Hitting the right note, on and off the page

By: Mark Fitzgerald This will be a busy month for La Raza Editor in Chief Elbio Rodr?guez Barilari.

Locked in a reinvigorated Spanish-language newspaper war with Tribune Co.'s five-month-old Chicago edition of Hoy, the weekly free-distribution La Raza Newspaper is launching new supplements and expanding sports and local coverage as it starts a rolling redesign. Every week, the 50-year-old Uruguay native will write a column for El Pais, the big Montevideo daily.

Away from the newsroom, Barilari is putting the finishing touches on his composition for a string quartet, which will be part of a Latin American musical program he's producing for Instituto Cervantes and Roosevelt University. The string quartet piece, in turn, will be followed by two or three other compositions that have been commissioned for premieres this year.

Then there's the recording of Barilari's "Tango Stamps," the concerto for orchestra and bandoneon, a kind of South American accordion, that was premiered by Chicago's Grant Park Orchestra in the summer of 2002. But that deadline won't arrive until later in the year, so Barilari may find time to play sax, clarinet, or guitar with the Gondwana Project, a seven-piece ensemble he co-founded that plays an eclectic range of music taken from both Eastern and Western traditions.

Fighting a bout of bronchitis on a winter day at La Raza's northside Chicago offices, Barilari described how his interest in music led to his journalism career ? and how he can now pursue both careers simultaneously. "People think there's a conflict, but I never saw a conflict," he says. All you need to know, Barilari insists, is how to "run" a piece ? whether you're writing an editorial or an orchestral concerto. "I have never believed this French romantic myth about the 'fear of the white page,'" he added.

Barilari is on to something, says James Palermo, artistic director of the Grant Park Orchestral Association: "Almost the same principles guide a newspaper man as guide a composer: Here's what I want to write about, and I can't put too much in. You work under time constraints and people are going to consume the product." Palermo calls Barilari a "Renaissance man" whose work appeals to fellow musicians such as Wynton Marsalis as well as the general public.

Barilari's route to journalistic and musical success started in 1977 at a Montevideo auto parts store, where he worked as a college student. The great jazz bassist Charlie Mingus was coming to Montevideo and Barilari couldn't afford tickets. He approached the entertainment editor of El Pais and said he was a jazz critic. The editor told him he could cover Mingus' press conference, and if his article was acceptable, he could have the paper's tickets.

Within three months Barilari had so much work from the paper, he quit the auto parts store. By 1987, he was the editor of El Pais' cultural supplement. He pursued music at the same time, studying in Brazil and Berlin. Barilari was recruited to head La Raza's newsroom in 1998 by former owner Luis Rossi.

Now he's excited by the latest turn in Chicago's Spanish-language newspaper war. La Raza battled Tribune Co.'s Exito, a free-distribution weekly, for 10 years, and Barilari says he's confident of the outcome against its replacement, Hoy, a five-day paper with a 25-cent cover price: "We defeated [Exito] always... . But competition is good for us, and good for the readers. I don't want to be a monopoly newspaper ? I want to be the best newspaper."