Acoustic Guitar Central: Gabriela Profile

One of the ’90s most fortuitous and memorable musical pairings was the collaboration between Argentine singer-songwriter Gabriela and American jazz guitarist Bill Frisell on Gabriela’s breathtakingly beautiful 1996 CD Detrás del Sol (Intuition/Allegro, www.allegro-music.com). To Frisell fans, the most obvious revelation of that CD was the way Gabriela’s lyrics enlarged two classic Frisell melodies ("Rambler" and "When We Go"), but the CD’s true purpose was to introduce Gabriela and her richly poetic songs, which fuse a "Spanish" melodic sensibility with Joni Mitchell–esque jazz and pop, to the world beyond Argentina.

The pair reprised their meeting last year to record Gabriela’s Viento Rojo (Intuition). While Viento Rojo follows the same format as Detrás Del Sol, with a fresh batch of Gabriela’s cinematic songs framing a couple of cowritten Frisell/Gabriela beauties, the instrumentation is more fragile and composed than Detrás, which featured Frisell and a sympathetic band of accordion, violin, bass, and percussion improvising arrangements to Gabriela’s songs. There are no drums this time, just Gabriela’s and Frisell’s acoustic and electric guitars fronting a string trio (violin, cello, bass) arranged by Frisell. "I had always dreamed of playing with strings, a chamber music–oriented sound," Gabriela says, from her home in Buenos Aires. "I wanted a record with no drums, to maintain a constant floating feel. So Bill arranged the music for upright bass, cello, violin, and guitar. When we went into the studio, I found myself playing these songs the way I had always played them but accompanied by a mini-orchestra from Mars!"

Gabriela’s father was a diplomat, and as a child she found herself in such musically fertile places as Portugal, Ireland, and Brazil. She began playing guitar as a 15-year-old in Brazil, accompanying herself on Mexican songs. "I listened to a lot of Mexican music as a child and learned to sing along with the records of Mexican singers," she recalls. "The first songs I learned on the guitar were Mexican tunes. While I was growing up on my family’s farm as a very young kid (I lived there until I was six years old), I used to hear the gauchos playing their chamame music—accordion, guitar, and sometimes voice—kind of a Carter Family from the end of the world. I wasn’t allowed to hang out with the men at their living quarters, but during some Sunday ‘siestas’ I used to escape and hide in the bushes, listening. It was all so magical, new, sensuous—like a reverie. I realize that this is what captivated me, years later, about Mexican music."

She returned to Argentina in 1971 and was part of a burgeoning Argentine rock scene for a few years before escaping the increasingly repressive political climate for the sunnier life of southern California in the ’70s. While there she recorded with such prominent L.A. musicians as David Lindley, Robben Ford, and Alex Acuña, but in those days, world music was not a vital commercial genre, and the album was released only in Argentina. She also met her husband, jazz guitarist Pino Marrone, during this time, and his influence expanded her guitar playing abilities. "He is an exquisite jazz guitar player and gave me all the pointers I needed to continue growing but didn’t know how to ask for," she says. Marrone also introduced her to Frisell’s music.

Gabriela returned to Argentina in 1992. When she was preparing to record her fifth CD in 1994, she set words to Frisell’s tune "Rambler," overdubbed her voice to a tape of Frisell’s original recording, and sent him the tape with a request for permission to record the piece. Frisell was so enchanted with the result that he offered to play on the entire recording, and his longtime producer Lee Townsend was brought in to produce the session that would become Detrás del Sol. "Working with Bill Frisell and his tunes has stretched my musical mind to unbelievable realms," says Gabriela. "My vocabulary is much wider now and I can use my preferences with more knowledge. The guitar is an integral part of my music, mind, body, emotions. I can’t imagine life without one."

The depth of Gabriela’s music is revealed to English speakers only when they venture inside the CD sleeve. The translations of her lyrics reveal her to be an incredibly poetic songwriter, blending the bright landscape and tragic history of her home country with mythic imagery and primal human emotions. She’s been inspired by Pablo Neruda, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, and Paul Bowles, and she deserves to stand side by side with these giants. "Lyrically I draw from anything and everything," Gabriela says, "beauty, poverty, political turmoil, existential matters, characters that I meet, stories that I hear, poems that I read." But her most consistent muse is nature and the beauty of her end-of-the-world homeland. "I never tire of looking at the sun setting or the moon rising or a storm resonating with thunder as loud as a double earthquake or the hissing of bird wings in a summer lagoon or the rusty colors of the desert . . . What a mystery. Now that really inspires me!"

