A music video posted and replicated dozens of times on social networks, which begins with the always heartfelt interpretation of Pablo Milanés de Cuba and continues with the voices or music of important artists from Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Uruguay and, of course, a considerable number of Peruvians, as well as with the participation of Carlos Vives and, in his own right, with that of Chabuco (whom his father, an admirer of the Peruvian composer and singer, gave him that nickname that he carries with undisguised pride) by Colombia , It was the musical tribute to Chabuca, whose songs Fine print and, above all, La flor de la canela, considered almost an anthem in Peru, are known and recognized throughout the world.
(Also read: Goodbye to Johnny Pacheco, the ‘visionary of salsa’).
And in the Music and Literature program directed by Carmen Millán de Benavides, which is broadcast on Sundays, from 9 to 10 at night, with repetition on Saturdays, from 8 to 9 in the morning, on Station 91.9 on FM, from the Universidad Javeriana, a broadcast was also dedicated to remembering Chabuca in a profound way, without reducing it to his two iconic songs.
Emotional longing for this artist and a pretext to relate some aspects of her life and her work.
Chabuca died in Miami in 1983. His sensitive heart failed him. He had already warned him three years ago in Bogotá, 1980, in a concert before fifteen thousand people, when he had his first heart attack.
Chabuca’s relationship with Bogotá transcends that unfortunate episode. In 1969, the mayor of the city, Emilio Urrea, declared her a guest of honor and gave her the keys to the city. And in the fifties, without still being the composer that she was, recently separated, she met a couple from Bogota who challenged her to return to a song that love she felt for Lima, the capital of her country and to which she referred to poetics. expressions.
Chabuca accepted the challenge and wrote a beautiful waltz, Lima de veras, that his friends sent to a radio contest and he won first prize.
From that moment on, she did not stop writing, adding hundreds of songs throughout her thirty years as a composer. In addition to songs, he wrote poems, film scripts and some plays, which continue to be discovered.
(You can also read: This is the Swedish movie that became a sensation on Netflix).
Chabuca was an original, determined, intelligent woman. She was married for 22 years with the Brazilian military Enrico Demetrio Fuller, with whom she had three children, two men and a woman
–
–
Carmen Millán de Benavides, director of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo, investigated thoroughly to convey to her listeners the legacy of the Peruvian artist and shared the script for her program, which began like this: “To enter into the complexity of a poetic voice that goes from longing for a colonial Lima to pain for the death of a guerrilla poet and it becomes a third moment of her life as a cultist of Afro-Peruvian music, I am going to use the book Popular Music and Society in Contemporary Peru, written by specialists Raúl Romero and Santiago Alfaro ”. And he extracted from that text sections that account for his excellent conditions as a lyricist.
Chabuca began writing songs of a very nationalistic nature. The majority dedicated to that stately Lima that changed its appearance, being populated with people from all corners of the country. It was the first stage of his career, in which the typical characters and the beautiful places of that beautiful country, especially those of his beloved Lima, became musical themes that awoke chauvinism and became popular like foam.
Social song
In the sixties, in the heat of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and taking into account that inequality and social injustices could not be covered with the hand, Chabuca dedicated his compositions to relate these topics with enormous sensitivity that went beyond poetry to become radical and protesting without being pamphleteer.
A separate chapter deserves the songs that emerged from his pen after the murder of the poet Javier Heraud, a young writer belonging to the Lima bourgeoisie who, from his early adolescence, wrote important poems, such as those collected in the book El río, to quote only one of those that were published with great acceptance by the most exclusive literary critics.
Because of his leadership at the university, at age 18 Heraud was invited to Moscow and later traveled to Cuba, with a scholarship to study film. Upon his return to Lima, he became a member of the guerrilla group, the Peruvian Liberation Army, where many university students gathered.
In a first armed encounter with the army, in the jungle, despite the fact that his skirmish partner asked that they not be shot, that they surrendered, they were shot. Javier’s body, which his father recognized, had thirty shots on it.
Last year, at the Casa de la Literatura Peruana, in the historic center of Lima, next to the Government Palace, I visited a temporary exhibition entitled ‘Heraud. Dimensions of a trip ‘, collected photographs, books, letters, testimonies of his swift and short life, in which he was considered one of the most important voices of Peruvian poetry, to the point that many critics compare it with that of César Vallejo.
(We recommend: The poet and architect Joan Margarit, 2019 Cervantes Prize, died).
The admiration for Heraud
“… When my son’s companion shouted: ‘Don’t shoot any more’ –Jorge A. Heraud Cricet, Javier’s father wrote in a public letter–, being close to the shore from where they were being shot, and according to oral versions that I have collected in the population, a captain shouted: ‘Fire, we must finish them off’. A lieutenant, more humane and more respectful of the laws of war that forbid firing at the already defenseless and wounded enemy, held the fire, but it was too late …”.
