“I’m a third-generation Italian-Argentine – my ancestors came from Benevento.” That was Gato Barbieri’s answer when, in 2005, we asked him about his Italian roots and, more broadly, about his relationship with Italy – the subject of this article, written ten years after the death of the great saxophonist on April 2, 2016. When Leandro Barbieri arrived in Italy – nicknamed Gato by Italians themselves because, as he once explained, “I used to play in two places every night and would slip through the streets with my saxophone to get from one gig to the other” – he was already approaching thirty. Born in Rosario on November 28, 1932, in one of Argentina’s most Italian cities together with Córdoba, and four years younger than Ernesto Che Guevara, who happened to be his neighbour, Barbieri spent years with his birth date variously reported as 1933 or 1935. What had El Gato […]
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