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Chango Spasiuk
The Charm of Chamamé
$16.99

The passionate accordion player and composer Chango Spasiuk transforms the Chamamé, a rural dance music, into an highly elaborated artform presented mainly in concert settings, in much the same way Astor Piazzolla added jazz elements and a classical note to the Tango.

Listen:
Governor Virasoro
Nande Reta
Poison

The sounds of country cattle followed by a wild accordion tune may not suggest that what follows is going to be as cutting edge as it is traditional, but that's a fair description of the music of Chango Spasiuk and group. Chamamé is the powerful accordion-led style of north-east Argentina, in which the complex rhythms of African and Creole-Spanish immigrants have been slowly fused with those of indigenous Mbya-Guaraní Indians and other peoples. Middle European settlers such as Spasiuk's Ukranian grandparents added to the mix a love for dancing polkas, schottisches and other lively folkloric salon dances ­ exemplified here by 'Besela Doroha', 'Ivanco' and the glorious 'Posadas'. Spasiuk's tangy music is suffused with percussive textures and he plays passionately, teasing out emotion from the sprightly yet seductive moves he makes between one note and another. 'San Jorge', with its flute dialogue, suggests Spasiuk may be an innovator along the lines of a contemporary great like Finland's Maria Kalaniemi. And such suspicions are confirmed by the emotional scope of pieces like 'Pynandi', the Brazilian-underpinned 'Escenas de la vida en el Borde' (Scenes of life on the Frontier) and the voices of 'Adios Beatriz'. The fact that Mercedes Sosa, one of Latin americas most potent singers, guests on 'Solo para Mi' (Just for me) ­ with music by Spasiuk and lyrics by Victor Heradia ­ is the cream on the cake. This is a groundbreaking work by a significant musician. - Songlines UK, January/February 2004 Jan Fairley

Press from the label:
Born in the northeastern rural province of Misiones, Chango Spasiuk grew up in a close-knit society defined by the complex process of fusion and interaction between communities of native Guarani, Caribbean Creoles and Eastern European immigrants, many of them from the Ukraine, like Chango’s grandparents.

In Argentina ‘El Chango’ has come to be seen as the guardian angel of chamamé, the powerful folk tradition of the Argentine Northeast and the “music with the deepest swing in Argentina”. A fiery and sensitive virtuoso on the accordion, he displays an audacity rarely seen with musicians of this genre. From a position of absolute openess and lack of prejudice, Spasiuk produces a rich mix of sound and tradition, where both legacy and synthesis, improvisation and composition, tradition and modernity play equal roles, making his music an intense listening experience that moves beyond boundaries of style and sound. A real discovery.