hot & cool from buenos aires to chicago: guillermo gregorio’s jazz cosmopolitanism

[JRJ 6.2 (2012) 151-169] (print) ISSN 1753-8637doi:10.1558/jazz.v6i2.151 (online) ISSN 1753-8645

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF.

Hot and cool from Buenos Aires to Chicago:Guillermo Gregorio’s jazz cosmopolitanism

Andrew Raffo Dewar1

New College & School of Music, University of Alabama, [email protected]

Abstract‘Dance under the stars to the music of 1924’ read the handbill—but it is not 1924, it is 1958—and Buenos Aires, Argentina is not normally considered a bastion of Chicago-style ‘hot’ jazz. Nonetheless, the little-known Hot Dogs Band, which included composer and multi-reedist Guillermo Gregorio, played their nostalgic take on this music, sepa-rated by time and geography, but drawn to a cosmopolitan aesthetic ideal. Engaging with the tropes of the ‘journeyman musician’ and more broadly the ‘jazz journey’, this essay discusses two kinds of migration—the physical movements of Argentine-American composer, saxophonist and clarinetist Guillermo Gregorio, and aspects of the aesthetic migration of jazz as it relates to mid-1950s Buenos Aires. Gregorio’s story is a compelling global journey from Buenos Aires to Vienna, Los Angeles and finally Chicago, often led by his individualized concept of the ‘cool’. By viewing Gregorio’s physical migrations as a movement towards his aesthetic ideals, we see a captivating manifestation of the trans-national circulation of jazz.

Keywords: cosmopolitanism; experimentalism; Guillermo Gregorio; jazz history; migration

Introduction‘Dance under the stars to the music of 1924’, a faded poster announces (see Figure 1). The music performed that evening, however, was not from 1920s Chicago—though the band’s polyphonic rendition of ‘Indiana’ cer-tainly had that flavour. Surprisingly, the time and place for this concert of ‘music of 1924’ was Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1958, on a live radio show entitled Jazz de Ayer, or ‘Jazz from Yesterday’. The performers, adolescent

1. Andrew Raffo Dewar is a composer, soprano saxophonist, and ethnomusicolo-gist. His research centers on experimentalism in the arts and music technologies. As a soprano saxophonist and composer, he performs his work internationally with his own ensembles, in interdisciplinary collaborations, and as a member of saxophonist/com-poser Anthony Braxton’s 12+1tet. He is Assistant Professor at New College & School of Music, University of Alabama, USA.

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152 Jazz Research Journal

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Argentine boys of primarily European extraction, swung their way back in time to an imagined Chicago they had never experienced, performing music to which they felt inexplicably attracted.

Figure 1. Concert poster for the “Hot Dogs Band,” Buenos Aires, late 1950s (courtesy Guillermo Gregorio).

This essay discusses the ‘jazz journey’ of Argentine-American saxo-phonist, clarinetist, composer, architect, and graphic artist Guillermo Gre-gorio. His story not only crosses geographically back and forth across the

Hot and cool from Buenos Aires to Chicago 153


Atlantic and north and south of the equator, but also aesthetically leaps from 1920s Chicago-style ‘hot’ jazz to 1960s open improvisation, interme-dia happenings, European postmodernist ‘cool’ jazz and beyond. In the life of Guillermo Gregorio, all these places and performances are embodied in his individual history, a migratory journey through both geographic and aesthetic spaces, unified by his dedication to all things ‘cool’.

I began interviewing Mr. Gregorio in 2008 to learn about his involvement in the late 1960s intermedia performance group Movimiento Música Más (or MMM) who were active during the Onganía military regime. Although that remains the main thrust of my work with him, in the course of these interviews I also became interested in questions of where and how he chose to migrate, and how those physical movements might be connected to his aesthetic development, both as a migratory pull factor and as influ-encer of his musical directions.

I examine Gregorio’s story with a gesture towards critical cosmopoli-tanism by exploring his multi-faceted arts practice holistically, even when it leaves the perceived bounds of jazz. Rather than making a case for his inclusion in the tradition’s prevailing narrative, or bolstering his ‘jazz man’ bona fides, I am more interested in presenting his life and work in all its omnivorous complexity. Because of his wide-ranging migration path, I entertain the possibility of aesthetics as one important pull factor in Grego-rio’s physical movements.

