Afropop Worldwide

Actor and musician Jorge Drexler is one of Uruguay’s most innovative creators. Perhaps best known for the 2005 song “Al Otro Lado del Río” the Oscar-winning song from the film The Motorcycle Diaries, Drexler has released 16 albums spanning pop, dance, folklore and probing singer/songwriter musical poetry. Drexler has long lived in Spain, but for his current album, Taracá, he returned to Uruguay and recorded there for the first time in 20 years. That’s fitting, as the album marks a deep exploration of the Afro-Uruguayan percussion tradition, candombe.

Afropop’s Banning Eyre reached Drexler by Zoom at his home in Spain to talk about the album, and learn more about this unique Afro-diasporic tradition. Here’s their conversation.

Banning Eyre: Jorge, thanks for talking with me.

Jorge Drexler: It's a pleasure to meet you. I read about you.

Did you? Well, then you probably know we've had this radio program for a long time.

For African music, yes.

Exactly. Afropop Worldwide. You know, I was once in Montevideo very briefly. I had a gig lecturing about Brazilian music on a ship and the trip ended there. But it was a holiday and there was nothing happening. I walked the empty streets for a day. I would have loved to catch a candombe, but it wasn’t happening. We have covered candombe music in the past, though, so I'm somewhat familiar with the roots of this project.

Sundays are the day of the candombe. It's a pity, you didn't get there on a Sunday.

I did meet a couple of Uruguayans on the ship from and learned a few things about it. They were big fans of yours, by the way. Anyway, we're going to talk about this album, which I just love.

Oh, thank you. Happy to hear that.

I must confess that I haven't followed your career closely, but I have read that with your 2014 album Bilar and La Cueva, you shifted more towards rhythmic, dance-oriented music. And this album seems to move even further in that direction. Tell me about what inspired this.

Actually, in my career, I started in the Uruguay of the early ‘90s, and it was very important for you to be in a band, to have a band and to be able to move the audience. So I wasn't in touch with a singer-songwriter entourage in the ‘90s, not until I came to Spain in 1995, and everything was about singer-songwriters. Before that, I didn't realize I could do a show with only voice and guitar. Then I had this period of more singer-songwriter-oriented records because I enjoyed very much the minimalism. But then I came back to the band. So it's not that I did it for the first time. My first two records in Uruguay are very orchestrated. And I returned to that for the first time in 1999 in a record called Frontera. That's when my son was born. I got this feeling that I had already been living in Spain for five years. My son was born in Spain. And I had this feeling that I had to reconnect with Uruguay in 1999.

I see. So this stylistic shift was more of a return than a new path.

Yes. And it happened the same again with this record in 2025, because my father died in 2024. I see a relationship between these two changes inside the family. I mean, I was only a son, and then I became a son and a father. And two years ago, my mother passed away a few years before. Two years ago, I became only a father, no longer a son. On both occasions, my instinctive reflex was to go back to Uruguay and record there. I don't know. I think it could be interpreted psychologically, you know?

But it wasn't something conscious. I also turned 60 years old in 2024. And I realized I had spent half of my life in in Spain—30 years in Spain, and 30 in Uruguay. So something inside me said, “You have to reconnect; you have to balance.” The record starts saying, “Your GPS is saying that you are drifting away.” It speaks about a relationship between two people in a couple. But I realized that I was also talking to myself. I realized that it was right before I became too far away to come back to Uruguay. I realized I wanted to go back.

I never stopped playing Uruguayan music. Never. My first song on the first record is a candombe called “Bienvenida.” The first time I went into a recording studio, I went to record candombe. I loved candombe, but I had never decided to actually have that pattern all through a record.

Until this one, Taracá.

Say, for people who are going to read this interview who may not know, how would you describe candombe?

Candombe is the Afro-Uruguayan rhythm, the main Afro-Uruguayan rhythm. You will also find milonga and tango, which originated in Uruguay, Argentina and the southern part of Brazil. Both milonga and tango. But candombe is played only in the Uruguayan African community, and it's a marvelous, intricate, complicated polyrhythmic experience because it's lived, as happens many times with African music everywhere, as you would know better than me. I will start saying that I'm not a candombe. I'm not a specialist in candombe. I would prefer to have the people that actually play it every day and live it every day answering this question, but here we are, so I won't run away from...

That’s fine. You don’t have to be an authority, just give people a sense of it.

