From the Stage to the Street
Jorge is a professional musician who has spent the last seven years playing music on the streets of Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.
On Pamplona’s Calle Real the lively chatter of midmorning pedestrians mixes with the steady pulse of reggaeton blaring from taxis and tiendas. The age-old calls of vendors carry throaty and distinct over the rattling of fruit and coffee carts. This small mountain town’s main street is rarely quiet, but today a foreign timbre mixes with the usual soundscape. The sound is soft and full and resonant, and it drifts upwards into the deep blue mountain sky to dance with the wings of the black vultures that soar through the currents.
The music emanates from a quena, a heptatonic bamboo flute most commonly associated with traditional Andean music. Breathing life into the quena is a young man with small ovular sunglasses and long, curling hair that is reminiscent of 60s counterculture.
Jorge plays confidently and shares a healing, soulful melody. However, he never formally trained to play wind instruments. His musical career began with a cello when he joined El Sistema, Venezuela’s renowned national youth music program, in the small border town of San Antonio where he grew up. He remembers, ‘music captivated me from the beginning.’ Jorge went on to play in the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, complete a music degree, and teach music in San Antonio.
His love of music and his commitment to shaping local children’s lives with musical opportunities encouraged him to continue his work in San Antonio, even when Venezuela’s economic crisis made pay unreliable and he had to pick up other jobs to make ends meet. ‘I was there putting my heart into the work because I liked it,’ he explained. His mother didn’t see things the same way, and told him he was being exploited. Things reached ‘a breaking point’ when one month, he received no pay whatsoever.
Alongside seven million other Venezuelans, Jorge decided to leave behind the life and home he knew to look for a liveable existence elsewhere in the Americas. The lack of economic opportunities was a significant factor in Jorge’s decision to take to the road, but he clarifies that he left ‘as much for the experience as because of the situation.’ He dreamed of exploring the world, its cultures, and its music.
An invitation from a group of circus artists introduced Jorge simultaneously to the inspiring nature of travel and to the world of street performance. They recruited Jorge to perform with them for three days in the Columbian border city of Ocaña, an experience that Jorge claims ‘changed [his] life.’ In the seven years since, Jorge has traveled the streets of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru with his music. The interpersonal connections that Jorge has built by sharing his art with fellow musicians and receptive audiences have fuelled his creative process, which he describes as ‘work of the heart.’
An irony of Venezuela’s economic reality is that itinerant street performance provides more economic stability than a professional career at home. Jorge doesn’t earn a lot, but he has enough to pay for bus tickets, cheap hostels, food along the road, and a phone to stay in contact with friends and family. This is more than can be said for hundreds of Venezuelans who walk through Jorge’s hometown and along the highway out of Venezuela each day, unable to even replace their broken shoes.
Beyond covering his own modest expenses, Jorge sends money home to his mom and siblings. Having an international source of income makes a world of difference for those still fighting to survive in Venezuela. Earning on the road also gives him the flexibility to travel home and see his family periodically. Though he lives seeking new experiences, he recognises that ‘I’ve been really lucky to have a nice family. We don’t have money, but there isn’t conflict between us.’ It is important to him that his work doesn’t deprive him of spending time with his family, especially in the context of a crisis that has forced so many parents, children, and couples apart.
After his first foray into Colombia, Jorge took to the road with his cuatro and a violist who was his partner at the time. Jorge explained that when they played music together their close personal connection resulted in melodies with ‘a more spiritual character.’ They dreamed of traveling to Bolivia and establishing themselves in a recording studio. However, two years into their journey the relationship ended, and Jorge lost the motivation to continue creating music. He recalls, ‘I was in the darkest place possible.’ Without performing, Jorge was not earning, and for a while he resorted to living under a bridge. It took time for him to heal emotionally and gather the energy to play and earn again.
Life on the road has also thrown Jorge into dangerous situations, and he lost his music a second time three years ago when he was attacked in San Agustin, Colombia. He was robbed of his cuatro as well as the guitar, cymbals, and djembe that he’d acquired and learned to play on his travels. ‘I was left with nothing,’ he said, ‘And uff, it hurt.’
‘It’s not an easy path,’ he admits, but he acknowledges that the most challenging times have been the most influential in shaping who he is today. ‘I think I travel searching for peace, trying to find peace with myself. A harmony.’
After the mugging, Jorge found opportunity in deprivation. Stripped of his strings and percussion, life guided him towards wind instruments. A friend who worked as a luthier showed him how to craft flutes out of PVC pipe, and Jorge made and sold many on the road to keep himself afloat. Then, following his enthusiasm for the spiritual music he’d discovered in Peru, he bought his quena. A year later, he added the classical flute to his repertoire, which he practiced under the tutelage of his friend and fellow street musician Guillermo.
Jorge receives varied receptions in different communities. In some places, stereotypes linking street artists with crime and drug use influence people to keep their distance. ‘People have built a wall’, he explains, and points out that most pedestrians don’t realize that many street musicians are ‘giving years of experience’. In such places he earns very little, but the biggest challenge for Jorge is maintaining the emotional energy to keep playing throughout the day when people avoid eye contact and ignore his music. He worries that ‘the minstrels, the street musicians, we’re a part of humanity’s cultural heritage that’s getting lost, little by little.’
However, he smiles when he describes other places where street performance is more widely accepted: ‘they listen, they clap, they stop in place, they ask you for another song, they dance, they invite you to eat. They get involved with the artist. This is what lets street art continue to exist.’ It is these positive interactions that give Jorge the passion to continue ‘living a life of art.’
Today he thanks music for seeing him through the challenging situations that he has encountered. ‘If I’m doing well, I play. If I’m doing badly, I play… there’s never a day where I don’t make music, because for me it’s also therapy.’ He explains that seven years on the road have shaped him in positive ways, personally and musically. ‘I was withdrawn, very introverted, and I didn’t talk to people. I was scared of performing in public. All the situations and experiences that I’ve been confronted with have made me evolve as a person.’ Now he has no fear of connecting with different communities through his music, experimenting with their tastes: vallenato or ranchero here in Pamplona; Amazonian or Andean music on the streets of Ayacucho in Perú.
He recognises the fellow musicians he’s met on the road as some of the most positive influences on his music. He finds more inspiration in his friend Guillermo, a flautist he met in Pitalito, than in the famed musicians whose music he played with the orchestra. ‘The art world leaves many people in the shadows,’ he says. In his experience of sharing music, ‘If I don’t interact with someone, I don’t find it as fulfilling.’
Though his outlook towards life on the road is positive, Jorge doesn’t believe his professional career is lost to the past. Within two years, he thinks he can raise the funds to record his own compositions professionally in a studio, share them with a wider audience online. After giving and receiving so much on the streets, he won’t abandon them entirely, but he hopes there will come a time when he no longer has to rely on street music for income, because ‘it wears a musician out.’ He hopes to reconcile his involvement in institutional and street music: ‘I hope that within a few years someone might hear me and see me in a video and say, “I think I’ve seen that guy playing in the street”.’
The future is uncertain, but Jorge reflects, ‘I’m following a dream… I thank everything that’s put me where I am today.’ He’s one of many musicians who by choice and partly by necessity have taken their music from the stage to the street. In doing so, he’s explored the unique power of sharing live music, and he’s discovered the resilience and creativity of his own human spirit.