Nano Stern Trio (Chile)
Fernando Daniel Stern Britzmann, best known by his artistic name, Nano Stern, is a Chilean singer, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. His work is linked with popular song movements, and his style encompasses trova, folk, and rock. The confluence of recent student and environmental political events in Chile and Nano’s rise as an articulate writer and performer have, much to his chagrin, positioned him as the voice of a newly politicized Chilean generation.
The grandson of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution, Nano’s childhood was painted vivid by not only his own family’s musicianship but by the powerful legacy of the Nueva Canción movement lead by Chilean musical activists during Pinochet’s dictatorship a generation before. Legends like Inti-Illimani and Victor Jara – who suffered exile and even death during these troubling times – continue to inspire Nano’s breadth of sound and emotion. “I am extremely respectful of the tradition,” Stern explains. “It is an enormous gift we received from the people of the past.” Oscillating between the personal and the political, outspoken, passionate, and experimental, it is perhaps Nano himself who captures his musical ethic best when remarking, “In the measure that I’m able to vibrate strongly, other people will resonate. If that frequency is intense, other things around it will vibrate together with it. Music, in the end, is that. We can put aside words, and genre, and tradition. In the end, it is all about a movement of air that makes our bodies move. It’s the most mysterious thing.”