By PAUL DESENNE
Everything has changed in 50 years, the memories of ten decades ago are confused with the painted scenes of Greek ceramics and the formidable murals of the Chauvet cave. Then there was a palpable reality, not a virtual one, a situation that allowed magical apparitions, vetoed by the plundering tax, trivializing the Internet, unifying all places on earth, the final sepulcher of human culture and its capricious magic, which is the daughter of of differences and distances.
I remember the night of April 18, 1973 in the clarity of its full moon, Wednesday of Holy Week in Chichiriviche, Falcón state, land of intact prehistory. Half a century has passed and the gentle waves still sound on the little beach where I walk, alone and barefoot, observing the moonlight in the deep sand. I see them from afar, sitting on top of a fence that runs to my left along the beach, cutting off the sea wind: they are two boys, or rather, a slightly older boy in overalls, shirtless, with a guitar, the human of the pair, and a being from another world, a tiny faun with a gigantic head, with his recorder, playing the moon. Imagine the scene on a Greek vase, from that world we came, in that world Music lived.
The breeze brings me fragments of loose, delicious, spontaneous notes and rhythms; something similar to what we 13-year-olds like, in that today of 1973; something of blues, perhaps, also something indescribable between rock and “progressive music”, mixed fantasy between Baroque and Pop… but… here, on this beach? I hallucinate. I get close; the faun, small and agile with his flute, releases threads of pearly notes in the delicious Caribbean breeze, over a swing of basses and pulsating chords, perfectly synchronized… I am close to the apparition: I never imagined seeing music of such a level, played by pure pleasure in front of the sea, with no other spectators than the moon and the waves, with such complicity between the instruments, so fresh and virtuous. (The world was magical and perfect).
The faun has the body of a child but the large head of a lord with surprising eyebrows, which thick glasses cannot hide; The older one smiles while he plays his guitar, tucked into his long hair, maintaining the discipline of accompaniment with a certain seriousness, as if he had invoked in the beach and hippie priesthood the appearance of a mythological being… his little brother!
In the first pause I interview them; my obsession as a child was to have a musical ensemble, despite my very short training and my scant talent. This encounter transforms my life: without knowing it or expecting it, I run into the musicians who are going to guide the rest of my existence, on that beach in Falcón. Perched high on the palisade, as if they lived there, light as the wind, unreachable. I admire them for a while. They are brothers: Juan Andrés, 16, and Juan Francisco Sans, “Pico”, the faun, is my age; both from the Humboldt College, students from the Juan Manuel Olivares music school, are residents of Las Palmas, in Caracas, and live in the tiniest and most magical house in the entire city, on a corner of Cumaná street: Quinta Mis Chongos , a house of great surprises around which, in the adjacent streets of Las Palmas, we created the group One Foot, One Eyewith the cousin of the Sans brothers, a fabulous 13-year-old drummer, Mauricio García, and with today’s famous bassist Lorenzo Barriendos, the oldest of the group, 16 (who with a “cow” among all of us we bought his first electric bass!).
What seems unusual to me today, fifty years later, is that less than a year after that beach encounter, in March 1974, we were already premiering with the group a totally original repertoire of collective creations, with an arsenal of borrowed instruments, in the Pocket Theater of the French Cultural Association: a basement transformed into a theater, three blocks from the Alberto de Paz y Mateos Theater, where a few months ago we shared the stage in the December season of 1974, with the extraordinary Gerry Weil Municipal Band.
The images of those concerts come to us thanks to the tireless documentary work of the photographer Patrizia Grassi, with whose wonderful archive we are preparing a small album with a record, celebrating 50 years of One Foot, One Eyeincunable record of the first concerts of the great Juan Francisco Sans Moreira.
Barely 20 months after our meeting in Chichiriviche, the exceptional talent of Pico and his legendary musical family had fueled our passions, concentrating our street energy, focusing it on pure creation, discipline and study. The secret? The invariable seriousness, the unmatched artistic integrity of Pico that guided us all like a rudder of talent and sweetness in the storms of adolescence. A being from another world, of inexplicable maturity from the most tender youth.
Neither Pico nor his older brother Juan Andrés, who died more than a decade ago and is remembered by many of his university students, are no longer with us. The recent and sudden disappearance of Pico Sans, a Venezuelan choir director, composer and scholar, who also practiced in Chile and Colombia, shook all of us who counted on his inexhaustible and extremely generous Spanish-American musicological expertise, sprinkled with the fine irony of the person who has done it. studied almost everything, through which we always feel a filigree of nostalgia for the times when effort and tireless dedication nourished Art and established legitimate hierarchies in its History.
In a book of the future, about Caracas and its music, there will be a great chapter dedicated to this Faun who marked all of us who knew them, as well as a Greek vase from the 5th century BC, where he already appears on his palisade in front of the sea, playing its Aulos that awakens the telluric forces of Music.