If you think inheriting money means responsibility, imagine inheriting a musical legacy. That’s what the younger members of Inti-Illimani, a Chilean band started in 1967, face. But they have the help of Jorge Coulon, the last active founding member and the link between generations.
Preservation and Innovation
Most of the younger musicians grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, when Inti-Illimani was exiled from Chile by then-dictator Augusto Pinochet. Though the group was forbidden from physically entering its homeland for 15 years—they didn’t return permanently until 1990—its music traveled the airwaves, influencing future members from afar.
Manuel Meriño, a superb guitarist and composer who is the now the group’s musical director, recalls growing up listening to Inti’s recordings and strumming along with his guitar to Inti’s trademark mix of Latin American, Afro-Latino, and Italian sounds. Even after he learned to play and appreciate other styles, he continued to feel a strong link to the band’s music.
| ‘I believe the group at this moment is very modern; I would even say it’s in the vanguard’ |
“I think we, the younger members of the group, bear a fundamental responsibility to deliver a message, and we have to treat that with respect,” he says. “That’s very easy to do because the music lends itself quite naturally to incorporating new Latin American influences.”
Toward the Past and the Future
Coulon’s brother Marcelo, who plays guitar, bass, and flutes, became a member in 1978. The others joined after 1994.
“I believe the group at this moment is very modern; I would even say it’s in the vanguard,” says Jorge Coulon. That’s in part because the group’s contemporary musicians enjoy an unprecedented freedom to mix musical genres in the style Inti-Illimani pioneered almost 40 years ago, he says. Still, he adds, “freedom carries a risk. …What pleases me about this group today is that the creative risks it is taking are very much in keeping with our history while opening us to many perspectives, many possibilities.”
The group’s latest CD, Pequeño Mundo, released in October 2005, features Inti-Illimani at its best: daring, creative, and in tune with its past. The original compositions include works by Meriño, the Coulon brothers, and Juan Flores. Highlights include the jazz-flavored, percussion-driven “Rondombe” and “Buonanotte Fiorellino.”
Meriño sees the recording of Lugares Comunes, Inti’s 2003 release, as the point at which the newly configured ensemble came together. He says it was a “delicate moment” for him as the group’s new musical director and the composer or co-author of about half the songs on the CD: “I felt I had to do something that would sound relatively new but not alienated from what has been recognized as the Inti-Illimani sound, and I believe that CD gave much consideration to the group’s older sounds, recordings, and aesthetic.”
| Audiences may be awestruck by Inti-Illimani’s extensive musical talent, but the band members’ admiration for one another is perhaps equally impressive |
As the band’s sound continues to embrace new musical sensibilities, the younger Intis are mastering classics like “Lo Que Más Quiero” and “Candidos,” which remain in the concert repertoire. But they don’t feel constrained by the musical legacy they have inherited. Says Daniel Cantillana, a violinist and frequent lead vocalist who has collaborated with Meriño on some of the new material, “Rather, these songs establish an intangible aesthetic framework that lets us know whether a song can fit within what we do. It is our own identity, and if it determines what we do, it does so very subtly.”
Tools of the Trade
Each member of the group plays numerous instruments that get passed around the stage in a mesmerizing choreography. Between them, the Coulon brothers play guitar, rondador (panpipe), zampona (panpipe), and quena, to name a few. Violinist Cantillana’s talents extend to mandolin and distinctive vocal phrasings. Christian González, who plays a half-dozen Western and Andean flutes and bass guitar, has one of the most beautiful voices in a group with no shortage of vocal gifts. Efren Viera contributes seismic percussion performances and plays clarinet and saxophone. Juan Flores, master of an arsenal of Andean instruments, is Viera’s accomplice in some of the band’s more spectacular onstage antics. A percussion battle between the two during the 2004 U.S. tour culminated in Flores’s one-man duet on zampona and cajón. The newest member of the group, guitarist César Jara, made his U.S. tour debut in 2005.
Audiences may be awestruck by Inti-Illimani’s extensive musical talent, but the band members’ admiration for one another is perhaps equally impressive. “Almost always, a group is a metaphor for life, just as a small village is a metaphor for the entire world,” Jorge Coulon says. “With regard to musical qualities, there are certain technical requisites, but many people have technical musical abilities. The people who have a plus, who have a connection to their world of values and their creative world, are much more scarce.”
If you missed the Intis during their most recent U.S. visit, catch one of their 2006 or 2007 tours, marking their 40th anniversary and making sure the beat goes on for generations to come.
