A History of Chilean Rock · Chapter 4: A Voice Is Born

In the first chapter we said that Chile began by singing by ear, like an echo of the world. This is the story of the band that put an end to that echo. And it carries a perfect irony inside it: that same band began as the echo.

On 15 August 1963, at the Teatro Municipal in Viña del Mar, five schoolboys climbed onto a stage to play a song that wasn't theirs: "Sueña", by Luis Dimas, pure Nueva Ola sound, pure echo of imported rock. They called themselves The High & Bass, with an English name as fashion demanded, and they played dance music to liven up parties. They were the Parra brothers —Eduardo, Claudio and Gabriel— plus Gato Alquinta and Mario Mutis. That day is remembered today as the Day of Chilean Rock. But at the time they were nothing more than another group copying what came from abroad, one more piece of the echo.

The journey that changed them

What changed them wasn't a fashion, it was a journey. Around 1967, Gato Alquinta travelled across Latin America and came back a different man. He came back with the idea that they didn't have to keep playing other people's music, that they could make their own. "That's when we grew beards and moustaches, and our clothes changed", Mutis would recall. They stopped looking north and started looking at the continent under their feet. They turned the name into Spanish —from The High & Bass to Los Jaivas— and in that gesture alone, moving from English to Spanish, they were already saying where they were heading.

They married the parents to the children

What they did next nobody had pulled off in quite that way. They took rock's electric guitar, bass and drums, and crossed them with the root: cuecas, huaynos, Andean rhythms, the quena, the charango. And it didn't sound like a laboratory experiment, like a forced mixture of two things that didn't want each other. It sounded natural, as if those cuecas had been born to be played on an electric guitar. You have to understand how difficult that was: in the sixties, folklore and rock were enemies. For the young rocker, folklore was "the parents' music", the old thing, what had to be left behind; the gap between the two was an abyss. Los Jaivas crossed it as if it didn't exist. They married the parents to the children.

"Todos juntos"

In 1971 they recorded their first album, "El Volantín", a pure psychedelic trip. And in 1972 came the breakthrough, with a song the whole country still sings today: "Todos juntos". It wasn't a trench song or a party song —Los Jaivas, unlike the Nueva Canción, didn't get involved in the hard politics of the time—; it was a call to unity, to peace between people. And in that song, at last, Chile didn't sound like anyone else. It didn't sound like the Beatles, or like Woodstock, or like the Nueva Ola. It sounded like Los Jaivas, which was the same as saying: it sounded like Chile.

The journey in reverse

Los Jaivas crossed towards the root from rock's door. But in those same years, others were making the journey in reverse, and they deserve to be named. Quilapayún, Inti-Illimani and later Illapu came from the root, from the Nueva Canción, and from there they embraced the rhythms of the whole continent. They weren't rockers, and they didn't claim to be: they had their own path, with their own identity, as valuable as rock's. But look at them together: some came in through rock's door and others through the root's door, and all of them, by different routes, arrived at the same place —a Chilean music that sounded modern and continental without ceasing to be from here. It wasn't a copy, it wasn't museum folklore. It was a voice of its own, in the plural. A whole generation, from different shores, stopped sounding like the world and started sounding like Chile.

The voice was in the crossing

The echo didn't fall silent by copying more and better. It fell silent when someone stopped choosing between the guitar from abroad and the quena from here, and played them together. Los Jaivas didn't choose between rock and the root: they married both. There, in that marriage, the voice was born. Chile stopped sounding like someone else not when it imitated better, but when it mixed what was its own with what it had learned. The voice wasn't in the copy or in the pure past: it was in the crossing.

Think about that band's journey, because it is the journey of the whole country. They began, in 1963, playing someone else's song and taking coins from an audience that laughed at them. They ended up giving Chile a song people still know by heart. From copying "Sueña" to writing "Todos juntos". From being the echo to being the voice. That road, the road of five kids from Viña, is the same one this series has been telling: the road of a country that stopped listening from far away and began, at last, to sing what was its own. The echo had a spark, we said at the beginning. Los Jaivas turned it into fire.

Sources

Los Jaivas formed in Viña del Mar as The High & Bass, made up of the brothers Eduardo, Claudio and Gabriel Parra, Eduardo "Gato" Alquinta and Mario Mutis. Their first performance, on 15 August 1963 at the Teatro Municipal in Viña del Mar, is commemorated as Chilean Rock Day; there they played "Sueña", by Luis Dimas, a Nueva Ola figure. Towards the end of the sixties the group hispanicised its name and turned from dance music to a fusion of rock with Latin American rhythms and instruments —cueca, huayno, quena, charango— a shift its members have credited in large part to their travels across the continent. They released "El Volantín" in 1971 and, in 1972, "Todos juntos", which became one of the most recognised songs in Chilean music. In parallel, Quilapayún, Inti-Illimani and Illapu arrived at a musical identity of their own from the side of the Nueva Canción and folk roots. Information drawn from MusicaPopular.cl, Memoria Chilena, Wikipedia and press coverage.