Days before their August 16 show in Viña del Mar, the Chilean rock band Los Jaivas announced that the 45th anniversary tour of the Alturas de Macchu Picchu album would be suspended, owing to the storms buffeting Chile. A supercharged El Niño had dumped rain across the country’s south and center-north, sending mine waste gulping over containing walls and knocking out bridges from Coquimbo to Araucanía. Snow was blanketing towns in the Atacama, the driest desert on earth. The elements were keen to be heard.
And yet the interrupted tour was in its way a testament to the elemental. The album that Los Jaivas were celebrating, widely considered among the pinnacles of Chilean music, is a sonic journey through the Andean sublime. How to capture the feeling of majesty suffusing that city in the clouds? Andean tarka flutes and zampoña panflutes and long Mapuche trutruka horns offer a nod to the traditional instrumentation of the region. Birdsong brightens the show’s opening number. Some of the songs march solidly as stone, while others float like a condor; even in those more ethereal moments a thunderclap crescendo threatens around the corner.
Alturas de Macchu Picchu was inspired by a canto of the same name by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda had penned the ode in the 1940s upon a visit to the soaring Andean palace. Of his visit, he would later recount—in words intoned at the start of the Viña show—he felt “Chilean, Peruvian, American,” the latter in the continental sense. He also felt a kinship with the many hands that had built and maintained that jewel of the Incan crown. In Neruda’s poem, a gloomy narrator worries at the lot of common people, as
the child of seaports, or the dark captain of the plow,
or the rodent of the filthy streets:
they all despaired waiting for death, their short daily death:
and their grinding doom was each day
like a black cup from which they drank trembling
It is his encounter with the heights of Machu Picchu which pulls the narrator from his despair. But he is just as quickly thrust back into apoplexy, wondering after the wretched souls whose labor built and maintained the city, and who found themselves buried beneath its royal streets. In a thrilling final turn, the poet exhorts these poor wretches to rise with him: to assume the patrimony of this majestic peak as their own and be reborn amid the commanding heights. Through the music of Los Jaivas, the crowd in Viña del Mar’s courtly and recently remodeled municipal theater were welcome to come along too.
A Pan-American Album, Tour, and Moment
One imagines that Los Jaivas could understand the searching meanderings of the poem’s narrator when they were presented, in 1981, with the idea for this album by their Peruvian friend and fellow-traveler, Daniel Camino. They were at the time living in Paris in a self-imposed exile, an “endless tour” in the words of their pianist Claudio Parra. They had left Chile soon before Augusto Pinochet’s coup on September 11, 1973, and decamped first for Buenos Aires, until the arrest of keyboardist Eduardo Parra by the dictatorship pushed them further east. In Paris, they shared the city with a host of other seminal Chilean folk-rock groups affiliated with Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular (UP) movement. The martyrdom of other UP-affiliated musicians—most notably the beloved Victor Jara—by the Pinochet dictatorship suggested the wisdom of spending some time away.
It was Camino who suggested Los Jaivas make a Pan-American album based on Neruda’s work, and film its concert video atop Machu Picchu itself. The group recorded two tracks, “Aguila Sideral” (Astral Eagle) and “Sube a Nacer Conmigo Hermano” (Rise to be Born with Me, Brother) during a tour break in Cologne; a positive response encouraged them to record the rest of the album and to tour it through a South America gripped by military dictatorships. The 1981 tour began in Argentina before returning to Chile, the band’s first visit to the country since their departure eight years earlier. From northern Chile, they crossed the border to Peru and flew to Cusco, to ride the train to Aguas Calientes and bring their ensemble to the Incan cathedral, where they shot the video.
The concert video is astonishing and surreal. In it, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa narrates Neruda’s words and contextualizes the album. Claudio Parra plays a white piano, incongruous as a dolphin in that windswept Andean setting. And yet, even as they adopt an impish spirit and prance through the ruins, marching in formation and throwing daggers at the camera, the band treat the performance with a grave seriousness. It means something to walk those ancient stone promenades, and to perform the words of the departed Chilean bard. Arriving at the end of a pilgrimage nearly a decade in the making, they unfurl a robust ode to La Patria Grande: to the Incan kings and paupers, to Neruda, to a formless but felt Latin American tradition.
And yet, even as they adopt an impish spirit and prance through the ruins, marching in formation and throwing daggers at the camera, the band treat the performance with a grave seriousness
Footage from the concert documentary was layered behind the band as they played in their hometown of Viña del Mar, a show that also marked the group’s 63rd anniversary. Only one original band member, the pianist Claudio Parra, was playing that night. But newer members have become beloved in their own right, none more so than Juanita Parra, daughter of the band’s original drummer Gabriel, who replaced him after his death in a car accident in 1988. The changes to the ensemble have made for stylistic adjustments as well—where original lead singer Gato Alquinta had a dusty croon in the tradition of Atahualpa Yupanqui, new singer Carlos Cabezas Gonzalez has a crisp and barrel-chested power.
A delightful moment came early on, when Cabezas Gonzalez, opening “La Poderosa Muerte,” pulled out two flutes and played both simultaneously for an airy solo. Later in the show, the lights rose to find four bandmates each holding large panpipes. Pianist Claudio Parra, genteel and cheery, narrated the album’s history in a couple of asides. One felt how far the group had come watching him solo on his white piano in the Machu Picchu footage projected behind them, hair dark and curly and white shirt billowing, while onstage the now snowy-haired Parra kept pace. The loss of his bandmates has been for him also the loss of his brother and earliest friends; seeing him push onward, I felt both a yawning sadness and the tenderness of Los Jaivas’s living, evolving present.
History Repeats Itself
The long, strange trip of Los Jaivas began in a past less foreign than it might seem at first blush. Toxicologists examining the exhumed body of Pablo Neruda confirmed four years ago that the communist poet had most likely been poisoned while in the hospital soon after Pinochet’s coup. Two weeks before the concert, the last of Victor Jara’s killers was arrested. Now, the ghosts of the South America that Los Jaivas fled have returned politically, as well. The far-right president of Chile, Jose Antonio Kast, is part of a revanchist movement across the continent including Javier Milei in Argentina, Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia, Keiko Fujimori in Peru, and Daniel Noboa in Ecuador.
The long, strange trip of Los Jaivas began in a past less foreign than it might seem at first blush.
When I asked Claudio Parra what this tour might thus mean now, in a continent that seems to be playing the wrong sorts of hits passed down from the 70s and 80s, he remained at a bit of remove: “Alturas de Macchu Picchu is a classic of Chilean, and Latin American, music,” he said. “It’s slipped away a bit from a political program. The text isn’t exactly a political text, even though it speaks about the struggle, the suffering of many people to create what today we regard as something beautiful. So it emerges from that social spirit, that social struggle, and helps to vindicate that perspective on life.”
Inside the municipal theater, the group played two previously unreleased songs, cut in 1976 for an aborted movie about a hiker’s journey along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. They followed Alturas with hits from other albums, and the crowd rose and surged and sang these old hymns back to the new Jaivas. Juanita banged her drums. The flutes burgeoned and multiplied. We blew out candles on a cake celebrating the group’s 63rd. And, for one night anyway, the pan-American sublime lived on.
Sammy Feldblum is a geographer and critic. A PhD candidate at UCLA, his work focuses on water governance in Chile and New Mexico. He writes often about the long tail of the Cold War in Latin America.