Germán Salto must be caught on the fly.
The man who has met us at El Laboratorio, the crowded building in the Madrid neighborhood of Carabanchel where he composes and rehearses, landed the day before from Miami and will leave the next morning for Guayaquil.
His salary depends on it: for six years, this Madrid native from 1984 has been working as a commercial pilot for Iberia for long-distance flights.
And in his spare time he becomes a singer and songwriter of timeless and unusual beauty.
The most recent, the homonymous Germán Salto, is already the third: a debut in Spanish with which this music lover collector (7,000 vinyls on his shelves), bilingual traveler, stubborn reader and distant relative of Miguel Delibes bears witness to his devotion to Cecilia, The Left Banke or Cánovas, Rodrigo, Adolfo and Guzmán.
Between his current job and his previous one, in a night freight company, Salto has flown around a thousand flights at the helm of those giant Airbuses.
Her aeronautical passion was in her blood through her father.
Her grandfather, Ramón Salto, was already an aviator.
Her father, also Ramón, is such an institution in Iberia that he confesses to being a “victim of Jordi Cruyff syndrome”.
Her uncle Javier Salto is a lieutenant general and you can find him on the news as chief of staff.
But bohemia, artistry and melomania are consubstantial to the DNA of her vast maternal family.
Guitars by Germán Salto.Victoria Iglesias
His grandfather, Jesús Fragoso del Toro, was a historical editor-in-chief of Marca who had time to found a family of 19 children!
while covering information about Real Madrid.
Delibes was the brother-in-law of his maternal grandmother, but he did not attend the wedding of Germán's parents because he had just been widowed.
"A widower at a wedding is like a clown at a funeral," the author of El camino apologized in a letter that the family keeps like the treasure it is.
Germán never got to visit him (“the idea of bothering me was terrifying”), but he wanted to endorse his admiration for him by reading every last one of his novels.
And something stuck to it.
“I write stories daily, more as therapy than with the intention of publishing them.
It's my first morning exercise: wake up and start writing.
I get things of surreal humor.
My girlfriend, psychologist,
Germán Salto portrays an ambitious man with expansive creativity, capable of writing beautiful and convoluted melodies that combine baroque pop and an exquisite string quintet.
He is very far from that kid who played badass listening to Barricada or Boykot.
He will never be able to be grateful enough to his uncle Fernando, one of his 19 brothers, for changing his life by giving him a copy of Sticky Fingers, by the Rolling Stones.
There he began to carve out that gourmet palate that today has Vindication of art in the era of artifice (2015), the brainy essay by filmmaker JF Martel, as his bedside book.
"No, I have never composed a single note to the controls of the plane," he smiles.
"This thing of coming up with a great song on the street or in a dream only happens to Paul McCartney."
The nine that make up Germán Salto were born, above all, in hotels around the world.
And the signer of it is legitimately proud of them.
“I have given myself the chance to record an expensive and commercially unviable album”, he concludes.
“The people who are successful in music now are guys in tracksuits, but that doesn't frustrate me anymore.
I am happy making people happy who are moved by my music.”
