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The quality of Jaime Delgado Aparicio´s (Lima 1943-1983) music is not only born of his natural talent, but from many years of study (mostly in the US) and investigation. From his first award for his piano skills at fifteen, to his position as conductor of the (no less) Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Peru, Jaime Delgado Aparicio´s career is one of no equal in Peru´s music history. We are talking about heavyweight, probably the most talented jazz musician in Peru, and maybe Southamerica. It is not frequent that an individual leaves a permanent mark in the musical history of a country. In Peru, in the 60' s and 70' s, Jaime Delgado Aparicio, a pianist and composer, promoted and exposed all different styles of jazz to all social levels, helping many young students and professional musicians to understand this musical language.
The soundtrack for "El Embajador y yo" was written in 1966 by Jaime Delgado Aparicio. The movie itself is worth watching, some sort of crossroads between James Bond´s films, Blake Edwards´ The Party, and Get Smart! But it´s the score what brought us here. The music in this rare action-comedy film combines, in an extraordinaire way, Jazz with different styles that were hip in the mid 60s, in a very groovy way. A genious score, very creative arrangements, and brilliant playing by an orchestra of sometimes over fifty musicians. Fourty years later Vampisoul offers you the complete soundtrack of "El Embajador y Yo", what many consider JDA´s masterpiece, with the addition of five recordings by the Jaime Aparicio Jazz Trio made in Lima, Peru, around 1964. Both on the CD and the LP you can find extensive liner notes, and a reproduction of the movie poster.
Soundtracks have been gaining more and more importance in movie productions, and one could now say that whether or not a film shines, and in some cases, whether it is a success or failure, depends a great deal on the quality of its soundtrack. This was clear to Kiko Ledgard (Lima, 1918 - 1995) producer of El Embajador y Yo, when he invited a young Jaime Delgado Aparicio to compose the soundtrack. His choice could not have been more accurate nor the results more brilliant. He had been listening to the analogue tapes of those compositions, only some of which were used in the movie, when he decided that he couldn’t pass up the opportunity of getting all of the songs on the soundtrack together and putting them on a record.
Kiko Ledgard was the host of such Peruvian television shows as the game show Haga Negocio con Kiko and music programs like Casino, Hit de la Noche, Cancionísima and Villa Twist –a daily children’s program- . With the political changes of the early seventies, and government run Peruvian television, the system of production entered a crisis. Kiko emigrated to Spain at the age of 50 with 11 children behind him. His singular and uninhibited style caught the attention of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, who he managed to sell his idea of a new program based on Haga Negocio con Kiko to–originally fifteen minutes long-. TVE (Spanish Television) included it in it’s lineup at a stellar hour…Un, Dos, Tres, Responda Otra Vez broke the barriers. It was a question and answer game show with models in miniskirts (Victoria Abril, perhaps?) where tons of money was up for grabs and everyday people participated by abandoning their shame and setting an example of what it means to have a good sense of humor…all of this driven by the cunning and spontaneity of the presenter.
In El Embajador y Yo (1966), with a cast including Saby Kamalich, Patricia Aspíllaga, Orlando Sacha, Vlado Radovich, Blanca Rowlands, Manuel Delorio, Enrique Victoria, Antonio Salim, Carlos Ego Aguirre, Germán Vegas Garay and the Spanish actor “with more years in theatre than alive” Juan Bautista Font; Kiko Ledgard played a double role, that of the ambassador: dynamic, athletic, multilingual and womanizing, and the polar opposite: a modest television extra, clumsy, shy and “unilingual”, who is only attractive to others because of his extraordinary physical attributes. Although this light action-comedy was a huge success, the record release was limited (Decibel LPD-1121). Today, almost 40 years later, VampiSoul is putting this music back in circulation, with the addition of five recordings by the Jaime Delgado Aparicio Trio made in Lima around 1964. The quality of Delgado Aparicio’s (Lima, 1943 - 1983) music is not only born of his natural talent, he also dedicated years to its study and investigation. At the age of fifteen he won an interscholastic piano contest, shortly after he traveled to the U.S. and received a diploma in music in 1961 from California’s Westlake College of Music. Upon his return, he began his career as a jazz pianist performing recitals and concerts in the Teatro Segura, the ICPNA and the Sala Alzedo. He returned to the United States in 1962 to begin advanced studies in composition, conducting and piano at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. The following year he participated in jazz festivals in Montevideo and Buenos Aires. After returning to Lima he performed new concerts and was on television. The jam sessions he had in 1964 at the Astoria Jazz Club under the name Jaime Delgado Aparicio Trio, alongside double bassist Juan Anges Russo (La Plata, 1934) and drummer Kalle Englund (Stockholm, 1942) are still remembered. Married to Maria Teresa Cultrera in 1965, he traveled to Italy and once again to the United States, composing music for various movies. He represented Peru in the Salerno International Jazz Festival in Italy and after returning to Lima became conductor of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, debuting one of his best pieces, the Symphonic Suite-Jazz Evocación, at the Teatro Municipal. He founded the Orquesta Contemporánea, composed of brilliant musicians such as Nilo Espinosa, Oscar Stagnaro, Rafael Purizaga, Eulogio Molina, Germán Neciosup Acuña, guitarist Victor Salazar, keyboardist Miguel Figuerosa, percussionist Coco Lagos and drummer José Luis Cruz (the last three being members of Black Sugar), obtaining a quality that made them unique to the genre in South America. The concert they gave at the Teatro Municipal on March 27, 1976, released that same year on LP by Sono Radio (SE - 9557) with Delgado Aparicio as artistic director, is unforgettable.
The music composed for El Embajador y Yo combines jazz with popular rhythms from the seventies in an extraordinary way. From the beginning, during the credits and Rafael Seminario’s cartoons, you hear the creativity of composition and the brilliance of it’s execution by a fifty plus piece orchestra performing the movie’s theme song. Two surf tunes appear on this album: Sexy Surf and El surf del Embajador. The scenes that inspired this last song caused a huge stir when they were filmed in the Sky Room of the Hotel Crillón due to the presence -in bathing suites- of the members of a dangerous gang involved in controlling the drug market: none other than Gladys Arista (the first Miss Playa), Mannie Rey (the Waikiki Club of Miraflores surf tournament champion), Anita Bracamonte, Rubeth Steck, Edith Benner and Violeta Sevillano –all sexy girls from Peruvian television, models and go-go dancers who were friends of Kiko Ledgard’s from the program Cancionísima. |
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