This treatment of his story applies Rebecca Walkowitz’s proffer to develop a critical cosmopolitanism that replaces ‘static models of mod-ernist exile with more flexible, dynamic models of migration, entanglement and mix-up’ (2006: 4). In addition, being mindful of Walkowitz’s emphasis on ‘adverse or quotidian experiences of transnational contact’ versus ‘rari-fied and exceptional experiences’ (2006: 15), I not only interrogate what it means for Gregorio to engage with the sounds of African-American black-ness, but how that encounter is situated in 1950s Argentina with its autoch-thonous conception of the negro, ‘black’, which more often than not is a descriptor of a social hierarchy rather than race.

Similarly, I do not focus on Gregorio’s rarified interaction with American soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy during his mid-1960s residency in Buenos Aires; instead I turn my gaze to Gregorio’s day-to-day relationship with his source for US sound recordings, which were pivotal to his artistic formation and profound transformations.2

2. Gregorio’s interactions with Steve Lacy were minimal, and did not involve any



This essay is not intended as a comprehensive view of the develop-ment and circulation of jazz to and from Argentina.3 Nonetheless, Guillermo Gregorio’s individual life story gives us one useful personal narrative sup-ported by archival documents from his meticulously kept scrapbooks of the Buenos Aires jazz and new music scenes in the 1950s and 1960s, but also presents a singular story of jazz’s circulation with a complex and lay-ered relationship to the nation-state and reified conceptions of the ‘jazz life’. Indeed, the fluid aesthetic paths in Gregorio’s story compel us to examine jazz’s journey outside these constraints.

Contemporary global jazz studiesParticularly in the past decade, scholars have begun to examine a fairly wide range of the global manifestations of jazz, filling in the prior dearth of historical narratives on the music’s dispersion (cf. Whitehead 1998; Atkins 2001; 2003; Jones 2001; Pujol 2004; Heffley 2005; McKay 2005; Derbez 2012 [2001]; Feld 2012). The majority of these studies have been large-scale, with a focus on jazz practices in a specific nation: Japan, China, Britain, and so on. Andrew Jones’s wide-ranging 2001 study of the Chi-nese jazz age has in some ways set the tone for contemporary global jazz studies by looking at the transnational circulation of jazz as an exchange that cannot be relegated to simply a ‘modifier of what remains an essen-tially African American musical genre’, but that approaches the topic as ‘a musical, technological, financial, linguistic, and racial transaction’ (2001: 7). Jones’s well-developed view of the circulation of American jazz culture simultaneously privileges the idea of a cultural transmission from a primar-ily African-American source while also advocating for what Mark Slobin has termed an ‘interculture’ (1993) that flows in interpenetrating directions. This approach to a range of localized re-inventions of jazz has been one of the most common tropes in contemporary global jazz studies—the rela-tionship to an American (and more specifically, African-American) ‘source’

music-making. Their contact was limited to Gregorio’s attendance at some of Lacy’s 1966 performances in Argentina, and speaking with him briefly at those events. Therefore, although Lacy is a well-known jazz figure, it would be disingenuous to weight Gregorio’s limited interactions with him the same as the daily interactions he had with other, lesser known individuals and musical objects, following Walkowitz’s charge to scholars of cos-mopolitanism to weight the importance of the quotidian over the rarified (2006: 15).

3. For that purpose, the reader is directed to Sergio Pujol’s Jazz al Sur: Historia de la música negra en la Argentina (2004), as well as Berenice Corti’s work on contemporary jazz cultures in Argentina (2010).



with all its complexities, and how that relationship manifests uniquely in a range of locations at different points in history. There is also an advocacy element in this methodology that seems to be based on the justifiably problematic idea of the ‘authenticity’ of a non-US-based jazz tradition, as if its mere existence and localized engagement with the music is not enough to justify its praxis. The tension caused by this issue, not only in the his-torical narrative, but also within the music communities themselves, has been documented by a number of scholars (cf. Whitehead 1998; Heffley 2005). This tension is encapsulated cogently in E. Taylor Atkins’s introduc-tion to the first major edited volume focused on global jazz, 2003’s Jazz Planet, where he writes, ‘practically all jazz discourse rests on the prem-ise of American exceptionalism’ and that while ‘jazz exists in our collec-tive imagination as both a national and postnational music, [it] is studied almost exclusively in the former incarnation’ (2003: xiii; emphasis in origi-nal). As mentioned earlier, in the ensuing decade since Atkins’s collection, a multitude of monographs and journal articles have begun to fill in these geographical gaps in the historical narrative of jazz’s diverse constellation of activity.

