Alemán

Oscar Alemán is one of the great unknown talents in jazz history. A brilliant guitarist who sounded very close to Django Reinhardt at times, Alemán was overshadowed in Europe by Reinhardt in the 1930s and spent much of the rest of his career in his native Argentina, remaining well known only in that country. This 1998 double CD from Dave Grisman's Acoustic Disc label has highlights from Alemán's career, including the eight selections he recorded during his three European sessions of 1938-1939, plus music from 1941-1947 and 1951-1954. Although the settings varied (including a sextet with violinist Svend Asmussen, a nonet, and two unaccompanied guitar solos), Alemán's basic swing style stayed the same, retaining its enthusiasm and creativity and remaining unaffected by bop. Sticking throughout to acoustic guitar and taking an occasional good-time vocal, Alemán is heard in peak form. He deserves to be much better known. A definitive two-fer from a major talent.

This album contains a collection of works from the Seicento, most of them well known and recorded several times, although it also includes a composition (Cazzati’s La Verità sprezzata) that is little or not very often heard. It is a repertoire to which we have usually devoted ourselves. That is why we wanted to propose our own way of doing it, in all honesty and avoiding fashions and artifice, without pretentiousness, respecting only the rhetorical —and dramatic— discourse implicit in the texts and their setting to music, fleeing from affectation —but not from affetti— and unquestioned customs, taking advantage of the information provided by musicological research, making use of our intuition and experience, and also remembering the teaching we have received from our old masters. Inspired by Ripa’s allegory and by the idea of truth as άλήθεια or unveiling of the self that is hidden by the veil of appearance, we have endowed our performance with a certain natural simplicity, a deliberate nakedness, especially in moments of particular emotional intensity.