World Music with uruguayan sound: Jorge Schellemberg

 It would seem unnecessary to talk or write about music, to use mechanisms that describe with words what is understandable only with the ear... and the heart.

Nonetheless, arts have always summoned to thinking and talking about them, because the concept that one people has of life appears also in artistic expressions, and to grant art a cultural meaning is a gesture that today, more than ever, seems to be a vindication of the local.

 Historically, the uruguayan model was seen through its european references, without taking into account its American integration, hiding outwardly any feature that linked it to a past with natives or blackness. Nonetheless, our culture today is going through a process of  revaluation of the past, of negotiation and symbolic disputes about those marks, in a quest for a tradition and a future project that constitute the basis of any identity and replacement project in a globalized world. For these reasons we talk about “cultures”, so minding a diversity of proposals that coexist and express themselves in our country in plastic art, architecture, gastronomy, religiousness, fashion and, of course, in music: Rock, Salsa, Funk, Jazz, Tango, Murga and Candombe.

In this context of the late ‘80s arises Jorge Schellemberg’s figure as a musician identified with urban music, belonging to what was called the “Candombe Beat”; that is one of the musical trends that had (and still has) more presence in our society, which also means a considerable number of adepts. This Candombe Beat arose more than four decades ago trying a style that would identify itself at first sight with uruguayan music and that would assemble the best of  Jazz, Rock and Pop.

 The original matrix of Candombe comes from the ancestral african (Bantú) patrimony, and refers to dances at the sound of  drums played by the black slaves brought to our lands, which constituted an expression of ritual evocation of their race. Despite the progressive disappearing of Afro-Uruguayans over the past centuries, the Candombe resisted and lately it has experimented an explosion that doesn’t  limit itself to the carnaval nights nor the southern district, but it’s in many districts of Montevideo, it walks by the cornes, and it assembles black and white adepts around fires and tunes.

 Pioneers such as Pedro Ferreira, Manolo Guardia and Georges Roos were the first explorers of the mix of this ancestral Candombe with other rithms, which  in the ‘60s  installed itself permanently with El Kinto, group made up by Eduardo Mateo, Ruben Rada, Walter Cambón, Luís Sosa and Antonio Lagarde, by which passed Urbano Moraes, Chichito Cabral and Freddy Vita. Later the list is filled with names such as Jaime Roos, Jorge Galemire, Mariana Ingold, Jorginho Gularte, Alberto Wolf, Fernando Ulivi, Jorge Drexler and the musician we are interested in right now: Jorge Schellemberg.

 This construction of identity starts – in this case – from an artist who defines what to look at and how to look at it (at us), who relates us with our past, granting with his art a palpable coherence. Jorge Schellemberg tells the city, builds it, reinvents it, invokes its texture through an exploration of images of the boulevard and  the suburb, from the Old City to Carrasco, of the people that walk down its streets and the people that leave, of the Carnaval and Candombe feast, of  drums and Rock; he sings to women, to men, to children, and he sings to love.

 The rest can’t be explained, it’s part of the magical ritual that takes place in the encounter between musicians and public. It can only be enjoyed.