On stage, Juan Martín Scalerandi brings the pampa into the light, between lifted voice and the wood of the guitar. © Ana Palma.
He arrives with a guitar, but he carries an entire landscape with him. Born in Temperley in 1977, in the province of Buenos Aires, Juan Martín Scalerandi (cf. @juanmartinscalerandi on Instagram) does not just defend a repertoire. He makes a memory and a way of inhabiting the plain heard. For him, Argentine traditional music is never a museum piece. It remains a living foundation. Trained at the Julián Aguirre Conservatory, he is a teacher, composer and researcher of pampas folk music. He works closely with the forms of the pampa — milonga, cifra, estilo, huella — with rare exactingness and clear speech. A former guitarist for Omar Moreno Palacios, he belongs to a lineage he never freezes. As he performs in France, notably at the Maison de l’Amérique latine, he insists on this forcefully. Argentine folk music is not reducible to its most exported emblems. His music, he says, seeks less to illustrate folklore. It aims to make present a profound link between the land, time and a people’s inner voice.
Juan Martín Scalerandi, Or The Art Of Making A Landscape Heard
There are musicians who play a repertoire, and others who seem to carry a secret geography within them. Juan Martín Scalerandi is one of the latter, perhaps rarer. Listening to him, you don’t receive only forms, timbres or rhythms. You enter a depth of earth and a memory borne by the wind. You even hear silence speak through sound. His Argentine guitar never seeks effect. It is not a posture. Behind this inwardness there is solid training, years of teaching and long research into pampas music.
What strikes you first is a kind of inner correctness. Nothing forced. Nothing picturesque. Nothing aiming to “add local color.” The pampa he makes heard is not a backdrop. It is a presence. It breathes in the phrasing and economy of gesture. It also breathes in that singular way of letting the sound settle without constraining it. You understand then that, for Scalerandi, tradition is neither a refuge nor an ornament. It is a living fidelity, an ancient soil from which a personal voice can arise.
He speaks of the music of his land with simple gravity, without emphasis, as one would speak of what grounds us. That is perhaps what touches most. The cifra, the estilo, the huella and the milonga are not summoned as objects of knowledge. They are still-inhabited forms, crossed by gestures, voices, landscapes and lives. Everything about him recalls that music is never separate from a way of existing.
At a time when so many cultural circulations smooth out singularities, Juan Martín Scalerandi makes something else heard. Not a rigid identity, but a sensitive truth. His visit to France, notably to the Maison de l’Amérique latine where we interviewed the trio Puka Wali, thus has the value of a discreet revelation. It is part of a path from Guitarras del Mundo to the CCK. It also led him to a nomination at the Premios Gardel 2025 for the album Romance de la llanura. Soy Milonga. It finally reminds us that musical Argentina is not limited to its most famous emblems. In the luminous shadow of the pampa, there exists an art of remarkable restraint and intensity.
This music does not impose itself. It approaches. It asks less to be deciphered than to be welcomed. That may be its deepest nobility. It brings us back to a slower, more open listening. A listening more available to what, in beauty, never fully reveals itself all at once.
Interview
Pierre-Antoine Tsady: Your music makes a tradition and a territory heard. It also lets the guitar speak in a very personal way. When you play the pampa, what are you trying first to make present?
“My guitar is sincere with my land and with my time.”
Juan Martín Scalerandi: My vision of regional artistic expressions rests on the link between the past, which we call tradition, and the present. It is the present that moves us and moves us emotionally. My guitar is sincere with my land and with my time. I seek to represent this present, feet firmly planted in the past traversed by our cultural predecessors. For me, respecting tradition is essential if you want to build from it. If you rely only on recent syntheses, you risk moving away from what is most true. The oldest traces we have are already a synthesis, of course. Yet they remain the most solid base for building a true artistic present.
P.-A. T.: What led you to this very specific musical region of the province of Buenos Aires? Why it rather than Argentine forms better known internationally?
J. M. S.: The pampas plain, and more particularly the province of Buenos Aires, are my place in the world. I was born there, grew up there, and I carry that land in me. When I take the stage with a guitar and the verses of my land, I simply try to be myself. I want to show where I come from and why I am here. I don’t claim to represent an entire region’s culture by myself. I just try to show myself sincerely to the audience. Pampas music is less known than other Argentine traditions. Other regions, as precious as ours, have imposed themselves more strongly. That has reduced general knowledge of this part of Argentine music. But it is fully part of our country’s immense, deep and diverse richness.
