“Les Luthiers were a Catalan invention in Argentina”

How were Les Luthiers born?

They were born now… oh my god! Fifty years. Buenos Aires was a prosperous and great cosmopolis, which, since World War II, welcomed exiles from all over the planet with their cultures and folklore…

Did some sardana sneak into the miscegenation?

My mother was Jewish of Sephardic Turkish origin and my father, Murcian; but in the engineering polyphonic choir we do meet a son of Catalans: Gerardo Masana, who became the soul of that group of misfit musicians addicted to jokes.

Why were they named Les Luthiers?

One day Gerardo appeared with the script for an opera from his grandfather’s trunk, Il figlio del pirata, and asked for volunteer interpreters.

And they created crazy instruments?

Because we wanted to enjoy our addiction to humor and our musical training creating instruments with cans, hoses, tubes, balloons… The sound box of our tin violin is a can of ham… It was logical that we were “luthiers”.

And his seat lyre?

O lirodoro: a lyre made from a toilet seat and attached mandolin headstock.

Didn’t they accuse you of being elitist?

We had different levels of demand for each public, but with a vocation to connect with everyone. Our Tango del plumber, for example, dedicated to Gardel…

Is the plumber the plumber?

Yes, in Argentine. We parody the movie Cuesta abajo: “The plumber went to work early / And he saw the pipe that he was losing”…

“…and welded it.”

He did not “solder” it. Lo sol (and here you have to sing a sol: the note sol) dó (ends with a do). “Weld it”… Did you see?

“When I left Santiago / all the way I cried / I cried because I had left…”.

…“All the way wet”. Thus we incorporate another note –now the do– to the joke.

“Oh sun, oh sun / burning and burning / Oh sun that cooks us / Oh sun…”

…Oh G flat! (and she has to sing it).

Is sol-o bossa yours and no longer bossa nostra?

G-o we enjoyed ourselves like pigs, because to finish off like this with a G flat you had to make the whole melody pass through there…

That effort makes them classics.

In Teresa and the Bear there are certain levels of humor that very few, by the way, catch.

Teresa and the bear and Pedro and the wolf?

Instead of classical orchestra instruments such as Prokofiev, we put our own to describe the traumatic metamorphosis he undergoes when he sees himself transformed into a beautiful prince… a mollusk.

Poor mussel: so happy on his rock.

But few recognize the four-chord quote from Skriabin’s The Metamorphosis.

Are musical appointments not common?

But this is twelve-tone. Not everyone is entertained listening to it.

Let’s see if you are encouraged now with reggaeton: too easy to parody?

One day I was playing with a harmonic dall’estro by Vivaldi and I realized that…I was actually playing an Argentine carnavalito! Bach was already doing it in his quadrivet, mixing fragments of works that coincided.

Nation Johann Sebastian Mastropiero?

Earlier in The Return of Carlitos (Gardel) we fooled everyone with a final double rhyme, because our Gardel does not return to Buenos Aires but to… Paris, which is more fun.

Looking at Argentine inflation, yes.

What a mess! And its causes come from afar. Then we already had the time of the Latin American left, tough to peel.

With poor results.

Venezuela, yes, Cuba… Argentina, anyway.

Meanwhile, Quilapayún had little waist for irony and they were always on strike.

We created a revolutionary cantata in which there were six of us from a “united people” at the beginning, but we started fighting and each one set up their own party…

That is pure news in this country!

In the end, division after division, the six of us sang separately: in six choruses of one.

Do we see Argentina worse than it is?

To sigh with relief. The Argentines run every time they receive their salary to spend it before everything doubles.

And Les Luthiers never fought?

When Masana died, we all had to go to the psychoanalyst…

kidding?

It’s true. We Luthiers spent 17 years in “institutional psychotherapy” to avoid fighting and dissolving, and you can see that it worked.

I thought he was joking again.

Now I will summarize the successes of my entire life with an aphorism…

I hear you.

If you want to know, ché, buy the book.

Wow!!!

“If you choose your job correctly, you will never have to work again in your life” and I was correct when I was Les Luthiers: I am 81 years old and I am still walking”.