BAS editor Helen Laurenson
May 2023 saw a veritable double whammy of Spanish and Latin American cantautores in London, with the Uruguayan Jorge Drexler appearing at the Barbican Hall eight years after the success of his performance at the Union Chapel, Islington, and el flaco himself, Joaquín Sabina, back in the Royal Albert Hall after a six-year interval.
Drexler’s links with Sabina run deep. It was the Spanish cantautor who saw the then medical doctor perform in a dive in Montevideo almost thirty years ago, and who subsequently encouraged him to try his luck in Madrid in 1995. Despite being introduced to an illustrious musical circle, including Víctor Manuel, Ana Belén and Ketama, Drexler started from zero in Spain – ‘recorrí el país con mi Renault Clio y dos músicos uruguayos, tocaba en salas de 60 personas’.
His latest appearance in London came at a very different stage of his career, as he rode the success of his 14th studio album, Tinta y Tiempo, which in 2022 won seven Latin Grammy Awards – a healthy crop in comparison with the four awarded to Rosalía.
Drexler is perhaps best known for his song ‘Al otro lado del río’ from the 2004 film Diarios de motocicleta. Walter Salles, the film’s director, commissioned him to write the music. Drexler says ‘leí el guión a las ocho de la noche. Me fui a dormir temprano y soñé con la canción. Me desperté y la escribí prácticamente desde la cama’.
In an interview in La Nación, he attributes its success to the scene in the film where Ernesto (aka Che) Guevara crosses the river to the Leper Colony: ‘sentí que esa escena donde Ernesto cruzaba el río sintetizaba el leitmotif de la película y del personaje histórico. Que no todo está perdido. De remar en conjunto hacia un mundo utópico, que es el del otro lado’.
The lyrics are simple but present a clear sense of universal solidarity and hope:
Clavo mi remo en el agua,
Llevo tu remo en el mío,
Creo que he visto una luz,
Al otro lado del río.
…
Yo muy serio voy remando
Muy adentro sonrío
Creo que he visto una luz
Al otro lado del río.
…
Sobre todo creo que
No todo está perdido
Tanta lágrima, tanta lágrima
Y yo, soy un vaso vacío
Son of a German Jewish doctor who fled to Uruguay in 1939 and a lapsed Catholic mother, Drexler has always considered himself, if not an outsider, a fluid mix of cultures and influences. ‘Yo soy un híbrido [y] cuando eres un híbrido te cuesta mucho más aceptar las categorías […] y la realidad es infinitamente densa cuanto más te acercas a una persona’.
He recoils from being labelled un cantautor (singer-songwriter): ‘no me gusta [el término]. Para mí, que vivo de las palabras, cantautor es una conjunción, como choripán, que nunca entendí muy bien’. His 2017 Ted Talk, ‘Poetry, Music and Identity’, reveals the evident literary process in his composition. Despite his protestations to the contrary – ‘pero eso no quiere decir que no me guste la canción de autor. Me gusta más cancionista, que es el que hace canciones’ – there is a clear intertextuality present in his works, and a poetic rigour. In May 2022, on his return to the Gran Rex Theatre Buenos Aires after a long absence, he revealed in an interview with La Nación, ‘Estoy en dos o tres chats de decimistas. Gente que escribe décimas con mucha capacidad y erudición. Escribimos sonetos, décimas, sextinas y villanelas. Más culto no puede ser.’
Challenged by ‘su maestro y amigo’ Joaquín Sabina in 2002 to write lyrics in ‘décimas’, starting with the lines written by Chicho Sánchez Ferlosio, ‘Yo soy un moro judío, / que vive con los cristianos, / no sé qué Dios es el mío, / ni cuáles son mis hermanos’, Drexler’s eventual song, ‘La Milonga del Moro Judío’, epitomises his approach to interculturality. He recently sang it with a Palestinian singer in Mexico and is in the process of recording a version with an Israeli singer.
As well as shying away from the term cantautor, Drexler is reluctant to be labelled a ‘Latin singer’, given the diverse nuances of musical production across South America. ‘I love the extrovert and happy music of Colombia and Panama,’ he remarks. ‘In Uruguay and Argentina we are melancholic and intellectual’. He describes his 2014 album Bailar en la Cueva as ‘an attempt to kill what Uruguay’s dictatorship left in me 30 years earlier. What I couldn’t do in my youth, dance and be happy, I’m doing now’.
Drexler started his professional life practising medicine, like his father, an ear, nose and throat specialist. Music was initially what Drexler did on the side after clinic, until eventually dismaying his father by taking it up full time. In an interview with Latinolife, Drexler states, ‘working in a hospital, dealing with situations of healing and suffering, joy and pain, power and impotence, taught me a lot about relationships and people, and influenced my lyrics and my performances’.
Whilst his switch to music was not entirely unsuccessful in Spain, the 1990s scene, with the Spice Girls and the Back Street Boys, was not immediately propitious. His third album, Frontera, did not sell well in Spain, but was an immediate hit in Argentina and Uruguay, ‘y ahí de golpe me volví una especie de símbolo de una generación, el tipo que mezcla folklore tipo Atahualpa Yupanqui con Beck’.
In the interim, Drexler co-wrote music for Rosario Flores, Pablo Milanés and Ana Torroja. In 2005, ‘Al otro lado del río’ won the Oscar for Best Song. Drexler himself was not allowed to perform the song at the ceremony as he was relatively unknown: Antonio Banderas and Carlos Santana were chosen instead.
Winning an Oscar at the age of 41 – the first ever for a song not sung in English – exemplifies the long road taken by Drexler, who remains philosophical and sanguine in his approach to both music and life: ‘a mí lo que me interesan son los procesos…’.
Find out more about Jorge Drexler:
Jorge Drexler: Grammy Preview 2023 – Rolling Stone
Jorge Drexler: Poetry, music and identity (with English subtitles) | TED – YouTube
Bulletin of Advanced Spanish 