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Chile

Andean prog rock, sixty years on

Los Jaivas

Los Jaivas started in 1963 as a group of schoolmates in Viña del Mar: brothers Eduardo, Claudio and Gabriel Parra, with Eduardo "Gato" Alquinta and Mario Mutis. They called themselves The High & Bass at first, then Hispanicized the name. Their mix of progressive rock with Andean instruments and melody became one of Latin America's most distinctive sounds, and after the 1973 coup they took it into exile, first to Argentina and then, from 1977, to France. In 1981 they set Pablo Neruda's Alturas de Macchu Picchu to music. Rolling Stone Chile later ranked that album the second-greatest in the country's history. Gabriel Parra died in a car accident in Peru in 1988, and his daughter Juanita eventually took over the drums. The band is still going more than sixty years on.

Theatre director, singer, 1932–1973

Víctor Jara

Víctor Jara was a theatre director and teacher as well as a singer. Born in rural Chile in 1932, he became one of the central voices of Nueva Canción Chilena, the movement that turned folk forms toward social change, and a committed supporter of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government. On September 12, 1973, the day after Augusto Pinochet's coup, he was arrested and taken to Estadio Chile, where he was held and tortured. Days later he was killed there, at forty. The stadium has carried his name since 2003. In 2023 Chile's Supreme Court upheld the convictions of seven retired military officers for his murder.

The Collection