This story originally ran in Acoustic Guitar magazine, March 2001, No. 99 in the Jump Street department. Below, read Nygaard's complete interview with Gabriela, an Acoustic Guitar Central exclusive.

How does the music you made with Bill Frisell differ from your other records or music you would make without him?

Gabriela First of all there’s the obvious fact that Bill is a musician with a very strong, original voice, not only as a guitarist but as a composer and arranger, so having him participate in a whole record instantly makes a difference. As for the process, the two records with Bill [Detrás del Sol and Viento Rojo] are my first in many years to feature a band where the whole record is played by the same group of people. Most of my other CDs were built in the studio with lots of different players coming in to play at different tunes.There are more than enough examples that show that both approaches can work great. What makes these projects with Bill particularly exciting is that the chemistry we have singing, playing, and co-writing makes things flow in a very natural way, almost as if we both belonged to a regular band. It is a wonderful feeling and you really do appreciate things like this enormously after having being in music and making records for such a long time.

Did the two of you work together on the arrangements and overall sound of the two records?

Gabriela The process was completely different for each record. Detrás Del Sol had a band put together mostly by Lee Townsend (who produced both albums and produces most of Bill’s records) and myself. There were really no arrangements in the traditional sense. I brought some simple lead sheets of my songs, we rehearsed a couple of times, didn’t do a lot of talking. We’d try some things out and kind of stay with whatever seemed to feel better. We then went into the studio, played and sang at the same time, just like a live gig, and did most of the record in three days with just a few overdubs. It was more of a jazz approach to playing and recording than the typical singer-songwriter approach where you have more time to go back into the studio to get the perfect vocal track and work on details. But I think we got the kind of magic that proves there are no rules!

For Viento Rojo we worked in a different way. I wanted to travel another road and thought it would be a creative idea to use Bill´s arranging skills, which I greatly admire. I came up with the instrumentation. I had always dreamed of playing with strings, a chamber music oriented sound. I wanted a record with no drums, to maintain a constant floating kind of feel. So Bill ended up arranging the music for upright bass, cello, violin, and guitar. We really didn´t talk much about the arrangements; I totally trusted him. He worked mostly around my guitar and vocal demos. When we went into the studio I found myself playing these songs pretty much the way I had always played them but accompanied by a mini-orchestra from Mars! Lee had a lot to do with the sound and choice of musicians for this album and I think he did a great job. Recording with strings definitely brought out a different side of me as a musician and singer and, in my opinion, Viento Rojo ended up being a whole, long piece, not just a bunch of songs put together for a record but kind of like a soundtrack for a nonexistent movie.

Viento Rojo is very cinematic. For one thing your lyrics are so visual and evocative. In their translation at least, they read more like poetry than the usual song lyrics. You’ve mentioned people like Joni Mitchell as an influence, but I was wondering specifically about your lyric writing. Are there poets or other musicians who have influenced you? And do you have any specific songwriting process or does each song emerge in a different way?

Gabriela Lyrics come to me as naturally as the grass grows. Your appreciation that my lyrics stand more as poetry than song lyrics is very true. I tend to treat my lyrics as such. Usually the way I start my songs is by writing a poem which I then set to music. Of course there are no rules and once in a while I’ll have a melody ringing in my head that will end up being a song. Other times I’ll just sit and mess around with the guitar and a sequence of chords will surprise me. When this happens I’ll just write them down and come back to this harmonic start with a melody or an idea for lyrics that I think might blend.

A new road for me has been writing lyrics to Bill Frisell’s music these past years—his melodies are so singable that they scream for lyrics. But the process is quite different and although it seems simpler given that the music has already been written, it isn’t. It can be both limitating and liberating. I have to write in a much more zen kind of way, as I don’t have the freedom to change the melody to fit in a word, I have to work with whatever there is. I have no choice. However this has been a great exercise for me and a new creative challenge that has expanded my songwriting capability.

