Cande y Paulo

Picture a desert stretching endlessly out across the horizon until being disrupted dramatically by the rise of the Andes. Barren but beautiful, like a scene out of Walter Salles’s Motorcycle Diaries. Now cut to over 12 million people captivated by two musicians delivering the most intimate of performances at an arts centre in a remote city nearby. A young woman in a red dress, face contorted with emotion, weaves the notes of her double bass around a breath-gentle voice, accompanied by barely-there jazz chords on an electric piano. The setting is San Juan Argentina, the Teatro del Bicentenario and they were performing Barro Tal Vez, an achingly intense but minimalist Argentinian song and it went viral on YouTube. So begins the almost unbelievable story of Cande Buasso and Paulo Carrizo.

The song was written by the Argentine poet and rock legend Luis Alberto Spinetta at the age of fourteen – it’s about the transmutation of the soul. This was the first time that Carrizo and Buasso had appeared together, partnered up by the municipal theatre of their hometown. The song was, in essence, their first date, revealing a musical chemistry so rare, the pair knew they had to act fast.

Fast forward two years, thousands of airmiles and a global record deal later and this most captivating of musical couples that we’ve seen in years present their debut album, recorded with the famed producer Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock) in LA. It is an exquisite collection of American, British and Argentine popular songs held together with a few common threads: Carrizo’s intensely musical arrangements, the pair’s deep sensitivity for transmitting the emotional heart of a song, and Buasso’s voice, mature beyond its years, but innocent enough to suggest the sense of someone singing to the world for the first time.

Like many of the great love affairs, the scenes of this unusual partnership were sewn long before the couple went to work on the Spinetta tribute. San Juan – a city of 120,000 nestled in the Tulúm valley with a stunning desert landscape – has no major record labels but is home to a thriving independent music scene: a giant family, Buasso calls it, preserving a kind of “village life”. Incredibly, the pair first met when she was fifteen, a restlessly creative child who had told her mother at four that she fully intended to be famous. Carrizo, a multi-instrumentalist and arranger equally at home in classical and rock music (his latest album with The Paulo Carrizo Trio combines flamenco and jazz) gave Buasso some piano lessons.

For several years his work as a keyboardist took him into the mainstream rock scene in Buenos Aires, before he returned to San Juan to find his former pupil, who is self-taught in opera and jazz, rapidly mastering a unique combination of vocals and double bass. The couple argue about pretty much everything, they laugh – apart from their music, which allows them an almost telepathic communication of notes and space. “It is always a fun process, a challenge,” Buasso says. “He says, can you do that? I say, yes, and it works – always spontaneous, and always a surprise.”

Unlike many new acts paired with legendary composers, Buasso and Carrizo arrived in LA with a solid idea of who they were as a duo. Back in San Juan, they’d done everything for themselves – press, touring, production – and met Klein with 20 tracks which he helped whittle down to ten, persuading them to take advantage of their interest in pop and rock in order to explore their hybrid sound. The new album features covers of songs by Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen and Cat Stevens as well as Argentine masters. The complex but subtle arrangements, all of them by Carrizo, were also fully formed when they arrived in LA.

“I was drawn to the honesty and lack of self-consciousness in Cande’s singing, and I felt that there was a mysterious minimalism in the musical language that Paulo and Cande were crafting for themselves that was immediately alluring to me and that felt very kindred to where I live musically” says Klein. “When we started to work together we had never met but everything fell into place very naturally. The three of us are all musical seekers and even though we needed an interpreter to talk to each other we immediately communicated very well musically.”

“Larry took what we originally had and amplified it while respecting the arrangements and sometimes simplifying them,” says Carrizo. “He helped bring everything to life, taking what we already had and building on it. But he maintained our concept of minimalism from day dot, brought oxygen into the music and helped us tell the story. Larry is an incredible architect and he could help us position things with an essence of magic.”

The ten songs on the new album are not your typical, easy-to-digest jazz covers of popular songs – we all know the kind. Buasso’s delicate bass, Carrizo’s subtle piano and the raindrop notes of the guitar reimagine Leonard Cohen’s final song Treaty in the most intimate of settings, underlining the classical purity of the original, which featured a string quartet.

Of their new version of Cat Steven’s haunting 1970 track Into White, Buasso says, “It was so well known, we didn’t try to renew it. Instead, we wanted to tell the story very simply, in a way only we could – to take something very famous and apply our own minimalism to it.” It is an upbeat take, with an exceptional lightness of touch, scattering little piano flourishes on a backdrop of brushed drums. Chet Baker’s I Fall In Love Too Easily features a less-is-more piano solo from Carrizo with another burst of clean jazz guitar.

Nothing quite illustrates the transformative power of Buasso and Carrizo’s approach than their cover of the Velvet Underground’s Waiting for My Man. The 1967 song, famously about scoring heroin, is rendered almost unrecognisable as a whimsical, seductive love song about a mysterious guy who always turns up late (“Here he goes, he’s all dressed in black”). They wanted to give it an entirely new meaning, explains Buasso, whose casual, delicate diction imbues the song with a kind of irony and humour Lou Reed wouldn’t have objected to.

The extent of the pair’s technical know-how is apparent in the stunning Preguntan De Donde Soy, a late Sixties track by the anarchist poet and Argentine folk hero Atahualpa Yupanqui. The song – whose title translates as “They ask me where I’m From” – reproaches the routine persecution and whitewashing of Argentina’s indigenous identity by the ruling class in the name of progress. The narrator is made to defend his origins to his fellow countrymen making him feel like an outsider.

Their new version of the song is completely different to the original, which was pure folk: half way through, the haunting ballad gives way to intricate polyrhythms and rippling keyboard runs, and Buasso’s voice takes flight, hinting at an operatic spectrum and the passion woven into the fabric of the original song. “We wanted to offer a new translation of the feeling of the original,” says Carrizo. “The lyric is really strong and powerful. In the part where Cande’s vocal takes off, she was just singing and she took flight…”

We also hear Gershwin’s Summertime as we’ve never heard it before. Carrizo bought a djembe drum from a musician in Paris, who showed him a complex African beat. He remembered the incantatory phrase all the way home to Argentina and it offered a new setting for a famous song he’d never intended to record.

It’s that curious alchemy, these spontaneous moments, which characterise the music of Cande Buasso and Paulo Carrizo on a debut which is both ambitious in its stylistic reach, and effortless in its emotional appeal.