Pablo Manavello

Life — the facts

Pablo Manavello was born on 21 May 1950 in Treviso, Italy, and died on 18 January 2016 in Miami, Florida. From the start his biography carries a nuance of nationality that is worth declaring without simplifying: he was born Italian and trained as a musician in Venezuela, the country where he developed his whole career and with which he is identified. The sources describe him again and again as an Italian-Venezuelan composer, arranger, guitarist, singer and producer.

He is known to have been a polyglot —he spoke Spanish, English, Italian and Portuguese— a detail that is anything but minor for understanding his later work with artists from all over Ibero-America.

His musical life starts in the Caracas of the sixties. As a teenager he formed Los Memphis, a Caracas pop-rock band of clear Beatle lineage, together with the fellow musician Charlie Spiteri; the group released recordings around 1967 and 1969 before breaking up. Then came Sangre, a project of a more experimental tone that put out a self-titled album in 1971. In the seventies he joined Ofrenda, the fusion band led by Vytas Brenner, which mixed jazz, progressive rock and traditional Venezuelan music: it is in that setting that Manavello matures as an instrumentalist and arranger.

Toward the end of the decade, a scholarship from the Venezuelan government took him to the Berklee College of Music (Boston, USA), where he graduated —according to the available sources— around 1982 with training in composing music for film. That degree, uncommon among Venezuelan musicians of his generation, explains the turn of his career toward the studio, production and soundtracks.

«His role fits less the figure of the “cover artist” and more that of the sound architect, the professional who translates a song into a finished record.»

The work

In parallel with his training, Manavello sustained a solo career that the sources document with these titles:

• ·Cosas Sencillas (1979)
• ·Un Día de Otoño (1980)
• ·Mi Fantasía (1981)
• ·Una Mirada hacia Dentro (1982)
• ·Gota de Fuego (1985)
• ·En Concreto (1989)

But his deepest mark is not under his own name, but in other people's records, which he shaped from the console. His debut as a benchmark composer and producer arrived in 1986, when he signed the production, composition and arrangements of Ricardo Montaner's first album, which reached multi-platinum status in Venezuela. From there he strung together work with a good part of the Venezuelan pop of the time: the sources link him as producer and composer with Melissa, Kiara, Ilan Chester and Carlos Mata, among others, harvesting gold and platinum records through the eighties and nineties.

His career adds up, according to the available counts, to more than fifty productions for different artists, plus soundtracks for six films and three television series. Once settled in Miami, he went on producing and his range of action widened to the international Hispanic market, with names that the sources associate with his later catalog —Carlos Vives, Shakira, Ricky Martin, Chayanne, Luis Fonsi, Olga Tañón, Soraya— although the exact detail of each credit and year deserves case-by-case verification before attributing it to him with figures.

The contribution

The facts: Manavello combined three trades that rarely meet in a single person —band guitarist, composer with academic training in music for film and studio producer— and put them at the service of Venezuelan pop right at the moment of its greatest commercial expansion.

What this suggests: his role fits less the figure of the “cover artist” and more that of the sound architect, the professional who translates a song into a finished record. That he produced Ricardo Montaner's multi-platinum debut and, the same year, signed the original music of the soundtrack of La Generación Halley, draws a musician placed at the exact center of the machinery that manufactured the decade's hits. His time at Berklee and his condition as a polyglot help explain why his work crossed borders so naturally. These are reasonable readings of his career, not superlatives: the precise magnitude of his influence (number of hits, total sales) remains material to be verified.

Connection with miniteca culture

The link with miniteca culture runs through La Generación Halley (1986), the film directed by Thaelman Urgellés that portrayed Venezuelan youth of the mid-eighties, and through its soundtrack (Sono-Rodven label), which documented the country's effervescent pop movement. On that record Manavello appears in a double role:

• ·Original music: credited as the author of the film's original music.
• ·Musical production: shared with Carlos Montenegro (“Producción Musical: Pablo Manavello, Carlos Montenegro”).

He also signs and performs four instrumentals within the album: “Pelea”, “Comenzó a Cantar”, “Empezar a Vivir” and “El Encuentro” —pieces that work as the connective tissue between the songs by Melissa, Frank Quintero, Guillermo Dávila, Karina and Jorge Aguilar that complete the tracklist.

That repertoire —the polished, radio-friendly, danceable pop of the Venezuela of the eighties— was precisely the one that played in the minitecas. Manavello was not a face on the miniteca's stage, but the technician and composer whose studio work helped define the sound that filled those floors. Hence his place in this blog: not as a fashionable performer, but as one of the hidden trades that made the soundtrack of an era possible.

Today / legacy

Manavello died in Miami in 2016. His death was covered by the Venezuelan press, which said goodbye to him as one of the most influential producers and composers of the country's popular music. His catalog —solo discography, productions for others and soundtracks— remains as testimony of the leap in quality that Venezuelan pop production went through in the eighties. A finer assessment of his legacy (a complete and verified list of productions, awards, sales figures) requires further research and is declared pending.

Links

• Wikipedia (EN)
• La Venciclopedia
• Artist profile (Spotify)