Gato Barbieri
Bolivia/Under Fire

This album represents an arrow shot into the sky, a dense and ambitious battle that undoubtedly bore its fruits.
Gato Barbieri is an Argentine saxophonist who, starting from the Coltranesque matrix, expands the sphere of his creativity to give rise to an intense and brilliant magma, which in chaos manages to establish and assert its own law. "Bolivia" and "Under Fire" are the albums that have most markedly decreed the stylistic evolution of a great artist: the creation of a true genre borrowed from the native rhythms of South America, from the high jazz tradition, and from the personal and original component that brands Gato's music indelibly.

The two albums, ("Bolivia" from 1973, "Under Fire" from 1971), will later be combined into a single CD. A wise and happy choice, considering the compactness of the compositions and the numerous analogies - even sound ones - that are found between the two albums. The line-up is eloquent, and in particular, we must remember Lonnie Liston Smith on the piano, a young (but more than promising) John Abercrombie on guitar, Stanley Clarke on bass, and Airto Moreira on drums and percussion.

The first five compositions are part of Bolivia. It starts with the ternary and pressing "Merceditas", a continuous and long cry wonderfully filled with melody; the pulses of the rhythm section (with an excellently devised bass line) decisively and firmly support Barbieri's beautiful sax voice, which always presents itself fresh and never repetitive in over 9 minutes. Beautiful solos by Smith.
The compositions are most often divided into "primera" and "segunda" part: an alternative track integrated into the original, a continuous movement and renewal.
In "Eclypse Michellina" this dynamic movement is taken to extremes: from a simple and relaxing rumba, it reaches the second part of the piece, which suddenly becomes dark, tense, and suspended. The beautiful "Bolivia" follows, seeming to evoke distant and ancestral paradises, alternating melody, sweetness, tension, noise, screams, only to finally calm itself; just as in the wild "Ninos", the impetus and violence of the percussion converge to mimic the power - although also devastating - of nature. And like calm after the storm, "Vidala Triste" appears, where in a sort of chant, our Gato gifts us his voice and that of his flute.

Bolivia is the narration of nature: the sudden overturning of balances on which man had well anchored his legs (in this case the ear); the total lack of predictability and staticity make this album a faithful (and I would suggest philosophical) representation of the natural world, of the analogies that man, by his own flaw, can no longer grasp.

If Bolivia represents the wild and primordial world, Under Fire seems to perfectly describe man, his integration with the world and nature, as explained in "El Parana": the sparse and dry guitars that accompanied the melodic discourse in Bolivia are now replaced by more refined, more "contaminated" (the use of the wah wah is exemplary and very functional) tones of Abercrombie's electric guitar. The elements previously used in Bolivia now create a strange tension, morbid, hypnotic.
The subsequent "Yo El Canto A La Luna" and "Antonico" are two ballads of incredible beauty and refinement: the first an Argentine folk song, the second a bossa. The last two tracks, "Maria Domingas" and "El Sertao", seem to link the two worlds, the two albums: the sophistication of new harmonies (more "humanized") is fused with wild rhythms, and the whole erases that dark tension, to shine in all its beauty.

Bolivia/Under Fire is a concept. It narrates the force of nature, the man's unhealthy force, but also the good that can be created by man himself. It reserves for us, in the end, a possibility, a hope that has not yet died.
We are obviously talking about the '70s, of especially ideological commitment (and Gato is a great master of it) that marked the places of music and arts.
Masterpieces like this have made a great contribution to music, but above all to humanity.

An album, therefore, highly recommended, not difficult to listen to but full of easy emotions.