Well first, the world of candombe is very peculiar. You have to be really respectful to get into it. It’s like many drum cultures, you know; you have to ask before you touch the drum. So candombe is a polyrhythmic, experience-based, African music. It happens with three different drums of different sizes, tambor chico, tambor repique, and tambor piano. Chico is the smallest, repique is intermediate, and piano is the low one, the big one. The chico has a fixed figure, “taracá, taracá, taracá.” That’s where the onomatopoeic name of the record comes from. So it’s one beat with the hand and two beats with the stick.

Ah. So that’s what Taracá refers to. I was going to ask.

Yes. Taracá is one possible onomatopoeia for the sound that the tambor chico makes. The chico is a fixed figure, “taracá, taracá, taracá.” But the peculiar thing that the strongest beat, the one with the hand, is not in the first beat of the bar. So it's ta-ra-cá. It always feels upwards. It's the drum that it's in charge of showing the grid, but it doesn't touch the grid. It's in the middle of it. It's a beautiful spiritual concept for me, because it's a very humble drum. It's a drum of service. The other drums are more solistic. They improvise, and they call, and they get to play more. But the chico drum is very difficult to play, because you have to be displaced from the main beat. I'm sure you’ve heard a lot of things that work that way in Africa.

Absolutely. That’s fascinating. I can think of various 6/8 triplet rhythms. In Madagascar the emphasis is on the second partial. It kind of takes you off the main beat.

But this is not 6/8; this is 4/4. So when you walk alongside 40 candombe drums, all the different drums are intertwined. If you get close to a group of chicos, you feel the one of the bar in one place, and then you move one step to the right, it changes. So that produces, for me, a paradox. That's my impression. I mean, you can talk to people who know better, but for me it produces like this Taoistic Zen concept, like a koan. It produces a rhythmic paradox when you hear it. It takes you out of your reason and puts you in the present.

Also, taracá means estar a ka, “to be here.” It’s another onomatopoeia that I found. So I added “to be here and now,” because when I think the chico drum, it propels you into the present. It puts you in a meditative state of mind. It's hypnotic. So the candombe, it’s performed in the street, and it's only drums. It's like a river of sound; it moves; it walks; it's a parade that walks, and it doesn't have singing over it.

No singing. Really?

No singing over the drums. It's very dramatic and serious. It's very concentrated. I mean, sometimes they might say, “Ah! Oh!.”

But there aren’t lyrics. It’s not like samba.

No lyrics. I mean you have candombe songs like there are samba songs. This is the same, but with candombe and samba, every rhythm is evolving. I think samba went through this stage also where it was only played in the Black community, only with drums. Then it moved to the whole society with songwriting, and you started having samba songs that became really popular with Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque and every everyone in Brazil. There have been candombe songs since the early ‘60s, but somehow it also remained played in the street in a very traditional way. Every Sunday, people will get together with 40 drums. They would hit it with a with a fire, and they would walk for 10 blocks playing, playing, really hurting their hands sometimes because you become unconscious when you play. It’s a trance; it's a trance.

You were talking about the rhythmic displacement creating a kind of disorientation. I think a lot of trance music is exactly that. It disorients you with your sense of where the one is, and so you go into a different state. In Zimbabwe, for example, mbira music is like that. It's very hard for an outsider to understand where the one is because you're hearing 4/4 and 6/8 at the same time. You can become disoriented, and that leads to trance, even spirit possession. It's a pan-African phenomenon.

I knew you know about this more than I do.

Well, I know what I know, but believe me, there’s a lot I don’t know.

It's very interesting the way this African culture is preserved in Uruguay. I once had a project with the BBC in Argentina and I've been to Brazil. The difference is so striking because Afro-Brazilian culture is so visible and so much a part of national identity. Everybody knows about it. Whereas in Argentina, the black population is almost invisible and there's no sense of an Afro-Argentinean identity. We did a show about tango with Robert Farris Johnson where he makes the argument that tango evolved from African music. I met people, tangeros there, who vigorously denied this, saying that this is not true, this is propaganda. So it's interesting to me that Uruguay, right in between those two extremes, has this very well preserved, even evolved, African tradition. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Well, there are there are many hypotheses as to why the Argentinian black community didn't survive. I think Africans were more scattered there, so they got blended. But also—I don't know if it's true or not—Blacks were especially sent to one of the hardest wars in South American history, the triple alliance against Paraguay. And they were put in the front. So they were sent to basically like… I don't know how to say that in English.

Fodder.

