Collection: Jorge López Ruiz

Jorge López Ruiz was born in La Plata in 1935, started on trumpet, switched to double bass, and was inside the Buenos Aires jazz scene by the mid-1950s, playing in Lalo Schifrin's quintet alongside a young Gato Barbieri from 1956 to 1957. That early association with Schifrin and Barbieri, two musicians who would both become internationally significant, placed him at the centre of Argentina's most ambitious jazz circle before he had made a record of his own. When he did, "B.A. Jazz" (1961), it was again with Barbieri as the lead horn. Astor Piazzolla, who was already redefining tango from within and had no particular obligation to advise jazz musicians, recommended that López Ruiz study harmony and composition with Alberto Ginastera, the most significant Argentine art music composer of the twentieth century. López Ruiz took the advice. The orchestral jazz suite "El Grito" (1967), which emerged from that study, demonstrated what he had absorbed. By 1967 he was musical director for CBS Argentina, working with Sandro and Leonardo Favio, the country's most commercially successful pop artists, without losing his jazz practice. The free jazz quartet he formed in the early 1970s with saxophonist Horacio "Chivo" Borraro produced "Bronca Buenos Aires" (1971), as politically charged as its title suggests: the military dictatorships that had removed elected presidents in 1962 and 1966 had created an atmosphere in which politically committed jazz was an act of some courage. He collaborated across his career with Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and João Gilberto, wrote music for over sixty films and forty plays, and taught at the Argentine Institute of Cinematography. He died in Buenos Aires on December 11, 2018, aged 83.