2024-05-07 03:01:00
Ruben Rada and Eduardo Mateo had a ritual that they repeated every summer: after wandering through the Uruguayan nights, they would go to the beach when the day began and lie down on the sand to stare at the sun. “After half an hour I lowered my eyes because I couldn’t take it anymore. And he would stay there for two or three hours looking at the sun,” Rada remembers. The scene could be set in the mid-1960s, the period in which Rada and Mateo formed a virtuoso creative duo that had its peak in El Kinto, the Uruguayan supergroup that laid the foundations of candombe beat. In the heat of hippieism as a global countercultural phenomenon, Uruguay also experienced its own festivals against the consumer society and around the beat song. He did it his way, with his logic, his identity, his character and his budget.
“We celebrated birthdays with Mateo with the famous American drink and a mortadella sandwich,” Rada writes about those 60s. And then she summarizes with an unappealable phrase: “We invented the candombe beat with bread and mortadella. Because there was no cheese to buy.” Ruben Rada, one of the most relevant and original artists of Uruguayan popular musicturned 80 in 2023 and will celebrate in Buenos Aires with a show that will cover a large part of his musical career, with special emphasis on three eternal bands: El Kinto, Totem and Opa. The place chosen for the celebration is up to the task: it will be the Friday, May 10 at 9 p.m. at Luna Park (Madero 470).
Although Rada played in all corners and spaces of the country, this is going to be the first to appear only on the Moon. “At Luna I was always on the back of someone’s head, accompanying some singer. I never eat Rada alone. I played in all the theaters except there,” she reveals. “I have vertigo but I am super happy. I am going to present a show that I already did here in Uruguay last year during four performances at the Sodre theater,” he says through a video call. In those concerts, Rada was accompanied by Uruguayan and Argentine artists such as Laura Canoura, Los Auténticos Decadentes, Facundo Balta, Samantha Navarro, Julia Zenko and her children Matías, Julieta and Lucila, all born in Argentina. “At Luna I am going to do the same show but with guests Argentines,” he says and prefers not to reveal any surprises.
-What does it mean to play with your children on stage?
-It makes me incredibly happy because I come from a family where for five generations no one went to high school (high school), everyone went to work. And one day Matías told my wife: “Mom, I already play the guitar, I don’t want to continue in high school.” And Patria told him: “Well, when you finish high school we’ll talk.” She nipped it in the bud. They all finished high school and for me it was a great success. And then, having them go up on stage and sing with me is a great joy. Matías made his way very well. For three or four years he was in Argentina playing with Illya Kuryaki and the Valderramas, with Peyote Asesino and with Martín Buscaglia. Lucila likes television and acting more. She does theater here. And now Julieta is in New York recording an album of old candombe songs.
-What are your first memories in Argentina?
-The first visits were when I was 10 or 11 years old at the National Theater, on Corrientes Street. She came with a group of Uruguayan drummers. Then I returned with Los Shakers, but a producer said: “El negrito isn’t going.” “It’s not going because neither John, nor Lennon, nor Ringo or anything works.” I couldn’t play but I came anyway. There I stayed in Buenos Aires and took the stage name Aros Rada. He walked in the street and sang in a program called Rhythm and Youth, on Channel 11. The Shakers put on caps and accompanied me to the program, because I had worked with Hugo and Osvaldo for many years in a group called The Hot Blowers. On Richie Silver’s album I sang a song with them. In the program they told me that they loved how I sang. Then I went to the United States for a while and returned in 1971 when we premiered the musical Hair, with Valeria Lynch, Fontova, Mirta Busnelli and a lot of well-known people. I was there for about six months. There I earned a little money and they called me from Uruguay to make the band Totem.
-And what happened?
-With Totem we came to play in Argentina at BA Rock in 1971 and they threw everything at us. It was something horrible! Because after us came Pescado Rabioso and Vox Dei. “And who are these guys?” the audience asked. We played candombe rock. Nothing of that had arrived in Argentina yet. Nothing had arrived other than Los Shakers and Los Iracundos. Well, it went very badly for me. Then we played at the IFT Theater and it went well because people went to hear Totem. That’s where the story ended and I left again. I always come and go to Argentina. It wasn’t until 1979, when I recorded the song “Rock de la calle” with La Banda and it did well, that I realized that there was a possibility with music. And I stayed in Argentina for twelve years.
-Did you know Eduardo Mateo when you formed El Kinto (1967-1970) or did you know him before?
-Mateo was already a well-known and well-loved guitarist in Uruguay. He played in a place called Orfeo Negro and had a group called Los Malditos. And he had already composed that famous song, “Prince Charming,” with Horacio Buscaglia. A musically beautiful song. One day on a random street I ran into Mateo – I was with The Hot Blowers at that time – and he told me to get together. He gave me the address of the house and from that day on we got together for four years to compose songs. Every morning I went to his house and we drank mates. Mate only because there wasn’t a handle for the cake. We didn’t have a tape recorder to record the songs. So, we composed songs and the next day I told him: “Mateo, we are going to do the songs we did yesterday.” “Which one? Let’s do another one,” he replied. We composed every day and nothing was written down or recorded. We will have made seventy songs. There were ten or twenty who knew each other.
