In his native Uruguay, Elbio Rodriguez Barilari is known as a columnist for the Montevideo edition of El Pais; in Chicago, where he now lives, he’s known as the editor of the Spanish-language weekly La Raza. But his career as a journalist grew out of his appetite for music. In 1977, jazz bassist Charles Mingus was booked for a concert in Montevideo, and Barilari, a 23-year-old composition student, was just scraping by at an auto parts store. “I went to the entertainment editor of El Pais and told him I was a jazz critic but didn’t have money to go to see Mingus,” Barilari recalls. “He told me to go to a press conference for the show, and if he liked my work, I could review the concert.” Barilari’s profile of Mingus impressed the editor, and within a few weeks the young man was contributing freelance reviews of not only jazz but folk and pop.
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Since then Barilari has built a distinguished reputation as a writer and editor, but only last year did Chicagoans get to hear his music. During a May 2001 concert at the Chicago Cultural Center, Dutch classical pianist Marcel Worms performed “Luna de Plata,” a piece he’d commissioned from Barilari that explored American blues through ever-shifting meters and polyrhythms. This week the Grant Park Orchestra will perform the world premiere of his latest composition, “Tango Stamps,” as part of an all-tango program. Works by Astor Piazzolla, perhaps the greatest tango artist of the late 20th century, dominate the bill, and Piazzolla’s sophisticated repertoire, which elevated tango to the level of symphony, was a key influence on Barilari’s piece for bandoneon and orchestra. “I feel overwhelmed,” he says. “Being part of this tribute to Piazzolla is wonderful, because he was and is one of the more powerful influences on my generation.”
His three years in that position left him disillusioned with government bureaucracy and eager for new challenges. “I took a look to my future and I took a look to my past, and it was the same,” he says. “It was just like a short story by Borges, a mirror.” While covering the Chicago Latino Film Festival for El Pais, he’d struck up a friendship with La Raza owner Luis Rossi, a fellow Uruguayan, and in 1997 he accepted Rossi’s standing offer to become an editor at the Chicago weekly. Within a year of his arrival he’d made an impact with “Arena Cultural,” which offers sharp coverage of the city’s vibrant Hispanic arts community, and this past January he joined the board of the Grant Park Orchestral Association.