Yes, to be dead first, because they wanted somehow to get rid of them. I don't know if that's true, but I heard that many, many times. And so the fact is that if you're walking in in Buenos Aires and you see an African person and he's speaking with the the Rio de la Plata accent, he's Uruguayan. No doubt about that. There is no no such thing as a strong African tradition in Argentina.

But tango? I can also understand what they say, because tango obviously is an African word with the “ng” sound in the middle. But it went through many changes. It might have originated when the African population in Argentina was already persistent, because there are stories about the first verse improvisers who were Africans in Argentina. But it became more European later, because it has the bandoneon, which comes from Germany. It can sound very Italian sometimes, or like Spanish paso doble, “raam, pam, pam, raam, pam pam.” And then Astor Piazzolla brought back into it the “three, three, two. pam pam pam, pam pam pam, pam pam.” By the way, they say that Piazzolla took that because he used to live next to a Klezmer community, next to a Jewish center that would play Klezmer music when he grew up in New York. He would usually go to play with the Jewish neighbors and they would play and he brought the 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2 into the tango, where it wasn't there before. It was in the milonga; the milonga is 3-3-2. I have a TED talk about that, if you like. It's translated to English. I did it in Ted Vancouver a few years ago.

Excellent. I’ll check that out. You clearly know a lot more about tango than I do! So thanks for that. Coming back to Uruguay, it sounds like candombe is a very coherent community, and very visible with street parades that everyone sees. It sounds a little like New Orleans in that way.

It took over the whole city and the whole country. When I started going to the Tambores to see the Candombe in the neighborhoods, there were only two main bands. They're called Cuerda de Candombe. It's like two tribes, actually, and they had two different ways of playing, Ancina and Cuareim. There were only these two, and they would come out only five or six days a year on special days. But then it evolved and they started playing every Sunday. And then it started spreading through all the neighborhoods, because also, the African population was moved to different places in a very bad situation.

During the dictatorship, they were seen as a problem, so they separated them. They spread them out. But what they did is they spread the candombe all around the city. So now every neighborhood in Montevideo has at least one or two candombe troupes. So now the whole city is in trance on Sunday. At one point on Sunday morning, everywhere in the city, you will hear the candombe in the afternoon or the morning. You walk in the streets and you hear one Cuerda 200 meters away, another one 100 meters away, one kilometer away. And so you walk between groups of people. You have to experience this. I'll take you there if you come one Sunday.

It's a deal. I know you’re running out of time, and we’re just getting started. We will have to continue this conversation in the future.

Definitely.

But let me ask a little more about the album. I love the use of space in these songs. There's so much openness in the arrangements. Can you tell me a little bit about how you put songs together, and how you arranged for this album.

I live in Madrid, so I started writing in Madrid. Then I got together with a group of very young producers. I'm 61 now, and the youngest one was 21 when we started producing it. He was a Uruguayan trap and hip-hop producer. I had another producer in Madrid, Lucas Piedra Cueva, who is Uruguayan too, and he knew what I was talking about, so we started working together on the first drafts.

And then I went to Puerto Rico, and I started working with two Puerto Rican producers that work with Young Mico, a very young Puerto Rican artist that comes from the world of trap and reggaeton. And they came with me to Uruguay. They had never seen candombe, so I wanted them to have an external view of candombe. Because I don't do traditional candombe, I do candombe song. I'm a songwriter, so I use candombe as a basic rhythm inside a song. So I wanted it not to work the way it works in the street, which is like a constant river of sound that evolves, always changing and always the same. I wanted it to be a good rhythmic root for a song, so we had to enhance the left hand of the tambor piano that gives the beat. [sings the low, tambor piano beat] So we placed a microphone so we could have a stronger sound than the one that you will hear on the street. And we had more tambor chicos than they have on the streets.

We have one song that's called “Ante la duda baila (When in doubt, dance).” In the bridge, in the middle, you will hear a street recording. There's also dog barking, but you will hear very clearly the tambor chico pattern.

Yes. I noticed that.

It’s very strong. That's the way they play in the street. And that's my favorite Cuerda de Tambor. It's a very old one called La Domingera.

At the beginning of that song, you're playing that taracá figure on the guitar, right? It's almost like an ostinato.

No. That's another song. That's “El Tambur Chico” where I play the chico pattern on the guitar. It's a song dedicated to the tambor chico.

Well, Jorge, thanks for this. Such a pleasure, and we must talk more in the future.

I'd love to speak more. Hopefully Banning, the next time I’m in New York, we can meet in person.

I would love that too. All the best launching this great album.

Thank you.