Two recent works that parallel the approach I take in this essay (though on a much broader and more in-depth scale, of course) are Carol Muller’s (2011) monograph on South African singer Sathima Bea Benjamin, and Steven Feld’s (2012) participatory research on jazz cosmopolitanism in Accra, Ghana. Both studies draw significantly on interviews with little-known jazz artists as a primary storytelling element, engage with the genre of the memoir in their construction, and yet also (using the well-worn tools of academic scholarship) examine their subjects as transnational actors in a complex network that includes media circulation, intercultural exchange, cosmopolitanism, and the appropriation and the negotiation of multiple identities.

Muller’s research subject is the largely unknown South African singer Sathima Bea Benjamin, who, prior to Muller’s work, was known primar-ily as having spent a day in 1963 in a studio in Paris with Duke Elling-ton, Billy Strayhorn, and her husband, and fellow South African, Abdullah Ibrahim, recording an album that went unreleased for decades. Muller’s work, then, is to some degree a reclaiming of jazz’s historical narrative to include Ms. Benjamin’s work, not only as a South African jazz artist, or a female jazz artist, but also as an ‘unknown’ artist, who, despite her lack of renown, continued to work on the margins of the music world throughout her life, despite her connections to that world through her marriage to the very successful Abdullah Ibrahim. Muller’s process of reclaiming parallels



other recent musicological work that has focused on recovering so-called ‘minor histories’ of marginal figures, such as Branden Joseph’s 2008 study of intermedia artist Tony Conrad. Adapting Deleuze and Guattari’s work on Kafka and ‘minor literature’, Joseph argues that ‘the “minor” is not the qualitatively or quantitatively inferior, but what is marked by an irreducible or uncontainable difference. It is not a subcategory or subsystem in the conventional sense, but what Deleuze and Guattari call at one point an “outsystem”’ (Joseph 2008: 50). Guillermo Gregorio’s life and work, sin-gular in its aesthetic breadth in similar ways to a figure like Conrad, is also a canon-confounding ‘outsystem’ in its relationship to the standard history of global jazz.

Feld chooses to discuss the cosmopolitan lives of his subjects ‘from the standpoint of the seriously uneven intersections and…off-the-radar lives of people who…live quite remotely to the theorists and settings that usually dominate cosmopolitanism conversations in academia’ (2012: 7). In defense of his somewhat academically unconventional storytelling approach used in the book, Feld goes on to discuss the mixed reviews he received of his Ghana research in its development phase, stating that ‘people indulged me in my storytelling, but I could tell that some were anx-iously waiting for me to get to the bottom of it all, to perform an analytic authority’ (ibid.). While acknowledging that stories, on their own, are not ‘analysis’ as typically deployed in academic circles, Feld notes, ‘that does not mean that they are un-analytic’, going on to say that ‘to listen carefully to stories is to take local subjectivity seriously’ (2012: 8) and ‘clear sub-stantial space for representing contemporary musical biographies at the cosmopolitan crossroads of modern jazz’ (10).

Therefore, while the subject-centred ethnography of this brief essay on aspects of the migratory life and musical work of Guillermo Gregorio is by definition limited (and limiting) in its scope, its limits allow us to ‘listen carefully’ to this bounded story of migration as a set of both physical and aesthetic movements that meet at the intersection of a transnational and aesthetically kaleidoscopic jazz praxis. In addition, in examining Gregorio’s individual story of his relationship to and discovery of jazz, we gain further insight into the kinds of ‘jazz stories’ being told, and how this discourse shapes our conception of global jazz practices.

Gregorio’s origins and introduction to jazzBorn in Buenos Aires in 1941 to a middle-class travelling representative for a fabric company, Gregorio grew up during the peak of complex populist



President Juan Perón’s rule. He describes his relationship to the Perónista period as

Complicated…it’s very hard to put a label and condemn it en masse. There are many, many sides [to this story]… For my childhood, it was a very nice time… Not at all the atmosphere of the later military dicta-torships… Those who depict the Perón times as ‘tough, cruel, dicta-torship’, that’s not true—you could live very well, and listen to any kind of music (interview with the author, 16 November 2008).

