Gato Barbieri _ Europa

 

Gato Barbieri _ Europa

 

Leandro Barbieri (born on November 28, 1934 in Rosario, Santa Fe Province,
Argentina) better known as Gato Barbieri (Spanish for "Barbieri the Cat") is
an Argentine jazz tenor saxophonist and composer who rose to fame 1999
during he free jazz movement in the 1960s and from his latin jazz recordings
in the 1970 .

 

Born to a family of musicians, Barbieri began playing music after hearing Cha-
rlie Parker's "Now's the Time."

He played the clarinet, then the alto saxophone while performing with the
Argentine pianist Lalo Schifrin in the late 1950s.

 

By the early 1960s, while in Rome, he was playing the tenor saxophone, and
also worked with the trumpeter Don Cherry.

By now influenced by John Coltrane'slate recordings, as well as those from
other 'Free jazz' saxophonists such asAlbert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, the
warm and gritty tone, which would become his trademark sound, began to
develop.

In the late 1960s, he was fusing musics from South America into his playing
and contributed to multi-artist projects like Charlie Haden's Liberation Music
Orchestra and Carla Bley's Escalator Over The Hill.

His score for Bernardo Bertolucci's film Last Tango in Paris earned him a Gram-
my Award and led to a record deal with Impulse! Records.

 

By the late 1970s he was working for A&M Records, and moved his music
towards jazz-pop with albums like Caliente (with his best known song,
Carlos Santana's Europa).

Though he continued to record and perform into the 1980s, the death of his
wife Michelle led him to withdraw from the public arena.

He returned to recording and performing in the late 1990s, playing music
that would fall into the arena of smooth jazz. Nancy Savoca and her husband,
Rich Guay, are working on a documentary of Barbieri's life and work.