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Discography
Members featured in the album
EDUARDO CASALLA - Drums
HORACIOACIO LARUMBE - Hammond organ and piano
OSCAR TISSERA - Teenor csax with octavoice and flute
Guest musician:
FERNANDO GELBARD - Fender piano
Biography
It was the convulsed year of 1973 when Eduardo Casalla, Horacio Larumbe and Oscar Tissera met at Fernando Gelbard's ION studios to record five songs they were working on. Patty Casalla recounts that when "we were listening to the recording of what they had improvised in the studio, Eduardo came up with the title 'Water' because of how it had flowed, but he was not convinced. So I suggested the title 'H2O' as a symbol and metaphor, and Eduardo loved it and it stuck". The imprint of that group interaction was such that some time later the musicians chose to give the trio that name. As Casalla said in an interview I conducted with him in 2010, the combo he had created "was a cannon shot, one of the first trios ever heard, except for Jimmy Smith's, with a Hammond organ without a double bass. This was especially challenging on tracks like como “H2O” or “Prohibido fijar carteles”,, which, due to its hard bop stylistic imprint, demanded a broadening of the rhythmic possibilities of the bass line -which came from the amplification of the double bass from the fifties- and a greater dialogic interaction with the drums.
The blues “Mate con sacarina” is the other joint composition of the trio where Tissera's solo on flute with Octavoice shines, a device that allowed the electrical amplification of wind instruments and the modification of their sound one or two octaves per second. under which it was issued. The result was an electric sound that sought to be part of the style of jazz-rock and fusion that prevailed in the late sixties.
The tape is completed with two pieces from the American classic repertoire, the ballad "The Shadow of your smile" and the medium swing “In a mellow tone”, standards that as such "provide the structure for improvisations through much of the history of jazz” as the ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner says. A story that, as can be heard, also has its rhizome in Argentina. In Ellington Larumbe's composition he performs two solos, one on piano and the other on Hammond organ, accompanied by Fernando Gelbard's Fender piano.
Horacio Larumbe used to say of himself, with the irony that characterized him, that he was the best jazz organist in the country... "because he was the only one". After starting out as a clarinetist in the Blind Symphony Orchestra and later turning to the piano, in 1964 he settled in Sweden where he delved into and specialized in Hammond; Among the few Larumbe record records, this is the only one where he appears showing off his competence on that instrument, and probably the first one that included him as part of his own combo. This also seems to be the case of the flutist and tenor and soprano saxophonist Oscar Tissera, who in 1973 was a member of the Jorge Anders Orchestra with which he recorded the emblematic album of this formation with Oscar Alemán. Eduardo Casalla, as a product of a career that began in his adolescence, had already made several recordings with Lalo Schiffrin, the Swing Timers, Horacio "Chivo" Borraro and Enrique "Mono" Villegas, among others.
It was a time of political but also artistic boiling for Argentine jazz, the result of the modern explosion of the sixties. Although Leandro “Gato” Barbieri and Schiffrin were already becoming international jazz stars, the scene where they were born continued to be active and diversify, both in terms of style and composition. From this indispensable period in the history of our Argentine Jazz, “H2O. Eduardo Casalla's TRIO with Horacio Larumbe and Oscar Tissera” is undoubtedly one of his jewels that is no longer lost.
By Berenice Corti
Information
* RP Music YouTube Channel
# Apologies, translated by https://translate.google.com.ar