At home, he listened to Western art music and Argentine folkloric music, particularly the indigenous singer/guitarist Atahualpa Yupanqui. He recalls hearing tango flowing from radios out the windows of other homes as he walked by, but his family did not listen to tango.

The circulation of recordings has, of course, played a crucial role in the global transmission and transformation of jazz. Nearly every scholarly work written about jazz outside (and even inside) the United States engages with this ‘first contact’ moment, most often through recordings, but also through live performances because it does in a number of ways highlight a pivotal moment in a given artist’s engagement with jazz, and also points to how, when and why that engagement occurred. In Argentina, according to Sergio Pujol’s foun-dational history of Argentine jazz, it was black dances like the cakewalk that began to appear in the country as the first African-American imports, some-time around 1905, shortly thereafter followed by other dances, such as the fox-trot, and more relevantly, the shimmy (2004: 19).4 In a 1911 ‘glossary of urban fauna’ by Roberto Gache, a chronicler of such subjects, Gache describes a new sound making its way into Argentine clubs from the United States as ‘musical paroxysms… The delirium tremors of harmony’ (quoted in Pujol 2004: 66). Sergio Pujol reports that by the end of the 1920s Victor, Brunswick, Gen-nett and Okeh recordings were available as imports, and that with the meteoric rise in jazz sales, an Argentine branch of Odeon began to sell jazz recordings by artists such as Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke, which ‘became a real ritual for initiates in its modernity and voluminous sound’ (2004: 20).

In 1954, Guillermo Gregorio befriended a fellow student who informed him that, ‘what they play on the radio, that’s commercial music, you have to listen to jazz!’ (interview with the author, 16 November 2008). The next day the boy brought two 78rpm albums that fascinated Gregorio: ‘the object in itself was attractive for me, the book with pictures of the instruments, and there were

4. Berenice Corti points out that one of the most recognized and enduring social organizations in the Afro-Argentine community in the twentieth century was the ‘Shimmy Club’ (2010: 189).



two albums—one was called Gems of Jazz and the other one was Modali-dades en Swing’ (ibid.). Perhaps not surprisingly, these first two recordings Gregorio was exposed to consisted of largely European-American perform-ers from the ‘Chicago school’. Surprisingly, however, the young Argentines associated this (at the time) historical jazz style with oppositional culture, in this case opposing a mainstream that consisted of the early rock ‘n’ roll that was beginning to make its way onto Argentine airwaves. This is particu-larly interesting because this very same jazz style at the same time in the US was seen as a bastion of traditionalism for ‘moldy figs’ opposing bebop’s modernism (cf. Gendron 1995). Gregorio’s fascination with the design and materiality of the object itself is also interesting in hindsight, given his later engagement with material creativity as an architect and visual artist.

Soon after catching the ‘jazz bug’, Gregorio asked his father for a trum-pet. After just a few lessons, he became ‘absolutely convinced that it was impossible for me’ (interview with the author, 16 November 2008). His friend mentioned that another friend was already playing trumpet, so perhaps he should play clarinet, advice Gregorio soon followed. Connecting with the sounds of Jimmy Noone, Johnny Dodds and Pee Wee Russell, he began to play in weekly jam sessions and dance halls with a young group that called themselves the ‘Hot Dogs Band’ (see Figure 2). They played in clubs on weekends, and with the money that they were paid Gregorio started amass-ing a record collection (interview with the author, 16 November 2008).

Figure 2. Hot Dogs Band, circa 1958, with Guillermo Gregorio on clarinet (courtesy Guillermo Gregorio).



The Hot Dogs Band played what they considered Chicago-style ‘hot’ jazz because

The dance orchestras…were fading, and what was fashionable among the teenagers to dance and listen to was what we called ‘hot’ jazz…We made a very strong discrimination between New Orleans, Hot, and Dixieland. For us, Dixieland was circus music…a kind of a ‘bad word’ for us. It was typical of those white orchestras…the real thing was the Creole [Jazz Band], or the Hot 5, or the top was the Jelly Roll Morton Red Hot Peppers—that was the thing!’ (interview with the author, 16 November 2008).

Though Gregorio’s initial exposure to jazz was largely through record-ings of Eddie Condon and his collaborators, he and his friends quickly latched on to ideas of black authenticity, though Gregorio recalls that, ‘for a relatively long time after first hearing jazz I didn’t have any idea about the color of the skin of the musicians playing on the records…later came that information…but it didn’t change the effect of my first impressions’ (email correspondence with the author, 15 October 2013).