-Were the others forgotten or lost?
-It’s not that they were lost. I suppose that Mateo would have continued composing, and suddenly music would have come to him and reminiscences of what we had done would have appeared. The music is in your head. With Mateo we made “Heloísa”, which I later recorded with Totem. We did millions of things with Mateo.
-Mateo appears all the time in the voice of Uruguayan references like you, Fernando Cabrera or Jaime Roos. Why is his figure so essential for Uruguayan music?
-Because Mateo was our John Lennon. If he had been born in England, he would have been just another Beatle. Because of the way of composing, the way of playing the guitar, of harmonizing. At that time there were Hugo Fattorusso and Eduardo Mateo, who were the ones who made it sound sweet. Horacio Buscaglia always said: “What a sponsor death is!” If he had lived thirty or forty more years, perhaps nothing would happen. I considered Mateo a composer and singer-painter. Because the great painters, like Dalí, Van Gogh or Picasso, became famous after they died. Mateo left a school. He was the creator of modern music in Spanish. Here it was called popular singing, but we called it candombe beat because candombe was played with tumbadora and electric guitars, and candombe in Uruguay is played with an acoustic guitar and drums, nothing more. This is how it was played in the troupes. We played without drums. The blacks here didn’t like what we did, they said that wasn’t candombe. And they were right. It had the beat and rhythm of candombe, but the three drums were missing.
The repertoire that Ruben Rada will offer at the Luna will be crossed by a historical feeling. Among his best-known works, there will be no shortage of songs from classic albums as The band (1979), Adar Nebur (1984), Montevideo (1996), the consecration Who is going to sing (2000) and the notable Tango, milonga and candombe (2014). The evolution of candombe beat, expressed in El Kinto, Totem and Opa, will have a central role in the show. “We did Totem thinking about doing candombe rock and we had a couple of songs very similar to the rock style that Santana later did,” says Rada from her home in Montevideo. “The dances were amazing when we played. It was like going to see Sui Generis or Seru Giran… The places were collapsing!”, recalls the singer, composer and percussionist about the group he shared with Eduardo Useta, Eduardo Rey, Lobito Lagarde and Roberto Galletti.
In the mid-70s, brothers Hugo and Osvaldo Fattoruso together with Ringo Thielmann created a group in the United States that managed to fuse candombe with jazz, Opa. “After recording his first album, Goldenwings (1976), they sent for me, I was in Germany singing in English, French, German. They had recorded two of my songs and wanted to record Opa’s second album. So, I went to New York and we started recording the second album, Magic Time (1977),” recalls Rada, who, in addition to contributing compositions, added the strength of her voice and her rhythmic ability to the group. The most recent of the Uruguayan is the versions album Candombe with the help of my friends (2023), with guests of the caliber of Fito Páez, Fernando Cabrera, Pablo Milanés, Julia Zenko, Adriana Varela, José Luis Perales, Armando Manzanero, Coti and Sebastián Teysera. “I wanted to make my friends sing and show people that any song that is in four can be played in candombe,” he highlights.
-You are a reference and disseminator of Afro culture. Why do you think it is important to put the origins of candombe in context?
-Candombe comes from Africa. The only problem is that we don’t know where we come from. Most of the blacks who came here to Uruguay were brought by the Portuguese. But the Portuguese raised people everywhere. And we don’t know if we come from Monrovia, Angola, Mozambique, all the Portuguese colonies. But there were also blacks who spoke French. The blacks did not come with documents, because they were slaves. In fact, we black people have the last name of our bosses. Silva, for example, there are millions here in Uruguay. Because Silva is a ranch family that bought blacks. So, I vindicate those people who came and left us that precious thing. And he gave me the blessing of being able to do it, of having the ease of composing a candombe at any time. Candombe is inside me. The milonga and the tango too.
-And candombe is a style that is visible in the world and that has the recognition it deserves?
-No. If I recorded a candombe album in English, I would put The New Old Rhythm, because it is an old rhythm that nobody knows; So, it’s new musically. Candombe is a rhythm that people don’t know. Chachachá, merengue, bachata, reggaetón are known, but candombe is not known in the world. And for me candombe is the mother rhythm. Tango is known in the world because white people sang it…
-When the pillars of Uruguayan popular music are mentioned, Mateo, Roos, Hugo Fattoruso and you appear. Does that put extra pressure on you?
-I feel happy to be among the hundred best Latin American artists. That’s why I keep recording songs. I have about five albums to release at the moment. If live concerts did not exist, there would be very few musicians composing and recording, because Spotify is like a lottery. Now I’m in a hurry. You realize that life is short when they tell you that you have cholesterol, hypertension and such. So, I start rushing to compose and do new things. Do things that I didn’t do because I believed that time was infinite. So I write songs all day. When I leave, many of my albums will appear.