10 years without Juan Carlos Calderón, the hidden genius of Spanish pop who conquered the world

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"After playing Bach, what can we do? The best thing is that we introduce ourselves."

addresses the camera after playing on the piano, in front of a small orchestra, the Fantasy on a prelude by the German composer.

It is 1976 and the musician from Santander stars in an installment of La hora de..., one of the musical programs coined by Valerio Lazarov for Televisión Española.

He is a star of his own.

He has signed

, the song by

that came second in Eurovision in 1973 and became an unprecedented worldwide hit, and in 1975 he returned to the competition with

, performed by Sergio and Estíbaliz.

He has arranged, produced and written records and songs for

.

's

a musical shape

.

He has contributed to refreshing the sound of national pop with a virtuosity cultivated in jazz, a genre of which he is one of the pioneers in Spain.

However, he knows that the popular faces are others, the artists who put the voice and face to his creations;

therefore it is best to introduce yourself.

Many more successes will come later.

He will make several records with small and large orchestras despised by jazz purists, he will cross the pond, work with the king of easy listening and industry magnate Herb Alpert, he will be one of the reference producers of Latin music and will shape the sound and the repertoire of its biggest star, the Sun of Mexico, Micky,

-in whose Netflix series he has not been missing as a character-.

But the public's memory is fragile, and therefore it is not surprising that the death of Juan Carlos Calderón ten years ago went virtually unnoticed.

Calderón passed away at dawn from November 25 to 26, 2012. Artur Mas had just reaped the first failure of unleashed sovereignism at the polls and was grabbing the headlines.

But time has passed and the vindication that Calderón deserves has not taken place.

Perhaps a pending

partly explains the void around his figure.

In any case, this tenth anniversary is a good opportunity to gather the testimony of some who knew him and worked with him, and incidentally fix some tesserae of the battered history of Spanish popular music, full of cracks and gaps.

DYNAMIC DUO

«We love being able to say that Juan Carlos Calderón started this with some arrangements for the Dúo Dinámico», explains Ramón Arcusa.

He and his partner Manolo de la Calva met Calderón in 1963, after a performance in Laredo.

«Afterwards we went to have a drink in a pub where he played the piano.

They introduced us and we hit it off.

Later we were regulars at Bourbon Street, a jazz club on Diego de León street, where Juan Carlos entertained the evening with his group and where we drank the last drink of the Madrid night.

I liked his style and one day in that same place I suggested that he make some arrangements for our next album.

I'm talking about 1965. He confessed to me, shy as he was, that he had never made an arrangement for a recording: I encouraged him and in the end he gladly agreed.

in Barcelona for their originality when we rehearsed them.

I also proposed to Leon Klimovsky, the director of a film we were shooting at the time,

, who did the music for said film.

So it was.

We didn't do anything else together until the Eurovision Song Contest, in 1968, when Juan Carlos transported the arrangement that Bert Kaempfert had made for

in a version by Joan Manuel Serrat and in the right key for Massiel.

And well, we won the festival with everyone's contribution.

MASSIEL

The story is well known: a few days before the contest, Serrat expressed his willingness to interpret part of the song written by Arcusa and De la Calva in Catalan.

Televisión Española refused, and the one chosen to replace him was a colleague from Zafiro, his record label.

A promising young woman who had made herself known the previous year singing

, by Luis Eduardo Aute.

«I did not find out anything, I was in Mexico and, when I arrived, the arrangement was already made.

But it makes sense that Juan Carlos adapted it, because he made my records then and went on tour with me, so he knew my tone of voice perfectly, "says Massiel.

She and Aute had met Calderón the previous year at one of his performances at Bourbon or Whiskey Jazz, the sister venue on Calle Marqués de Villamagna.

«He was a very handsome boy, with green eyes, straight hair, from a good family in Santander.

A charm.

.

He knew a lot of music, he was like a clueless wise man.

Eduardo insisted that he make the arrangements for the Rosas en el mar EP.

From there we started working together.

We went to record several times in studios in Milan and London and we wrote many songs together.

AGES

In 1969, Zafiro received a tape recorded at the Radio Popular station in Bilbao by a local group that fell into the hands of Calderón.

“Something must have caught his attention, because he liked him enough to come and meet them.

The rest is history»: the history of Mocedades.

Carlos Zubiaga tells it from Bilbao, who joined the group in 1973, on the eve of Eurovision, and who today makes up El Consorcio with Amaya, Estíbaliz and Iñaki Uranga.

According to Zubiaga, Calderón honed his facet as a songwriter with Mocedades.

«He Until then

and was beginning to be a recognized arranger, but when he began working with Mocedades he had not yet composed important songs.

I believe that living with the group and especially the figure of Amaya were fundamental for him.

We made ten albums together in Zafiro, and in each of them there was at least one hit:

,

... Songs that have overcome time and that we continue to sing».

This Saturday, El Consorcio performs at the Casyc Theater in Santander, Calderón's hometown.

LUIS GOMEZ-SCHOOL

In addition to shining in Eurovision,

, and one of the few songs in Spanish to reach the top 10 of the Billboard list in the United States.

Years later, when Calderón moves to Los Angeles, this song will be an unbeatable "visiting card" for him, says Luis Gómez-Escolar, the most prolific of Spanish lyricists and a regular collaborator of the composer.

They met in the 70s, when Luis was part of the Aguaviva group.

He and his partner Honorio Herrero wrote the song

para Mocedades, and shortly after Calderón produced the first album by Cecilia, then a couple of Gómez-Escolar.

«That album was first recorded by Julio Seijas and Cecilia alone, with their two guitars and the voice, and then Juan Carlos entered the studio to record the rest of the orchestra.

It was the first time that something like this was done in Spain ».

Later, when Calderón had already embarked on the American adventure, they began to collaborate regularly.

«He was tackling very important projects, with many songs and with many artists, and I helped him with the lyrics.

He would call me and tell me, 'Micky has asked me for a song', and then

, I would record it with a system that I had installed at home and with that I would write the lyrics».

It was the time when a handful of Spanish professionals, figures such as Calderón, Rafael Pérez Botija or Arcusa himself as producer of Julio Iglesias, reigned in Latin music studios.

SAN BASIL DOVE

On November 10, 2010 in Las Vegas, Paloma San Basilio presented Juan Carlos Calderón with a

for his entire career, the same one she had received the previous year.

"I felt very proud, because I really admired him a lot and I think it was a very deserved recognition," she recalls.

The singer made two of her most important albums with him,

(1985, whose homonymous song also went to Eurovision) and

(1986), with hits such as Cariño mío or brilliant and premonitory rarities such as

(“Yesterday my computer fell in love with me", "I saw myself naked in front of him", "I programmed a reason for him and he answered me love").

"He was a great teller of women's stories, sometimes very advanced for his time," says San Basilio.

And very perfectionist.

He sometimes called me at three in the morning to exchange a word.

, he always thought that things could be done better.

He had a very special way of composing, an enormous harmonic richness and that point close to jazz that meant that the harmonies were never conventional.

He was exquisite choosing the musicians.

And, of course, a magician with the piano.

He has been one of the great Spanish musicians of the last decades of the 20th century ».

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

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• Bilbao

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