The admiration of Chabuca Granda for Javier Heraud’s poetry and for his altruism as a revolutionary convinced that he had to take up arms to transform his country was the reason that led her to sing to him not in one, but in several compositions, among them: Las good flowers from Javier, The poet’s rifle is a rose, Silence to be sung, An armed forest, From the neighboring roof or A canoe in Puerto Maldonado.
Chabuca was never on the left, but the poet’s murder moved her to the depths of her soul and one way to make her outrage public was to write those songs that marked her stage of commitment to popular causes.
It was at that time that he also paid tribute to the Chilean composer Violeta Parra, with several songs, the most recognized being Thistle or cherry.
And from this stage is the one that he dedicated to the revolutionary government of Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975) and which he titled with the pompous Paso de victors.
Raúl Romero, author of the chapter ‘Music and power: aristocracy and revolution in the work of Chabuca Granda’, quoted by Millán, maintains: “Most of the public opinion perceives this stage as the product of the composer’s sadness before death of a young and idealistic poet, completely decontextualizing the ideological component of Javier Heraud’s career, who was hardly seen as a dreaming poet, instead of the ideologically committed guerrilla he had become ”.
(Also: Los Tigres del Norte ready album 10 years after their MTV Unplugged).
Blackness
Energetic were the compositions that Chabuca dedicated to the Afro-Peruvian population, in which he highlighted the contempt and disdain with which blacks were treated, and the silencing of their forms of cultural expression.
Chabuca sought out Afro-Peruvian musicians with whom she formed the musical group that would accompany her in her performances in the 1970s and 1980s.a, and rescued instruments never used, such as the cajon, to which he added the characteristic stamping of the Afro dance.
In these compositions he clearly reflects his shame and that of many of his compatriots for those three hundred years of slavery. Whenever he had the opportunity, he expressed his rejection of these years as the most ignominious chapter in the history of his country.
After ten years
As a marriage, she expressed to her husband the desire to resume her artistic career, which he sharply opposed. She didn’t hesitate. Separated
–
–
Due to her immersion in the Afro-Peruvian world, she met and stimulated two fundamental voices in the local artistic sphere, those of Susana Baca and Eva Ayllón, who always recognize her as a fundamental support in their triumphant careers.
In 1979, Chabuca inaugurated in the exclusive Miraflores neighborhood a café concert that she called Zeño Manuel, in which she gave an account of those three stages of her life as a composer. And he never tired of talking about the origin of each song and the reason for each one. Work that was highly applauded and lasted for months on the billboard.
What is making a song? He wondered, and replied: “It’s like writing a letter. If you don’t have anything to tell, you don’t write it ”.
With Armando Manzanero
Last year, coinciding with his centenary, the enormous Mexican singer died and in some Peruvian newspapers it was recalled that a 25-year-old Manzanero arrived in Lima in the 1960s to work with Chabuca on some musical projects.
When he, very shy and reserved, showed her some of his compositions, she, dazzled, invited him to a Sunday lunch at the home of the Miró Quezada family, owners of the newspaper El Comercio, attended by very influential people.
Chabuca introduced Manzanero and asked him to interpret his songs, that were received with great enthusiasm and publicized, an occasion described as the start of his career as a performer of his own compositions.
Throughout the years, Manzanero and Chabuca’s relationship was close and he always pointed to that invitation as final.
(You can also read: What would Serrat be without Machado, Benedetti and Hernández and vice versa?).
Her life as a warrior
Chabuca Granda was an original, determined, intelligent woman. She was married for 22 years with the Brazilian military Enrico Demetrio Fuller with whom she had three children, two men and a woman. After ten years of marriage, she expressed to her husband the desire to resume his artistic career, to which he sharply opposed.
She didn’t hesitate. He separated, which was scandalous in those fifties in closed Lima society.
He does not care about me. She began working as a seller of Helena Rubistein beauty products and at the same time writing her poetry, most of the time, made into a song. Very quickly she managed to emerge as one of the most sought after artists in Latin America.
The beauty of her songs, the unique way of interpreting them and the sympathy that she wasted in each of her presentations made her popular and very successful.
In addition to her physical attributes, she was very talkative and her audience loved that, who not only listened to her songs, but the theoretical framework she made them.
(Continue with: Gloria Trevi turns 53, with ‘best and worst experiences’).
Fine print was written for his father, Eduardo Granda, a mining engineer, who died at the age of forty, for whom he felt a special devotion, and La flor de la cinnamon, which he made in honor of a black woman, a laundress, whom admired for his dignity and hieratic walk.
Chabuca Granda, big and special. There is not a day in which his compositions are not listened to with devotion or admiration in Peru or abroad.
On the Paseo de Recoleto, in Buenos Aires, in the district of Hortaleza in Madrid (Spain), in the Conchalí commune in Santiago de Chile, in Barranco in Lima and in many other cities there are monuments that commemorate this singer whose music was declared cultural heritage of Peru in 2017.
MYRIAM BAUTISTA
– .
