Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music by Matthew B. Karush (review)

Whether because of explicit or implicit cultural exceptionalism, the traditional confines of national or area studies, or ambivalence toward narratives of hemispheric exchange and pan–Latin American brotherhood, generations of critics, historians, and biographers have, at times, created the impression that Argentina stands apart from the rest of Latin America: a sonic island somehow unperturbed and uncontaminated by transnational cultural flows.

Matthew B. Karush's Musicians in Transit persuasively makes an argument to the contrary. Focusing on several key figures in twentieth-century Argentine popular music, Karush deftly explodes the myth of insularity, but not by proving that barriers to contact and dissemination never existed to begin with. Rather, he shows how the very uniqueness of some of the nation's signature performers—from Óscar Alemán to Gato Barbieri, Lalo Schifrin to Astor Piazzolla, Sandro to Mercedes Sosa—thrived on tensions between the centrifugal and centripetal forces of cultural politics brought to bear on the nation's vernacular musical production. Constantly subjected to wayward social, economic, and political pressures, these "in transit" musicians responded by breaking out of the Rio de la Plata cocoon and embracing the inherent mobility of music. "By navigating the ideological and economic structures of the transnational music industry," Karush argues, "they transformed them" (2).

The heart of Karush's study is the mid-twentieth century, and in particular the ways that musicians like Alemán and Barbieri struggled to find "authentic" musical identities despite reigning, and sometimes haranguing, cultural nationalism. Critical gatekeepers of the period tended to view jazz as either a threat to national idioms such as tango, or else as a valuable but essentially US expression that Argentine musicians should embrace at their own peril. What is more, especially in the form of big-band swing, jazz carried with it not just cultural menace but also a pungent whiff of the market. It raised the specter of race as well. Even in the early twentieth century, Argentine musicians and intellectuals frequently acknowledged blackness as a foundational presence, albeit one safely tucked away in the nation's past.

Still, race was an uncomfortable subject when brought up in contemporaneous debates. In his chapter dedicated to Alemán, Karush highlights the ways the Afro-Argentine guitarist saw his career defined by racial perceptions that shifted over space and time. First coming into public view as a child performer, Alemán was typecast as a "black gaucho," playing the type of rural, nostalgic música criolla then in vogue. Moving to Brazil with his performing family, Alemán absorbed samba, choro, and also Hawaiian music to such an extent that, in his first, brief return to Argentina, he was seen as a transnational exotic. In the 1930s, Alemán capitalized on his formidable technique, wide musical repertoire, and phenotypic blackness to find success as a swing guitarist in Paris, playing for Josephine Baker's band, among others. A decade later, Alemán returned triumphantly to Buenos Aires as a consecrated jazzista, celebrated by music critics who generally viewed black Americans as the only authentic jazz musicians of the period, even as others judged him as a purveyor of commercial excess, contaminated by his extended exposure to the transnational music industry.

Gato Barbieri, Lalo Schifrin, and Astor Piazzola, Karush argues in chapters 2 and 3, brought to bear different aspects of Argentine identity amid the global music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. As white jazz musicians, Barbieri and Schifrin in some ways had more options than Alemán, and in other ways they had fewer: lacking the double-edged identity capital of blackness, they took advantage of the emerging Latin jazz subgenre of the 1950s and 1960s to negotiate their own place in the transnational music industry. To do so, however, meant accommodating the industry's reductive notions of latinidad. Schifrin, by virtue of being South American, was able to establish himself as a white, educated, North American–friendly...