It’s 1995, and a 22-year-old Argentine jazz guitarist named Ale Demogli is sitting in an office at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Twelve years later, he will be a pillar of the Argentine scene, a musician who, on acclaimed albums like ‘3.30’ and ‘First,’ blends a reverence for jazz tradition with the unique sounds of his Buenos Aires upbringing. But in that office in Berklee, he’s nothing – a green porteño in a foreign city trying to get a campus job in a language he can barely speak.
“When I went to the interview,” Demogli said, “I answered everything – yes, yes. So the guy asked me, ‘Do you know about computers?’ ‘Yes.’ I didn’t know anything about computers. I had to learn in two days how to use a computer. So they gave me that job. Actually, it was very good. It was 80 computers, and I had to teach.”
Demogli may have had to learn English and computers in a hurry, but he’d been studying music intensely for his entire life.
He began playing the piano when he was six, but switched to the guitar when the schedule of his travelling football club made the smaller instrument more practical.
From the beginning, Demogli was awash in disparate musical influences. He loved rock, especially groups with more symphonic sounds like Yes and Rush, and he came from a house where tango, swing and classical music filled the air.
It was at 16, though, when Demogli found his true musical love. A friend of his gave him a copy of jazz pianist Bill Evans’ album ‘You Must Believe in Spring,’ and from that moment on, he had a calling.
Even after he fell in love with jazz, Demogli continued to play rock, backing famous singers Marilina Ross and Sandra Mihanovich. By the age of 20, he was touring South America with various rock singers, earning good money and dreaming of a time when he could dedicate himself more fully to the music he loved most.
It was around then that a fellow player on the rock circuit mentioned Berklee to Demogli. After recording two albums for the admission committee, Berklee gave him the full scholarship that he needed to travel to US – his jazz career had begun in earnest.
Demogli graduated from Berklee in just three years, but when he returned to Argentina he was left with lingering doubts about his ability. It’s one thing to study jazz with the masters, but it’s another to play with them night after night under the same hot lights. In a folk art like jazz, academic degrees matter little on their own. It’s what you can do sharing the stage with the best players that carries real currency.
That’s why Demogli, after spending a post-study year in Argentina, boarded a plane to return to Boston.
His second stay in the US was an unalloyed success. Soon after arriving, he was playing consistently with the Boston-based drummer Bob Moses, and crisscrossing the country for gigs in New York, Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin.
It was in Madison – a University town with a small, but passionate, music and arts scene – where Demogli got his biggest break.
“I was playing in a jam session with [drummer Leo Sidran, pianist Tim Whalen, and bassist Nick Moran] in the King Club in Madison. It was a Wednesday, and we opened the jam. We played for half an hour, and when I went back to the bar, this guy came over and said, ‘Hey, nice to meet you, you play very good,’ – old guy, black guy, big guy. He said, ‘I’m Richard Davis.’ I couldn’t believe it. All those records that I love – he’s playing the bass on them. For eight or nine years, the DownBeat critics’ poll voted him best bass player. He’s terrific.
“And he said to me, ‘hey man, I’m looking for a guitar player.’ He was doing the auditions the next day at the university, and he told me to come around the next day at nine o’clock. So I went to the audition, and it was 16 or 17 players. He chose two, me and another guy.”
It was during Demogli’s days with Davis that his US jazz career almost came to an abrupt end. In 2001, as the economic crisis hit Argentina, Demogli’s US tourist visa was set to expire. He desperately wanted to stay to play with Davis, but his prospects looked bleak. An artist visa was his best shot, but he needed to have 16 references from prominent musicians, and even then it was far from certain.
“Richard Davis picked up the phone and called everybody,” Demogli said. “I have a letter from Chick Corea [a legendary US jazz pianist and composer]. He didn’t know me, but he wrote a letter saying, I know Alejandro, he’s a terrific guitar player. I have a letter from Andrew Hill [another revered pianist]. I have one from Roscoe Mitchell, the sax player for the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I have another letter from Bob Moses, but Bob actually knew me, so did [vibraphonist] Gary Burton. The whole thing was really funny and it worked – I got the artists visa for four years.”
Demogli moved back to Argentina full-time in 2005 to be closer to his family. Yet he still maintains contact with both scenes,cutting albums with prominent US players like bassist Hill Greene, as well as playing throughout Argentina. He’s also drawn to teaching, sharing his invaluable experience with younger Argentine musicians who have found it increasingly difficult to study in the US since the economic crisis.
“I think one of the reasons that Bob Moses and Richard Davis chose me was that my music is a little different. That difference is what I am – tango, Argentine stuff – but at the same time I have so much respect for the jazz tradition. It’s the stone that everybody goes back to.”
Jazz has a rich history of incorporating the sounds of other idioms and cultures into its constantly-evolving sound. Ale Demogli’s well-travelled life fits snuggly into this tradition, a serious musician who looks equally to the history of the music and his home in a land thousands of miles away from the jazz’s epicentre. The 22-year-old porteño who went to the US to study the music he loved has, at 34, become a truly global artist.
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