Perfect Sound Forever

MÁRIO DELGADO


The Soul of European Jazz
by Plinio Degoes Jr., Esq., Ph.D.
(February 2016)


The U.S. State Department sent jazz artist like Satchmo abroad in the fifties because Armstrong and other artists like Duke Ellington represented an exciting, anti-totalitarian sound. The cooperative freedom of jazz was deployed to represent democratic society despite the fact that these ambassador-musicians, almost all African-Americans, were barred from fully participating in political life at home. Nonetheless, the message was strong, intoxicating, and took hold in Europe, inspiring flourishing jazz scenes in Germany (the nation which eventually gave rise to jazz guitar deity Volker Kriegel) and Italy (home to guitar great Franco Cerri, although Cerri was also clearly influenced by Bossa Nova). Little is known, however, about the impact of American jazz in Portugal. Even less is known about the guitarist Mário Delgado.

It all starts with a man named Villas-Boas. Luiz Villas-Boas was so overtaken by the American auditory art form that he began to put on jazz concerts and started the Hot Club Portugal with some other aficionados, the Club Statute they adopted in 1950 stating that their mission was to "divulge jazz music" as much as possible. The Hot Club brought Count Basie to Portugal but it also perfected local Iberian talent. The Hot Club had a jazz school with instructors like bassist Zé Eduardo, who played with Steve Lacy. Mário Delgado was born in 1962, over a decade after the club had opened, and only began to play jazz guitar with bands in the eighties. Delgado's sound, however, owes a lot to Luiz Villas-Boas and, therefore, to the American pioneers who inspired European jazz artists during the Cold War. Satchmo created Villas-Boas and therefore created Delgado - and this lineage shows.

Delgado jumps into European free jazz, the avant-garde which took hold of the continent, but he also honors the memory of a rich tradition, transforming into Wes Montgomery when he starts to sound too much like Derek Bailey. In other words, unlike many (but not all) European jazz artists, Delgado embraces the groove. The groove reflects the religious history of former slaves importing a traditional, repetitive African musicality generated in agricultural societies wherein reincarnation and, therefore, the cycle of life itself, was auditorily represented into the Americas. Most African people lived in societies where agricultural production in family estates formed the basis for sustenance and children were frequently ancestors reborn. The whole purpose of the groove is to captivate the listener in a trance, to affirm the human, to keep the cycle of the growing seasons going - hence the symbolic power of jazz against systems based on objectification of the individual to forward-thinking historical processes, whether historical materialism in communism or racial-cultural manifest destiny in fascism.

Why do European jazz artists run away from the groove? Is it because the Christian historical legacy which so marked the continent is eschatological, linear as opposed to cyclical? It must be strange to come from a culture marked by the Renaissance with its Christ-centered vision of a march towards the future and have it invaded by a different mode of thought wherein no final destiny is on the GPS. Attempts to return to a medieval or pre-medieval agricultural cyclical spirituality are the stuff of fascism- hence Hitler's love for pre-Romanic Germanic runes and medieval Bavarian history, his need for a deeper spirituality leading him to forge a cockamamie Hindu Aryan origin story importing elements of Indian religion into his nationalism. Here, again, jazz can be revolutionary in Europe because it provides a different connection to essence.

Delgado's embrace of the groove with a simultaneous adoption of the less rhythmical jazz form provides an alternative to close-minded spiritualism because it allows for a hybrid soul to form, clearly European in its linear form but infused with richness, or sabor as Latin jazz artists would put it. His talents are currently being deployed in the TGB Jazz Trio. The name of the band stems from the instruments that they play (tuba, guitar, bateria or drums). They are represented by Clean Feed Records, a Lisbon-based jazz label. Their 2010 release Evil Things is worth a listen for any jazz guitar lover. Sérgio Carolino's tuba often keeps rhythm like a warm bass alongside drummer Alexandre Frazão. The star of the show, however, is Delgado. Esoteric renditions like "George Harrison" feature sitar-like playing while "The Weird Clown Pt. 2" features sludge-metal-like notes and "Nameloc" is pure jazz-rock. "Tangram" and "Interplay" are back-to-the-basics jazz. At times Blue Oyster Cult, at times Burzum, at times Charlie Parker, TGB keeps you guessing as they transition from texture to texture seamlessly. Drummer Frazão deserves credit for his ability to tie these themes together while staying true to the spirit of groove-based jazz.

Delgado also played with bassist Carlos Barreto on tracks for the Carlos Barreto Trio. Barreto teaches at the jazz school associated with the Hot Club and is, therefore, another son produced by the Luiz Villas-Boas family, which (given that Villas-Boas was influenced by American jazz ambassadors) makes him a son of Satchmo as well. Like Delgado, Barreto is a distant relative of all the American jazz greats, one of our children, eager to form his own identity.

As Americans, we tend to view the United States as a product of Europe. Very rarely do we realize how much Europe today is a product fundamentally shaped by us. Our music, our jazz, has taken hold of the public's imagination there for decades. In the able hands of musicians like Delgado, it has offered an alternative to agricultural cyclical thinking based on a racist mythology and has, instead, allowed Europeans to reject a self-denying soulless rationalism not by spiritual fascist self-worship but through their own version of the groove. European artists like Delgado are not just playing jazz, they're standing next to Satchmo while saying "this is how I reach my essence with dignity, this is how I bring the organic into my life - not via self-exaltation but through my own damn groove. My groove, my way." Satchmo himself, who once said "what we play is life," would likely approve.

See more on Mario Delgado's Facebook page


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