Gregorio remembers the Argentine label Odeon releasing many Colum-bia recordings at the time by Louis Armstrong, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, and others. After hearing those albums, Gregorio was hooked. His response to the seminal Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Seven recordings was that they were

very dry… I imagined an empty room with a table and a chair in the middle, and a bulb of light hanging from the ceiling, with scratched walls… [It was] very crude, but something fascinated me, and the clar-inet player [Johnny Dodds] especially called my attention (interview with the author, 16 November 2008).

This fanciful image from Gregorio’s youth, of a ‘dry’, ‘crude’ and simple life, in a room with ‘scratched walls’ laid bare by the bright illumination of a single bulb, is a fascinating illustration of his youthful imaginings of African-American culture and the power of the music he engaged with as a young man thousands of miles removed from its source.

When asked about his conception of race in him and his comrades’ embrace of jazz, Gregorio stated,

We think of ‘black’ as something different, because there was not a big black population in Buenos Aires, or in Argentina—they were our idols! I started learning about the terrible history of the blacks [in the US], the exploitation and the hangings…because I started reading about jazz [right away]… they were the great players, and the real ones (interview with the author, 16 November 2008).



According to Gregorio, then, black performers such as Dodds, Armstrong, and others were seen as ‘idols’ among his friends, with their performances reified as ‘the real thing’. The trope of black authenticity invoked here by Gregorio is, of course, common in many players’ origin narratives, espe-cially those from sites developing a transnational jazz aesthetic (cf. McKay 2005). Contemporary Argentine jazz drummer Pepi Taveira, one of the patri-archs of the current scene in Buenos Aires, echoes Gregorio’s reification of black performers, stating in a 2008 radio interview that ‘Nowadays jazz is a very broad word, but for me it is still the jazz we know of as Louis Arm-strong, Ellington, with the black or African roots present. It’s black music. We whites do what we can’ (quoted in Corti 2010: 189).

In Gregorio’s estimation, an opening for jazz to penetrate the popular culture of Argentina occurred because tango was so demonized by the Argentine upper-class that black music from the US was able to make its way into the country as a welcome, and exotic, cultural import:

The bête noire of the Argentine bourgeoisie at the beginning of the [twentieth] century was tango. Jazz…was adopted by the [Argentine] oligarchy as an exotic product. I remember people opening night-clubs and hiring orchestras that included…the few black guys that were playing there…coming from Brazil… Caribbean areas, Uruguay-ans. They were very well considered. When an American black musi-cian visited [Argentina], he was received as a king. I remember clearly that Perón personally received the [Harlem] Globetrotters (interview with the author, 16 November 2008).

So, while in the United States at this time jazz had been in a decades-long period of being perceived as a dangerous corrupting force on society (by both blacks and whites at different historical moments), in Argentina, jazz and US black culture were literally welcomed with open arms. By the 1930s, Pujol states that for Argentines, ‘jazz offered a fantasy of escape, even though it was not a mass phenomenon’ (2004: 42).

At this point I will briefly contextualize conceptions of race, class and iden-tity formation in 1950s Argentina so we might understand how these teens’ musical identities fit within the nation-state framework, before we follow Gre-gorio’s path into the wider world. Typically thought of as a nation of Euro-pean immigrants, in Argentina (as everywhere) there are a variety of identity strategies in play. As Arnd Schneider has written in his study of appropria-tion in the Argentine arts, modern Argentine identity is ‘often developed in opposition to [their largely European] descent… [in a] willful creation of new identities’ (2006: 3) to creolize and join a self-constructed Latin American melting pot. The arts and music scene of 1960s Argentina was a complex



period of almost obsessive aesthetic internationalization, in an (ultimately failed) attempt to bring Argentine arts to global attention (cf. Giunta 2007). Even the word criollo (or ‘creole’) has multiple meanings in Argentine culture. The most commonly employed modern meaning of the word is as a descrip-tor; for example, a particular dish might be described as ‘bien criollo’ (very creole) by which is meant something rootsy, culturally melded and ‘authenti-cally’ Argentine. Historically, however, criollo referred to two distinct groups of people in Buenos Aires: the upper-class porteño creole families who could trace their descent from Spanish conquistadors (similar to the identity strate-gies of some upper-class creoles in early New Orleans), and the lower-class criollo, whose mixture of indigenous and Spanish blood made them either ‘diluted’ to the proud Porteños or authentically Argentine to those interested in locating their identities firmly in Argentine soil.

