Music: Trash Orchestra

Los Reciciados

They send us garbage — We send back music

The Recycled Orchestra of Cateura. Young lady at far right holds her MOBIL oil can cello; two boys in front line show their double-can guitars.    

When the urge to make music grows strong enough, you play on what you can scrape up, patch together, beat on, blow into, bow or pluck. The early jug or “spasm” bands often used a washtub bass, washboards, spoons, guitars and mandolins made from the neck of a discarded guitar bound to a big gourd or metal pie plate.

By Fradley Garner

Jersey Jazz International Editor

Welcome to Los Reciclados. The Recycled Orchestra was born a couple of years ago in the suburb of Cateura, a shantytown perched on a massive garbage dump with a foul river just outside Asunción, the capital of Paraguay.

One of the poorest slums in Latin America, Cateura is home and workplace for some 2,500 los pobres. Kids and grownups pick through mounds of waste for stuff that can be used or sold to the local recycling plant. Prospects for most of the youngsters growing up in Cateura are bleak, with gangs and drugs waiting for too many of them.

Nicolas “Cola” Gómez, a trash picker and carpenter, got the idea of making instruments out of junk.     

One day, Nicolás Gómez, a carpenter and garbage picker known locally as “Cola,” found a piece of trash that looked like a violin and took it to his music teacher friend, Favio Chávez. The pair found steel wire and other items and fashioned a working violin and bow in an environment where a “real” violin would be worth a lot more than a shack on this wasteland. Oil drums became violins and cellos. Water pipes and bottle caps were fashioned into flutes. Packing crates morphed into guitars.

Favio Chavez, music teacher and founder-conductor of The Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, plays a tin-body guitar. 

Of course the question was bound to come up: Could a children’s orchestra be conceived in one of the world’s worst slums?

Ada Maribel Rios Bordados showing her talent on a trash-based violin.    

Yes, and it was. Google this quote and watch the kids who “play everything from Beethoven and Mozart to Frank Sinatra and The Beatles.” On one video, some players are interviewed in Spanish. “My name is Ada Maribel Rios Bordados. “I’m 13 years old and I play the violin,” reads the subtext. See for yourself how she enjoys it.

Juan Manuel Chavez says he’s “better known as Bebi. I am 19 and I play the cello.” His instrument, says Bebi, “is made from an oil can and wood that was thrown away in the garbage. The pegs are made out of an old tool used to tenderize beef, and this” — pointing to a broader peg — “was used to make gnocci.”

Some wordspinner dubbed the orchestra Landfill Harmonic.   Slogan: “The world sends us garbage. We send back music.” A crew of filmmakers, producers and photographers are busy making a documentary film. Working title: Landfill Harmonic. Hopefully, the orchestra will open doors to a greater world of living and learning outside the slum. They’re planning a multi-city tour around the United States. Nearly 5.000 donors enabled the filmmakers to exceed their Kickstarter goal of $175.000 by nearly $40.000.

you can find more information at: www.landfillharmonicmovie.com
JJ dec. 2014.

The photos are different from the original article