Duo Benitez Valencia

Dúo Benítez Valencia is a folklore musical & vocal duo from Ecuador, created in 1942. The duo was composed of Gonzalo Benitez Gomez and Luis Alberto "Potolo" Valencia. Gonzalo Benitez was the first voice and Luis Alberto Valencia the second voice. The Duo performed professionally from 1942 till 1970 when Luis Alberto Valencia passed away and the Duo ended.

Gonzalo Benitez and Luis Alberto Valencia were kingpins of the musica nacional movement in Ecuador. In 1970, when Valencia collapsed onstage during a performance of the yaravi Desesperacion -- "My heart is already in ashes" -- and died four days later, aged 52, his coffin was carried through those city streets on the shoulders of his fans.

They began singing as a duo in their mid-teens. During twenty-eight years together they recorded more than six hundred songs, for Discos Ecuador, Nacional, Granja, Ortiz, Rondador, Onix, Fuente, Real, Tropical, Fadisa, RCA Victor and CAIFE. Their exquisitely romantic harmonizing is a sublime blend of collected forbearance and abject self-annihilation, underpinned and elaborated by the heart-piercing, improvisatory guitar-playing of Bolivar 'El Pollo' Ortiz.

Effectively the third member of the group. "El Pollo" sets the tone and intensity for everything that follows: listen to his soloing at the start of our opener, "Lamparilla". Musically a pasillo -- a cross between a Viennese waltz and the indigenous yaravi rhythm -- "Lamparilla" draws its verses from a poem by Luz Martinez from "Riobamba", written in 1918 when she was 15, under the influence of Baudelaire and Mallarme. Another pasillo here, "Sombras" is one of the best-loved songs in the musica nacional canon, setting lines about undercover sex and loss by the Mexican poet Maria Pren, which were considered pornographic on publication in 1911.

And Benitez and Valencia looked back still further, to the indigenous roots of Ecuadorian music, as the key to its future. "Carnaval de Guaranda" is their take on a song dating back to the era of the Mitimaes, a broad group of Bolivian tribes conquered by the Incas and displaced to Ecuador.

The music from this Duo establishes the golden era of the "Musica Nacional" of Ecuador, they are the referent of traditional Ecuadorian music.