Origins. The shampoo-seller's flute

To turn back the clock and go in search of your origins, you have to delve into the mists of time, where cause and effect work alongside factors like logic and the forces of nature. To uncover the reasons why Jorge Pardo chose to carve out a career in music requires a great effort, and the truth can be elusive: "to ascertain the truth of the matter, you have to travel back in time, and the sensations can be confusing." What's clear is that he was "a born musician", by which he means "I'm drawn to music by the sheer pleasure it gives me, it's a natural attraction." Back then, when he was barely fifteen or sixteen years old, his intentions weren't so clear, but "I received a lot of professional encouragement". Even at that age, bordering on childhood, "I started getting hired by some places, and so the two things started working in parallel: you love music and on top of that you can earn a crust. That's the magic formula which made me opt for a musical career."

Málaga, Seventies

The choice of instrument was the work of the same kind of forces. Jorge Pardo comments that, "like your regular Spaniard, my first instrument was a guitar I got for Christmas. It's a familiar tale." And the explanation for the shift from six strings to the flute and saxophone lies in a search for the atypical: "I guess it was just that - a few of us used to get together to play the guitar, so I started thinking about other instruments. I mean why always the guitar?"

The story of how Jorge Pardo got his first flute is a tale worth telling: "I was a student back then, and I worked all summer as a door-to-door salesman selling baskets of soap, hand cream, cheap shampoo, at twenty cents a shot, with glycerin soap. I still remember to this day. And with the money I saved that summer I bought my first flute".

And from the flute... to the sax. "The sax was a career decision, almost obligatory, because as a flautist you couldn't make ends meet. And I knew that everyone who played flute and worked in different jazz groups or whatever, used to juggle the flute with the sax." So he set to work "with the same enthusiasm".

As for the keys to the language of music, he learned as much from the academic route as he did in the street: "It was a fusion, a mixture, a cross between the two, just like everything else has been. There was a deliberate seeking of academic knowledge on my part, I said to myself 'I want to learn to do it properly right from the start', but the truth is academic teaching didn't show me anything I really wanted to learn. In the street I learnt what I wanted to learn, but I never lost sight of how more orthodox music is played or composed, even if I was a little iconoclastic in that sense".

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