P.-A. T.: In your career, how have the roles of performer, composer, researcher and teacher been articulated?
“In my case, they are the four faces of the same coin.”
J. M. S.: In my case, they are the four faces of the same coin. The performer came first, with childhood curiosity. Then arose the need to find my own voice, thus to compose. Then I became aware of all I ignored about my own culture. I then began research, not academic, but intuitive and self-taught. Finally came teaching, as a transmission based on experience and on knowledge that circulates both ways. When I record an album, give a lecture or play a concert, these four dimensions are present at the same time. And the path remains open. We learn every day and no knowledge is absolute, especially in popular culture.
P.-A. T.: In your playing, one hears a very fine attention to phrasing, to breathing, to supporting the sound. In your view, what makes the truth of a way of playing the guitar in this repertoire?
J. M. S.: This way of interpreting the music of my land is natural. It almost belongs to the daily breathing proper to life in the pampas. Any regional music represents its people, its way of life, its customs, and above all its landscape. The pampa is introspective, deep, almost philosophical; it questions existence and being. Its music carries that within it. When I play guitar, I am one more among the people of my land.
P.-A. T.: You work on forms like milonga, cifra, estilo or huella. What do you think distinguishes their deep character?
J. M. S.: The cifra is an old pampas music of Hispanic heritage, linked to the payadores, those improvisers of verses. The huella and the triunfo are couple dances, one more oriented toward seduction, the other toward celebration. The estilo is a slow, reflective form, linked to matters of the heart. As for the milonga, it is the most recent genre of the pampa. This Argentine milonga would give birth to the tango as we know it today.
P.-A. T.: When you compose, how do you find the right distance between fidelity to a tradition and the necessity to speak with your own voice?
“One should not confuse tradition with traditionalism.”
J. M. S.: Tradition is not for me an absolute value, but a point of support. I like to think of the idea of the avant-garde: to move forward, you must know what is behind you. In my case, this traditional foundation is mainly in the forms, rhythms and phrasing. That is where I anchor myself. By contrast, I give myself more freedom in the organization of pitches and harmony. One should not confuse tradition and traditionalism.
P.-A. T.: In music so tied to orality, what details make the difference between a correct reading and a true musical embodiment?
J. M. S.: For those of us from an academic background, this music shows how porous the boundary between orality and writing remains. For my part, I try to write all the music I compose and record. I also include certain arrangements as a support for memory and transmission. But writing has its limits. This is particularly true for pampas genres and their regional singularities. Someone who wants to interpret this music from the score must also go through listening, analysis and immersion in the style. It’s a situation found elsewhere, for example in flamenco or jazz.
P.-A. T.: Your concerts are often accompanied by historical contextualization. Do we listen better to music when we understand the world that saw it born?
“A minimum of contextualization makes listening richer and more enjoyable.”
J. M. S.: Music speaks for itself, or at least that’s what I try to make heard. But since pampas music remains little known, a minimum of contextualization makes listening richer and more enjoyable. It can also spark new curiosities in the listener — about authors, genres, vocabulary — that they will want to explore further.
P.-A. T.: You play in France, notably at the Maison de l’Amérique latine. What would you like the French audience to perceive of this music beyond discovery or exoticism?
J. M. S.: I would like them to perceive the authenticity of this expression, the depth of its message and its history. I would also like them to feel that it truly represents the inhabitant of the pampa. Finally, I would like them to hear more clearly how tango inherits from these earlier genres. This music offers content and aesthetic diversity that paint a true portrait of the Argentine pampa.
P.-A. T.: For someone hearing you for the first time, what would be the best gateway into your universe?
“Letting yourself be carried by the soundscape is the best way to appreciate any work of art.”
J. M. S.: Probably by letting yourself be carried by the soundscape. It’s the best way to enter a work of art, whether a symphony or a painting. It is not necessary to know all the technical processes to be moved by Debussy’s La Mer or Picasso’s Guernica. The same goes for pampa music. Of course, deeper knowledge can enrich pleasure and understanding. But do not forget this: this music was born as an expression of the gaucho. Often it came from men without musical training or technique. Yet it engendered an aesthetic of great quality and depth.
And perhaps that is what his guitar ultimately makes perceptible with such restraint. Not a folklore to be deciphered, but a presence to be heard.