| | |  Entertainment | August 2008 
Gustavo Santaolalla: His Film Scores are Spare, His Tango Newfangled
 Larry Rohter - International Herald Tribune
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| | Gustavo Santaolalla | | |
Buenos Aires - As a pop-besotted teenager living in the suburbs here in the 1960s, Gustavo Santaolalla was so intent on becoming a musician that he even designed a logo for the record label he dreamed of owning. The idea that he would some day be able to display a pair of Oscars on his mantel, on the other hand, was so far-fetched that it never crossed his mind.
But in 2006 and 2007, Santaolalla, who turns 57 next week, won Academy Awards for best original film score, for "Brokeback Mountain" and "Babel." That made him the hottest film composer in Los Angeles, where he now lives. But he has confounded expectations by returning to his Argentine musical roots and performing onstage for the first time in more than 25 years as a member of Bajofondo, a neo-tango ensemble that will be appearing on Friday at SummerStage in Central Park. "The fact that I do so many things, it really nurtures me," Santaolalla (pronounced san-ta-oh-LIE-uh) said in an interview here during a trip to finish production of another tango recording. "It may seem like a schizophrenic scenario, but it makes sense to me and keeps me fresh. One thing cross-pollinates another, so that I work a little bit on this project, then a little bit on that, and then I go back to this one."
Organized in 2001, Bajofondo, which roughly means underground, began as a one-off diversion in the studio for Santaolalla, who plays guitar in the group, and some like-minded Argentine and Uruguayan friends. But after recording two CDs, the latest of which, "Mar Dulce," or "Sweet Sea," was released on July 15, and touring to acclaim here and in Europe and the United States, the project has taken on a life of its own.
Bajofondo is often lumped with the Gotan Project, a Paris-based collective with French and Argentine members, as an example of electrotango because both groups mix traditional tango instrumentation with contemporary samples and beats. But Santaolalla, a burly figure who speaks with a somewhat gravelly voice, chafes at that description.
"We don't consider what we are doing as tango," he said. "We are doing contemporary music, music that expresses the urban landscapes of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Obviously tango will be present there. But milonga, candonga, murga" — three other local rhythms — "and rock, hip-hop and electronica are also part of the genetic map of this place."
Until recently, in fact, Santaolalla was known here primarily as a rock 'n' roller. In 1967 he helped found Arco Iris, or Rainbow, a prototypical flower-power band. But feeling cramped and fearful after the Argentine military seized power in 1976 in a rightist coup, he decided to try his luck in Los Angeles, where he organized Wet Picnic, a group that had little commercial success.
As the dictatorship was collapsing in the early 1980s, Santaolalla returned home and recorded a New Wave hit, "Ando Rodando" ("I'm on the Move"), still remembered here as a herald of new, more open times. He soon tired of that pop sound and, with his friend León Gieco, the folk singer, embarked on a long project called "De Ushuaia a la Quiaca," documenting the lives and work of the masters of Argentine folk music. (Ushuaia and Quiaca are the southernmost and northernmost towns in Argentina.)
Around the same time, Santaolalla moved into producing records and soon emerged as a leading figure in the nascent Rock en Español movement, which was based in Mexico. By his own estimate, he has produced more than 100 records, from rock to rap, and including discs by Julieta Venegas, Café Tacuba, Molotov, Juanes and Juana Molina.
But it was Santaolalla's explorations of Argentine folk music that led to his film-scoring career. In 1998, encouraged by some of the traditional artists he had recorded, he released "Ronroco," an album largely of solo pieces recorded over 13 years. It caught the ear of the American director Michael Mann, who used one of the moodiest tracks, "Iguazu," at a crucial moment in his film "The Insider."
The Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu also heard the record, which led to Santaolalla being invited to score the films "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams." He also wrote music for Walter Salles's "Motorcycle Diaries," favoring in all of them a style he described as "minimalist, heartfelt and full of space and air" instead of a lushly orchestrated score.
"It's a deliberate choice," he said. "I am a fervent supporter of the idea that you don't have to have wall-to-wall music in good films. With bad movies, I have this image in my head of the director and the editor in the editing room watching a scene that is not happening, looking at each other and saying, 'Put some music in there.' "
Though he has made his name in Hollywood by incorporating into film music the high, lonesome sound of the charango and the ronroco, stringed instruments originally from the Andes, Santaolalla has also innovated in the way he works. Usually a movie's soundtrack is one of its last elements, tacked on after the actors' performances have been filmed and edited. Santaolalla likes to write as much music as possible before the film is shot, rather than waiting to compose cues that have to fit the length and mood of a particular sequence.
Ang Lee, the director of "Brokeback Mountain," said he had never worked that way until meeting Santaolalla, but found the process to be "very organic." He told Santaolalla he was seeking a sound that was "sparse and yearning," sent him a script, and two weeks later received a CD, which, he said, he initially thought contained samples of Santaolalla's previous work. Instead, it turned out to be new compositions intended for "Brokeback Mountain."
"Usually you don't talk about the music until after the first cut," Lee said, "but with Gustavo, I had music for seven scenes while we were still in preproduction, in fact before we had even scouted for locations. That was a luxury that helped inspire me to visualize the film and find its heart. And when the major actors were rehearsing I shared the music with them, to set a tone for what we were doing."
For all his eclecticism, Santaolalla deliberately kept his distance from the tango until recently. Though he recalls being a child "listening to my father singing tangos while he shaved," for a long time the style did not appeal to him.
"At the beginning it felt to me like adult music, and I was a kid," he said. "It also had a tremendous amount of melancholy and sadness that didn't match the energy of youth that I was hearing in the Beatles."
In addition to Bajofondo, Santaolalla has also spent time on Café de los Maestros, a project sometimes described as a tango version of the Buena Vista Social Club. It began as an attempt to bring together veteran musicians, some in their 80s, to make a record, but has grown to include live shows, a documentary film and a book from Retina, the publishing house that Santaolalla and his wife, Alejandra, a photographer, founded.
But Santaolalla is by no means neglecting new movie projects. He is once again working with Salles, this time on a film version of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," which is steeped in a beatnik-and-bebop aesthetic that might seem foreign to Santaolalla. But the same could have been said of "Brokeback Mountain," and look how that turned out.
Gustavo Santaolalla performs with Bajofondo at 7 p.m. on Friday at Central Park SummerStage, Rumsey Playfield (midpark at 70th Street); (212) 360-2777 or summerstage.org. |
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