The concept of a ‘black’ person, or negro, in Argentina is entangled with these largely ‘creole’ roots, and typically is used disparagingly to describe lower-class Argentines with indigenous or mixed-race backgrounds and dark complexions (though usually not of African descent). Gregorio remem-bers these persons as being patronizingly called las cabezitas negras, or ‘little black heads’ (interview with the author, 16 November 2008). Though Argentine negros were for the most part not subjected to the kind of physi-cal violence African-Americans endured, they have been victims of labour exploitation, forced migration, and, in general, have been relegated to the lower strata of society. In Gregorio’s view, Argentine negros have been vic-tims of a ‘certain violence…socially. In northern Argentina there was exploi-tation of those people… They exploited them in a feudal regime’ (interview with the author, 16 November 2008). Gregorio’s description of the gap between how visiting African-Americans and indigenous Argentines were viewed by the bourgeoisie illustrates an unfortunately all-too-common dis-crepancy between the treatment of the foreign and indigenous Other.

It should be noted that these creoles are also where tango’s origins begin, prior to its acceptance by the upper class, which mostly occurred after it became a worldwide sensation. I mention the Argentine conceptions of criollo and negro not only to contrast the local definition of blackness with the transnational (but US-centred) blackness Gregorio and his friends idolized in their musician heroes, but also to highlight the self-consciously constructed nature of authenticity and identity in Argentina as a result of its majority immigrant population.

In consuming American jazz recordings, then, these budding musicians were able to engage with the black sonic culture of the US without dealing



with the bodies, histories and broader culture that accompanied those sounds—allowing them to more or less effortlessly identify with one form of difference and blackness (that of black US jazz musicians) over another (that of Argentine negros and tango culture), underscoring a partition between the treatment and acceptance of foreign and indigenous Others.5

Gregorio performed with the Hot Dogs for several years, but during that time also took part in a series of composition seminars with Argentine mod-ernist composer Alberto Ginastera and became interested in the graphic arts, enrolling in architecture school so he might make a living while con-tinuing to practise music. In the seminars with Ginastera, he was taken by the music of Anton Webern, Edgard Varese, and the musique concrete of Pierre Schaeffer. The visual art he gravitated towards included concrete artists such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Theo Van Doesberg and Max Bill. As a result, his appetite for modernist art and music grew in tandem with his love for jazz.

Gregorio was introduced to modern jazz around 1959, specifically the so-called ‘cool school’ of musicians, through a twice-a-week radio show hosted by a DJ named Basualdo on Radio Excelsior. Basualdo’s show introduced Gregorio to the work of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh and Jimmy Giuffre, among others (see Figure 3).

The first bebop records he encountered were 78rpm sides from France, by artists such as Howard McGhee, JJ Johnson, James Moody, Char-lie Parker, as well as French performers Hubert Fol and Bernard Peiffer. Because the records were French pressings, Gregorio admits that at that first moment of contact, he ‘thought that bebop was from Paris!’ (email cor-respondence with the author, 15 October 2013).

His introduction to the jazz vanguard occurred in 1961. While attend-ing a studio class at architecture school, he met Nelly Selasia, who intro-duced him to her husband Alberto, an independently wealthy patron of the arts and small-scale importer of foreign recordings. Selasia ordered LPs in boxes of thirty from NYC’s Citadel Records, a distributor that advertised in Downbeat magazine. Gregorio would go to Selasia’s home with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and record as much music as he could, including recordings by Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy. Through Selasia, he also became enamoured with the work of American ‘New York school’ compos-ers Morton Feldman, John Cage and Earle Brown.

5. That said, it should be noted that Guillermo Gregorio’s early music listening as a child, mentioned earlier in this essay, included the music of Atahualpa Yupanqui, a performer of indigenous Argentine folk music often described as musica criolla.



Figure 3. 1959 program from Radio DJ Basualdo’s ‘first stereophonic concert of modern jazz in Argentina’ record listening event (courtesy of Guillermo Gregorio).

