Discography

• Yo me acuerdo, Buenos Aires - (2013)

 

 

Members featured in the album

• Yo me acuerdo, Buenos Aires - (2013)

 

GUSTAVO MORETTO - Piano

MARTÍN MORETTO - Guitar

NICK DANIELSON - Violin

PEDRO GIRAUDO - Double bass

 

Guest musicians:

MAURO SATALINO - Percussion

TONY DE VIVO - Percussion

STEVE GERARDI - Violin

 

 

Biography

Gustavo Moretto was born in Buenos Aires where he began his musical career as a trumpeter, pianist and composer for the group Alma y Vida, an outstanding Argentine band that pioneered the fusion of rock and jazz.

In 1974 he separated from Alma y Vida to form a trio called Alas -where he composed, sang and played keyboard and wind instruments-, with Carlos Riganti (drums) and Alex Zuker (bass and guitar), the latter later replaced by Peter Aznar. With Alas, Moretto sought to develop a sound in which jazz, rock and tango merged, in the evolutionary line that Ástor Piazzolla was marking. Producer Miguel Grinberg tells in his book 25 years of rock that:

Two of the greatest impacted by the Piazzolian spirit were Luis Alberto Spinetta and Gustavo Moretto. It was a kind of love at first sight since during a "Lunch with Mirtha Legrand" on TV, Piazzolla spared no praise for those musicians.

Spinetta himself spoke of Moretto in those days like this:

Why are the guys who respect me the most the most bosses? Why a guy like Gustavo Moretto, who is a guy who puts on a Debussy score and plays it by reading it, who has a musical knowledge that exceeds mine several times, and who has an ear as big as mine, and I I have infernal, and that he has a poetic flow that is incredible, that he sings well, and that he plays like a sanputa, and that he put together a group like Alas that in less than two years breaks everything... why does that guy listen to The ring of Captain Beto and he tells me that it is the most beautiful thing he has ever heard in his life and I realize he is serious?

Luis Alberto Spinetta (Interview with Miguel Grinberg).

Moretto was summoned by Spinetta to participate in the album “El Jardín de los Presentes”, considered by Rolling Stone magazine as #28 among the 100 best albums in the history of Argentine rock. Moretto plays the keyboard there (ARP String Ensemble) in "Ruido de magia" and "Las golondrinas de Plaza de Mayo", the latter one of the classic songs from the Spinette songbook.

Alas discontinued his work at the beginning of 1978, beset by economic difficulties at a time when Argentina was suffocating due to the prevailing dictatorship, but it has been valued as one of the great bands in the history of Argentine music.

During the last years of the 1970s he joined the Banda Spinetta through which Luis Alberto Spinetta carried out what he called his "jazz project" (sic). Spinetta has said that it was precisely Gustavo Moretto who excited him to approach jazz by introducing him to Diego Rapoport, with whom the leader of Almendra would carry out a large part of his jazz stage until Spinetta Jade came to fruition.

In 1979 he joined the group La Banda, led by the Uruguayan Rubén Rada -recently settled in Argentina- with Bernardo Baraj (sax), Luis Cerávolo (drums) and Ricardo Sanz (bass). In 1980 they record an album with the title of the group that was very well received.

That same year, 1979, he settled in the United States to receive formal musical education, obtaining a doctorate in composition at Columbia University, and a graduate degree at the New England Conservatory, also serving as professor in charge of the instrumental program at La Guardia. Community College of New York since 1996.

 

 

Information

* Gustavo Moretto Official Facebook

# Apologies, translated by https://translate.google.com.ar