As far as musicians who have infuenced me lyrically, I can name Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Lennon and McCartney, and Jane Siberry. As far as poetry goes, the poet that I have read most extensively is Pablo Neruda. His imagery impressed me deeply as a teenager and still does. As far as writers, I can name a few: Paul Bowles, Doris Lessing, Ray Bradbury, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jack Kerouac. But undoubtedly, when I came across Bowles, my world turned upside down. He completely threw me off-center and there’s a "before and after" Bowles, regarding my songwriting. His bleak descriptions of humankind and nature—its extremes, contrasts, contradictions, excesses—are so powerful and yet his writing style is so cool—he conveys all the turmoil without being overpassionate or melodramatic. He is definitely my role model.

Lyrically I draw from anything and everything, beauty, poverty, political turmoil, existential matters, characters that I meet, stories that I hear, poems that I read, but mostly I draw from nature, which is my biggest muse. I never tire of looking at the sun setting or the moon rising or the rain falling or a storm resonating with thunder as loud as a double earthquake or the hissing of bird wings in a summer lagoon or the rusty colors of the desert or the breaking of ocean waves that never repeat themselves . . . That is my biggest fascination—observing the natural elements, knowing that I´m just a particle of this huge universe I live in and know nothing about. What a mystery. Now that really inspires me!

I’m curious about your relationship to Argentine music. Some of your music is clearly influenced by pop and jazz and people like Joni Mitchell, yet some is very "Spanish" or "Latin" sounding. Also, the instrumentation on Detrás del Sol, with guitar, violin, and accordion, hints at tango music without really sounding like tango music. Was there music around when you were growing up that influenced you?

Gabriela Well, the fact that my childhood was spent in different countries, because of my diplomat father, and that I wasn’t raised like the typical Argentine child, who grows up and stays in the same city or country all her life, probably caused a loss of identity in me as far as musical roots go. Actually, my Spanish sound originates in Mexican music. I have serious influences not only because I listened to a lot of Mexican music as a child and learned to sing with Mexican singers singing along with records but also because the first songs I learned on the guitar were Mexican tunes.

As a teenager I grew apart from Mexican music, because I was afraid it wasn’t "cool" enough. But later on, as you grow up, all the influences you ever had naturally reappear once again, so I let those Mexican inflections that were so ingrained in me take over and effortlessly flow through me while singing non-Mexican stuff like my own songs—in an understated way, of course. Also, during all the years I lived in L.A., I was constantly haunted by Mexican and border music as well. Even the people I loved the most at that time, like Ry Cooder, were into Mexican music. So it’s always been there in some form in my life.

While I was growing up in my family’s farm as a very young kid (I lived there until I was six years old) I used to hear the gauchos, who at that time came mostly from Corrientes, northern Argentina, playing their music called chamame, accordion, guitar, and sometimes voice—at times even other voices singing harmonies, kind of a Carter Family from the end of the world, and the first music I ever heard! I was in awe as I let the sounds cut through me, melting me, blending with the birds’ songs, sometimes in dissonance, sometimes in perfect harmony, it was all so magical, new, sensuous, like a reverie. I wasn’t allowed to hang out with the men at their living quarters, but during some Sunday "siestas" I used to escape and hide in the bushes listening to a joy I didn’t have access to—music! I realize that this is what captivated me, years later, about Mexican music. Blissful times hidden somewhere in my brain that were awakened by the spirit of Mexican music during my often lonely times abroad.

In a different way, tango was a big part of my life too, because that’s all my dad listened to. So the cadences and phrasing must have seeped in and stayed somewhere in my unconscious, although I was in denial of this music because it was my parents’ music and I didn’t really try to understand it back then. Fortunately I rediscovered it and got into it heavily upon my return to Argentina a few years ago, and in my opinion, it is the best music Argentina has ever put out.