Although Gregorio regularly attended the bi-weekly Monday night jam sessions at the legendary Argentine Bop Club (Bop Club Argentino), a major centre for Buenos Aires jazz in the 1950s and 60s (‘I didn’t miss any!’ he has said), he did not feel particularly connected to that community for a variety of reasons, one of which, he expounds, was a lack of personal style among a number of the players and their tendency to play whatever style was popular at a given time versus finding their own voice. Gregorio singles out Leandro ‘Gato’ Barbieri specifically for this critique, at one point even playing me jam session recordings to illustrate his point:

Gato is…a great musician, but…when I was involved in hot jazz, he was playing in a Konitz style alto. Later he got the tenor, and he played like Rollins…after several jam sessions, since Coltrane’s records were very well known, he was playing like Coltrane! Two years later, I went to a concert, and he was playing like Pharoah Sanders! Man…you know, that was, in general, with all my respect, because there were terrific musicians, but that was Argentine jazz. There were very per-sonal people, but most of them, if the wave was bebop, they played bebop. If the wave was cool, they played cool… If it was hard bop,



they played hard bop… For me it was fantastic because I learned about finding my own voice (interview with the author, 16 November 2008).

Gregorio felt that the attempts to find his own voice, which he has since dubbed ‘free cool’, were simply not tolerable in the community that worked at the Bop Club—‘kid, you don’t know the language’ they would say to him, which is to say, Gregorio explains, ‘you don’t play like the Americans—especially the fashionable Americans’ (interview with author, 16 Novem-ber 2008). Of course, in his critique of Barbieri and the scene at the Bop Club, Gregorio does not account for the genre-hopping in his own musical practice.

In 1965, Guillermo Gregorio began exploring free improvisation. Describ-ing his first foray, Gregorio said:

I was at the house of a friend to play…[pretty conventional] swing music…after the piano player left, the drummer stayed. The trumpeter said, ‘Let’s play free jazz’…and the drummer says, ‘but tell me some-thing, what do we do?’ ‘You have to do…do anything!’ And [the trum-pet and I] started playing, and fortunately the recorder was working.

Figure 4. Carlos Miralles (left) and Guillermo Gregorio (right) circa 1966 (courtesy of Guillermo Gregorio).



‘Doing anything’ is certainly not what the recorder captured that day, in a recording released nearly forty years later by John Corbett’s Chicago-based record label Atavistic (Gregorio 2000a). The recording of this early free improvisation by Gregorio and trumpeter Carlos Miralles (see Figure 4) bears stylistic comparison to early work by Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, which makes logical sense given the Coleman recordings Gregorio and his friends were absorbing at the time.6

The next step in the evolution of Gregorio’s style took place after the 1966 military coup, when he met up with experimental composers Roque de Pedro and Norberto Chavarri after a concert by American composer Larry Austin. Gathering a community of like-minded interdisciplinary artists—poets, photographers and dancers—the three formed the perfor-mance group Movimiento Música Más (MMM) in 1968. MMM were involved in performance art that included improvisation and Fluxus-style ‘happen-ings’ in public places at the height of the Onganía regime.

One MMM performance began with the artists placing an advertisement in all the main newspapers for a ‘first annual birdsong contest’, asking the residents of Buenos Aires to go to a local park at a specific time and date with their pet birds to have their songs judged for a cash prize. When a large audience arrived, they saw the members of MMM, themselves in a large cage, performing improvised music (see Figure 5). Of course, one goal of the work was to highlight the potent symbolism of artists and musi-cians caged in a public park during a brutal military regime.

The period that follows MMM, from the mid-1970s until his migration in the 1980s, encompassed a second brutal military coup d’état in 1976 and the subsequent ‘Dirty War’. During this period, Gregorio stopped playing in public and re-evaluated his art (Meyer 2005: 1). Working as an archi-tect during this time, Gregorio characterized the late 1970s as ‘a dark and dangerous time: You were fortunate if you could keep working and live untouched by suspicions and provocation’ (Gregorio, in Meyer 2005).

In 1986, Gregorio’s wife, a literary theorist, accepted an appointment in Vienna, and Gregorio joined her there. Through chance circumstances he became acquainted with composer and trumpeter Franz Koglmann, and the two found common ground in a shared love of both the ‘cool’ jazz of Tristano, Marsh and Konitz, and concrete art.

6. Gregorio’s story of the duo’s purportedly spontaneous and unrehearsed step into free jazz with the recorder fortuitously turned on—while certainly plausible—is also a common trope in jazz storytelling; a way to raise the drama of an artist’s breakthroughs by making the static properties of an audio recording into a dynamic event and injecting a sense of immediacy into the typically pre-planned process of recording.



