“This should have been an album of mourning,” Jorge Drexler said of his new album, Taracá, noting that his father died last year. Drexler said that though his father was a child of the Holocaust, “he was a very celebratory person. And so this is a celebratory record. I think it’s a way of mourning.”
In the late 1990s, Drexler left Uruguay and his career as an otolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat doctor) to pursue music and subsequently lived in Spain for decades. Though he has visited his homeland over the years, this was his first time recording an album there since his 1999 album Frontera. One reason for the return, Drexler said, was that he wanted to dive into Uruguay’s flourishing creative scene, collaborating with musicians who weren’t even born when Frontera was released.
“My son was born in Spain, and I wanted to restart my connection with Uruguay,” he explains of his early Uruguayan albums to PopMatters. “I didn’t want to get lost in the distance, and the second time I went back to Uruguay [to record] last year was after a very important thing in my life. My father passed away, and I stopped being a father and a son, and I became only a father. I got that sensation to go back and reconnect. I can’t explain exactly why, but I think it’s easy to guess—you feel uncertain of your situation, and you want to get in touch with the roots at some point”.
The homecoming album was also a chance to explore further the Afro-Uruguayan rhythm called candombe, so he collaborated on several songs with the percussion-based Rueda de Candombe. The album title is a playful onomatopoetic take on the basic candombe drum rhythm. On “El Tambor Chico”, he and the band praise the barrel-shaped tambor drum: “It makes you be here and now / Be here and be now / A while passes,” but one finally ends up realizing that the little drum is on the right side and it’s the world that is turned upside down.”
Rueda steps away from candombe for a Spanish version of the samba “Que sera que es (What could it be?)” by the Brazilian star Gonzaguinha. Amid the celebratory rhythms, the chorus chants: “Live, and don’t be ashamed of being happy. Sing (and sing, and sing) the beauty of being an eternal learner/I know that life could be better, and it will be, but that does not stop me from repeating: it is beautiful, it is beautiful, and it is beautiful.” The accompanying video is a mélange of home movies filmed by Drexler’s father of their family playing together in the 1970s.
The theme of joyous rhythms and dance runs through the album. In “Ante la Duda, Danca (When in Doubt, Dance)”, Drexler narrates—against a percolating polyrhythmic foundation—a history of government prohibitions against dancing, from a 16th-century Spanish edict giving 200 lashes for dancing the zarabanda to Puerto Rico’s 1995 seizure of reggaeton cassettes. “¡A mover ese culo! (Let’s move that ass),” he concludes.
Speaking about his own relationship with dancing, Jorge Drexler recalled: “I grew up in a dictatorship in Uruguay, and in a family of intellectuals that thought there were more important things to do than to dance, and the dictatorship also didn’t want people to dance … I found out with the years that there isn’t something more important than dancing.
“I started dancing when I was 40,” he continued. “Because I wanted to take the dictatorship out of my joints. Because dictatorships end at some point, but they stay in people’s minds, in people’s joints. My generation was rigid. I don’t know how to explain that in a better way. We didn’t dance.”
Drexler said that Taracá was, in a sense, an extension of his 2014 Bailar en la Cueva (Dancing in the Cave), which was built around Colombian cumbia rhythms. “I’m a big fan of David Byrne and Paul Simon,” Drexler notes. “They have this thing in common: They come from reason, but they move the body. I think we all learned that from the Paul Simon record Graceland. He really showed all singer-songwriters that he could move to rhythmic music and feel at home, at the same time, use the counterbalance of reason and body, and have them interacting in a way that they balance each other. They’re complementary”.
As if to illustrate that juxtaposition, Drexler wrote the song “Las Palabras”, which he dedicated to his father. “He was a surgeon, like my mother,” Drexler said, “but he spent the last years of his life writing.”
The song also articulates Jorge Drexler’s own love of words as a songwriter of widely varied topics and a creator of memorable imagery. “People pass, but the words remain / Like a trail attesting to a ship / Thus the imprint in the mud will evoke the wheel,” Drexler sings with Falta y Resto, a renowned Uruguayan murga or carnaval theatrical troupe. He noted that the multi-generational group has a long history in Uruguay and was on the front lines in helping bring down the country’s dictatorship.
The group sings: “Let’s use the words to give nuances, let’s look for subtlety in the verbiage, let’s honor each letter of what is said.”
“It’s really hard for me to give advice”, Drexler said. “To say you should do this, let’s do this. So I couldn’t sing those passages. So I had this choir sing it … They have the authority I lack.”
“Encouraging is not in my main list of things to do,” Jorge Drexler notes. “The equation is much simpler than that. I consider myself an equal to the listener. So if I feel that it works for me, I have the hope that it will work for somebody else. I’m not an ambassador. I’m not a monk; I don’t have any advice to give to people. I don’t even want to encourage people to do anything. I just do what I enjoy in the hope that it will be good for other people too.”
Drexler’s father escaped from the Nazis in Berlin when he was four, emigrating to Bolivia, one of the few countries that gave safe haven to German Jews at the time. There, he became a doctor and relocated to Uruguay, marrying a Catholic woman of Spanish, Portuguese, and French heritage and raising a multi-ethnic family that celebrated all facets of their background.
“My Jewish grandfather dressed up as Santa Claus at Christmas,” Drexler reminisces. “Everybody was relaxed with that. My non-Jewish grandfather went to the synagogue to say hi at somebody’s bar mitzvah. It was a treasure. It was something absolutely precious. I thought the world would always be like this, and in moments when the world is moving away from that, I feel I’m so privileged that I got to live that. I still have that idea … I mean, you are the other. The other is you. It’s a very simple thing that is being destroyed today.”
In “Our Work/The Bridges”, Drexler sings: “You will wonder what we are doing singing about love while the world is going to hell / Each of us will know what to do when the ship sinks with the hull open due to the impact of the rocks / It is our turn to sing / It is our turn to keep the bridges open / And cross them song by song.”
A music lover as a child, Jorge Drexler began writing his own songs as a side gig while doctoring in Uruguay, but was encouraged by Spanish singer Joaquín Sabina to move to Spain to pursue a new career. After growing a following with several critically acclaimed albums, he was tapped to record the song “O Otro Lado Del Rio (The Other Side of the River)” for the Ché Guevara biopic The Motorcycle Diaries. The song was nominated for an Oscar, but was performed at the ceremony by Antonio Banderas and Carlos Santana since Drexler was deemed not famous enough. When he won, his gentle protest was that his acceptance speech was a recitation of two verses of the song in Spanish.
Since then, Drexler has received five Grammy nominations and 13 Latin Grammy awards. He has had successful collaborations with other musicians, including the Colombian star Shakira, a hit single with the Spanish rapper C. Tangana, and the Bajofondo Tango Club.
Now 61, Jorge Drexler has seen his son step out as a singer-songwriter in his own right, using the stage name pablopablo. With his own father gone, Drexler is philosophical about his passage to being the lone patriarch. He noted that after his concerts, he always goes out to mix with other musicians, dancing to new music and dissolving any generation gap.
“I felt the shift when I was 40, because you start getting these signals from life,” he said. “You always know that you’re mortal, but when you come to 50, you start feeling something. When you turn 60, it’s there, and you can see … So at some point, my feeling with that is: do it all. Do everything you want to do.”