Leda Valladares

Today I present the third edition of meetings with the greats of Argentine Folklore.

Singer, songwriter and researcher Leda Valladares is a phenomenon. Born in Tucumán in 1919. As a teenager she is enthusiastic about jazz, blues and classical music. “Before I looked at the world I started to hear it,” she says.

At the age of 19, she founded the set FIJOS, which means Folkloric, Intuitive, Jazzy, Original and Surrealist. Soon after, she discovers the baguala during the carnival of Cafayate, when she hears from his balcony three women singing this form of archaic song from northwestern Argentina. It is then that she decides to devote herself to the music of the Andes and trace the musical treasures from Ecuador to Santiago del Estero in Argentina.

She records so many of these songs creating a “Musical Map” and specializes in this repertoire as a singer. Because she doesn’t see herself as a researcher who sings, but as a singer who explores.

In 1952, she founded the folkloric duo Leda and Maria with the poet, composer and singer María Elena Walsh and toured throughout Europe. In 1956, the two returned to Argentina. They made numerous albums and toured Latin America.

In the sixties, Leda received different scholarships to continue exploring and recording this repertoire. In the 70s, it brings together young folk musicians with representatives of Argentine national rock. What seems incompatible at first glance works and creates a very special musical world. In 1989, Leda recorded her famous album “Grito en el Cielo” singing with rock musicians such as Fito Páez, Pedro Aznar and Gustavo Cerati.

In December 1994 I found Leda Valladares in her house. She told me about her travels in Latin America and her experiences with macumbas in Bahia, Brazil. She explained to me why the drum, in particular, has a religious and magical power, what fascinates her so much about the scream in the musical traditions of the Andes and why she hates Italian operas.

Listen for yourselves to what this great singer, songwriter and researcher, who died in July 2012 at the age of 92, told me in her living room while we had a cup of tea and some delicious cookies.

Purchase the full transcript

WIKIPEDIA

Biographies

Leda Valladares was born in Tucumán in 1919. Her father was from Tucumán while her mother was a “patricia” from Santiago surnamed Frías, great-granddaughter of Félix Frías, and her adolescence was spent between blues, jazz and classical music that his father listened to. “Before I looked at the world, I started to hear it. Because of my father, playing and singing I entered the foliage of music,” he said.

She graduated from the National University of Tucumán with the title of professor of philosophy and then also graduated in Education Sciences.

Before turning twenty, she formed his first music group, with some friends: FIJOS (Folkloric, Intuitive, Jazz, Original and Surreal). Under the pseudonym Ann Key she began singing jazz. But at that time, music was almost a game and Leda says that she sang in English by phonetics (despite her irreducible passion for Argentine folk music she also maintained all her life a great passion for jazz, music of which she was passionate since she was fourteen years old).

Baguales

At the age of 21 he discovers the bagualas and from there he will not stop to recover that anonymous song of the valleys and mountains of Argentina. That meticulous work is still today one of the few carried out with the scientific rigor that would be required: I was in Cafayate (Salta). It was a Carnival night, I was 21 years old and there I discovered the baguala.

I was revealed by three women who stopped in front of my balcony. I had never heard of the baguala and then it seemed to me that it had to be something very mysterious, very powerful. After listening to them I promised myself to recover such a gift from the earth. They were traces of a song that was many centuries old and was falling apart, it was disappearing.

I went out to look for the vestiges of this miracle that until that moment I did not know. I had never had to find the wild voice and exit the mountain. But it was a very lonely cry, and already that poor cry was so widowed, so lonely, that it panicked. Then I took on a kind of rather tragic consciousness. A country that was on the verge of losing its history, its traditions, and no one realized that all that was dying or that it was already dead. Leda Valladares

There she made the decision to record those melodies and make the Argentine Musical Map. “With my modest engraver in tow I was collecting folklore from Ecuador to Santiago del Estero. And so, with a lot of patience, I was reconstructing the musical map of the country, and tearing those songs from alleys, ranches, valleys, ravines or corrals.

In this she defined herself as: I am not a researcher who sings but a singer who investigates.

At the beginning of the 1950s she went to live in France, in Paris, in 1952, she met María Elena Walsh with whom they formed the folkloric duo Leda and María that performed in various locations in Europe. In 1956 both returned to their country, becoming known the duo with the simple name Leda y María, in Argentina during the 1960s they toured and recorded albums, including the one entitled Canciones del tiempo de María Castaña (a compilation of old Spanish folk songs). They performed in 1960 in Necochea at the Jornadas del Nuevo Mundo del Niño, singing “Canciones para mirar”.

She won the Konex Award – Diploma of Merit in 1984 and 1994.

In 1999 she retired from artistic activity and was hospitalized due to Alzheimer’s disease, a disease based on memory loss in a degenerative way.

When she turned 90, Miriam García led a troupe of about 20 members who came to greet her and sing to her. In 2005 she received the Special Mention of the Konex Awards for his outstanding contribution to Argentine culture.

Leda Valladares passed away on July 13, 2012, at the age of 92. For a long time, she had been suffering the consequences of Alzheimer’s.

Eschuchen also:

Suma Paz

leda valladares pareja, ancestral conceptionvanguardista of argentinity, cry in the sky: leda valladares, baguala Leda Valladares, romantic to an ancestral conceptionvanguardista, in collaboration with pedro guerra, leda valladares compilation, leda valladares coplas