Figure 5. Movimiento Música Más performance of composer Norberto Chavarri’s ‘Plaza Para una Siesta de Domingo’, 1970 (courtesy of Guillermo Gregorio).

A short time after moving to Vienna, Gregorio received a call from an Argentine friend working in Los Angeles. He asked if Gregorio would be interested in an architecture job, to which Gregorio responded with a resounding ‘yes’, as he thought about one of his heroes, Warne Marsh, who was still living and working in the LA region. Gregorio remembers get-ting on the plane to Los Angeles on a day cold enough to create humidity on the plane’s windows. As he waved goodbye to his wife, he wrote ‘cool’ in the condensation (personal communication with the author, November 2009).7 In 1986–87 he studied with Warne Marsh in Los Angeles, before moving back to Vienna to join his wife and rekindle his working relation-ship with Franz Koglmann, with whom he began recording in 1988, adding his ‘free cool’ style to Koglmann’s music. Gregorio recorded and toured for

7. Of his conception of the cool, Gregorio has said that from his point of view, ‘“cool-ness” is an attribute of “blackness”…what I am talking about…is an “anti-predicative” perceptive experience difficult to name or define exactly—but there is nothing neither mysterious nor magical or esoteric, or things like that so frequently used by cheap criti-cism’ (email communication with the author, 15 October 2013, emphases in original).



several years with Koglmann, a period he describes as one of the most ful-filling of his life.

In 1991, Gregorio’s wife accepted a position at Purdue University in Indi-ana, and they moved to Chicago, home of the ‘hot’ jazz style he had played as a boy, as well as Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus and a number of Mies Van Der Rohe buildings, two of his idols in the visual realm whose work he has also described as ‘cool’, which he says has nothing to do with ‘mini-malist aesthetics, “less is more”, or any of those phrases frequently used which refer only to an immense void. My idea had [more] to do with conci-sion and a sense of structure than with style or formal aspects’ (email com-munication with the author, 15 October 2013).8 Chicago became his home, surrounding him with both the aesthetics and musical history that carried him through the difficulties of two dictatorial regimes in Argentina. In Chi-cago he began recording his music furiously, releasing more than half a dozen recordings of original music in the space of just a few years (cf. Gre-gorio 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000a, 2000b, 2002).

Certainly the conventional reasons for migration are readily present in Guillermo Gregorio’s narrative—good, secure work in a place that has rela-tive political and social stability, and relocation to support the blossoming career of his wife—but there is also an undeniable connection between these physical movements and his aesthetic journey as an artist that inter-penetrate these more traditional migratory pull factors.

There are two main points I have drawn out in my discussion of Gre-gorio’s personal history: first, I gave a brief glimpse into jazz practices and cultural exchange in 1950s and 1960s Argentina, and second, I suggested that there is an intriguing connection between Gregorio’s aesthetic migra-tion and physical migration through his individualized concept of the cool, which of course has its roots in his love of jazz and early identity as a 1950s hipster, but also incorporates concrete art, modernist architecture, and the music of Ginastera, Varese, and Anton Webern. The seemingly eclectic or contradictory aesthetic of these diverse influences from Gregorio’s for-mative years is woven together through both his early ideas of coolness and the aesthetic characteristics of physical places he inhabited through his later migratory patterns—a captivating expression of a cosmopolitan-ism Walkowitz has described as ‘gestures of idiosyncratic contact…and

8. In this same 15 October email to the author, Gregorio amplifies upon his idea of ‘coolness’, citing a famous quote by alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, who once described tenor saxophonist Lester Young’s music as being ‘complex in its simplicity’ (quoted in Hamilton 2007: 18).



sympathetic association’ (2006: 13). While Gregorio’s path into and around jazz has many parallels in other stories of transnational jazz circulation that have been told of late—particularly in the details of his early contact with the music—his journey is unique in that it encompasses such a diverse range of places, both aesthetic and physical. One lesson we learn from Gregorio’s unique life in jazz is that there will always be new stories to dis-cover that complicate and add nuance to our understanding of the trans-mission, circulation and reception of this music, and the ways in which those elements combine to generate new sounds and approaches to jazz. As some narratives and individuals continue to be reified and reinscribed into jazz history as the story of jazz, other stories have yet to be told.

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hot & cool from buenos aires to chicago: guillermo gregorio’s jazz cosmopolitanism

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