Tango is pretty amazing. It has a life of its own and it’s intense music—you can’t get into tango lightly and think you’ll nail it because you won’t, it’s a lifetime committment. Its rhythms and style are unique, and lyrically, it’s a special, very dramatic kind of poetry. The guys who wrote the best tangos are gone, and unfortunately, there are no replacements. I was lucky to see one of the best tango singers, Roberto Goyeneche, perform a few months before he died. The way he expressed each word, phrased it, almost as if he was speaking, whispering, going from low to high in intensity as the lyrics asked for, turned out to be a very big influence in my singing of these last years. It comes out at the most unexpected moments, surprising me every time. Seeing Astor Piazzolla live had a long-lasting effect on me as a musician as well, he was one of the few cases where you see a totally liberated artist, and to this day I still draw from the vision of Piazzolla playing, eyes closed, entranced by the music, his bandoneon almost performing on its own. However, the tango influences in the music I write come out mostly in spirit and in a general feel and have no relation to the form or musical elements of tango.

Gabriela The music scene in Argentina right now is sad. Most of the music you hear is very unmusical. The good musicians are working out of the country because there is no demand for them here and I can only hope it’ll all make a 180-degree turn in the next few years, it is badly needed.

Gabriela My main instrument for over 20 years has been a gorgeous sounding nylon-string instrument made by a renowned local luthier,Yacopi. It’s a really warm and big sounding instrument. Fifteen years ago, on David Lindley's recommendation, I added an L.R. Baggs piezo pickup that I ran through a Passac preamp. Recently I switched to a Baggs Para Acoustic D.I. In the studio we usually mic the guitar and take the signal from the Baggs.

However, in the last ten years I felt that my chord vocabulary had improved quite a bit and I had gotten to the point where I was struggling with the Yacopi’s fat neck and high action. So, last year I found this electric nylon-string Fender Telecaster with a very thin air chamber and an f-hole that turned out to be an incredible instrument! It is very easy to play, it stays in tune really well, it´s friendly and simple for performing live, which is very important to me (the practical side, no feedback, easier soundchecks,etc.). I plug it through a simple A.R.T. tube preamp and add a dash of reverb. As a result now I’m hooked to this instrument and have used it exclusively, even to play and write at home.

Also, although I don’t really play with steel strings very much, I do use a beautiful Guild F-50 for writing in Nashville and open tunings. For example on songs like "Imagenes del Amazonas" I used C G C F C D and "Viento Rojo" I used G A C D E G, both tunes from the Viento Rojo CD. Or take a tune like "Luz del Mundo" from Detras Del Sol, I used Nashville tuning on that one. I hardly ever play solo gigs so I won’t always play guitar on those because of all the switching and retuning on stage. I’ve been lucky to be able to surround myself with jazz musicians who know enough about voicings and harmony to be able to re-orchestrate things to get a similar effect. So for now the steel-string guitar is mainly a writing tool. I play fingerstyle exclusively, with my bare fingers.

Gabriela I use synthetizers and sequencers as a writing tool. I can’t really play keyboards but I use them to help my ears find those notes that seem to be hiding on the guitar or that I wouldn’t be able to reach if I did. Also, keyboards help me get into other areas where a certain sound or timbre that I’m looking for is hard to find with the guitar alone. Then, when it comes time to record most times I don’t use the synths. Examples of tunes that come to mind that were written like this are "Sueno Transparente" from Detrás del Sol and "Hay Senales Claras" from Viento Rojo.

Gabriela I was 15 years old and living in Brazil when I bought my first guitar, it was a cheap Gianinni but good enough for somebody who had never played before. A friend taught me A, E and D and I happily adapted all songs I knew to these three chords. Obviously I got bored after a while and started nagging everybody who had a guitar and could play for information so I learned mainly by asking questions. Years later I took some classical guitar lessons which were useful in some ways but not really what I was looking for. When I married Pino Marrone 18 years ago things changed. He is an exquisite jazz guitar player and gave me all the pointers I needed to continue growing but didn’t know how to ask for. Also, working with Bill Frisell and his tunes for over five years now has stretched my musical mind to unbelievable realms. If this experience hadn’t opened up my ears then I’d probably be better off becoming a bus driver or a lawyer. My vocabulary is much wider now and I can use my preferences with more knowledge. I love working with open-string chords and cannot get enough of them. The guitar is an integral part of my music, mind, body, emotions, everything, and I can’t imagine life without one!