanted throughout Latin America in response to the “disappeared,” the loved ones and fellow citizens who were swept away without a trace by Pinochet’s security forces. The second section is “Presente: Sueño de Luna Azul.” “Presente” was another chant used to keep the memory of the disappeared. “Sueña de Luna Azul” is taken from the work of Mapuche (the indigenous people of south-central Chile ) poet Elicura Chihuailaf. The third section, “Lukax,” is dedicated to Chilean improviser and one-time political prisoner Lukax Santana.
The sound of Canto shifts between abstract improvisation and Chilean folk songs, the overall effect something like wandering on the high Atacama desert, a barren, jagged landscape more like the moon than earth, and then periodically running into a street festival around the bend. The mood swings from mournful to joyous without warning. The final track on the album concludes with an impromptu recording of Victor Jara’s “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz,” featuring Irarrazabal on haunting vocals. The song makes plain the beauty and sadness experienced by the Chilean people. We can hope that people learn from the lessons of history and the era of the strongman dictator comes to an end soon.
