Discography
Members featured in the album
HÉCTOR CERÁVOLO - Piano, electric piano, organ and marimba
LUIS ALBERTO CERÁVOLO - Drums and chorus
BO BATHU - Electric bass and chorus
RUBÉN RADA - Vocals and percussion
GUSTAVO BERGALLI - Trumpet, fluegel and charango
HÉCTOR "Finito" BINGERT - Tenor sax, flute and quena
CONNY SÖDERLUND - Electric guitar on tracks 4, 6 y 8
Biography
In 1972, the Argentine brothers Héctor and Luis Cerávolo and the Swedish bassist Bo Gathú met in a house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to play Jazz. They were times of the height of a current that sought to fuse that genre with rock, basically through the incorporation of powerful wind sections and the combination between concepts and Jazz phrases with sounds and rhythms of Rock origin and other nearby genres. The seed had already been planted several years earlier by Miles Davis with his 1969 Bitches Brew album, but now it flourished and reached massive with bands such as Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago, in the United States, and its sprouts spread to all latitudes: Los Canarios in Spain, Alma y Vida in Argentina, to name just a couple of examples.
In that suburban house, the idea arose of putting together a group with the purpose of recording original songs, which Bo proposed to call “S.O.S. Sonido Original del Sur”. Shortly after walking, another Swedish (guitarist Conny Söderlund) and a handful of musicians joined the project, some of whom were (or would eventually be) true pillars of Jazz and Rock on both banks of the Río de la Plata, with trajectories that deserve a separate chapter: Argentine trumpeter Gustavo Bergalli and Uruguayans Héctor "Finito" Bingert and Rubén Rada.
The group thus formed began to work on original themes and arrangements on the fusion of rhythms of Argentina and Uruguay with Pop and Jazz Rock, and managed to record ten compositions in the legendary ION studio, in 1974. They performed some concerts with the repertoire of disc, but when not obtaining a record contract, the plate did not get to be published in Argentina, where the fusion did not interest for that time neither to the public nor to the record companies. But it did get to be published in Uruguay in 1976 by the Clave label and reissued in 1984 by the mythical Sondor label, although under the title There was once a black dream, with two Rada songs added to the original edition.
The group ended up separating at the end of 1975 and its members dispersed throughout the world. More than forty years later, Luis Cerávolo, in coincidence with the name of the band, issued an S.O.S.: he asked Bo, who still retained the original tapes, to re-mix the ten recorded tracks in Sweden.
That is the sound that, thanks to the Acqua Records label, now reaches our ears with the edition of this album, which rescues the original recording from oblivion, but with new mixing and mastering. A happy event without a doubt, because beyond constituting a curiosity, this plate allows to know what was being cooked for those years in South America. A huge boiling cauldron where the creative experiments of bands such as those already mentioned and those that had already been carried out by groups such as Arco Iris in Argentina, Los Jaivas in Chile, El Polen in Peru or the Opa group, of the Uruguayan Hugo Fattoruso .
Information
* Luis Alberto Cerávolo Official Facebook
# Apologies, translated by https://translate.google.com.ar