He’s won an Emmy, scored music for successful films and TV shows, and has worked out of late with a butt-kicking dance band. But now and then, Jorge Heilpern can’t escape a feeling of déjà vu.
“Sometimes, I feel like I am repeating myself,” says the Argentinian musician/composer, a recent settler in the hills of Woodstock. “Producing papers, producing music. In some ways, it’s the same energy. It’s still the same language. You are still servicing somebody. But, when you perform, it’s something else.”
Heilpern’s words reflect his two-careered life span and his recent shift to live performance. Born and raised en Buenos Aires, he received a master’s degree in economics and taught at the university of that city for about 15 years. He also did a stint as a private consultant and worked for the government as an economist.
“Music was always my second thing, my hobby,” he says of those years. No more. You can catch Jorge Heilpern in his moving-and-grooving incarnation on any one of the next three Thursdays, when he appears with Mambo Daddy at Tinker Street Café, or in his slightly more sedate, but not less enjoyable “concretizing” side on Saturday, November 17, when he leads his new band, Tangomen, at Woodstock’s Mountainview Studio.
The shift from musical hobby to musical profession began while Heilpern was still in Argentina. He worked on documentary and institutional film scores for three or four years, and then made the leap to New York City in the ‘80s.

It’s a very competitive market. You must,” he emphasizes, “be the best you can be.”
Even commercial work, which Heilpern admits is “stereotyped in some way,” is a challenge when you score music for TV documentaries or shows. “You are working with a lot of different moods,” he says. “It’s broad situation.” By contrast, working on commercials or jingles is limited, only one mood.” And, he points out, “the position of marketing, of the business thing, is so important,” that sometimes it “becomes a pain in the neck. An artist, you know, likes to be an artist.”

Heilpern studied orchestration and composition at Juilliard to become “literate in the new technology, in MIDI digital systems for music.” While still living in New York City, he operated his own music production company. More recently, he’s been working with television, and his efforts earned him an Emmy a couple of years ago for the theme song for American Promise, a children’s educational special for NBC.
“The producer called me and asked me to write a song around the concept for school becoming like a second home for kids,” Heilpern recalls. “With both parents working, many children are spending all their time in school and losing the family things. I put all my feelings into this kind of situation, imagined being a kid without a family.”

Two other TV shows for which he has composed music, Cocaine: End of the Line (about coke in the corporate world) and Fast Forward (a weekly show for teens), have won Best Show Emmys as well.
“Generally, working with NBC has been very interesting,” says Heilpern. “Very creative people. I am learning all the time I am doing this. Providing music for somebody’s project… it puts you in a different kind of attitude than performing.” Becoming a father, nearly 4½ years ago, was the impetus for Heilpern’s move to Woodstock. “New York City is like a big stage; it could be anywhere,” he says. “When Josie [his first-born] came, I thought, `This is not for my kids.´ Here [in Woodstock], I feel like I belong to America. I am happy here, I tell you the truth.”
Being a father, he says, is an amazing experience. “I am a father like a mother,” he laughs. “I spend as much time as I can with my kids [Josephine, now 4½, Sebastian, 3]. I love them. I highly recommend it –but people who want kids should rent one for a couple months so they can feel the heat.”
His songs, Heilpern says, are always about the same things –“love, relationships, individual philosophies of life, freedom.” Generally, he works on the lyrics himself, but some have also been written by Carlos Marsero, a “country guy from another part of Buenos Aires” who recently relocated to Woodstock, or Howard Vogel, local bassoonist, flutist and writer. “Some of the slang used is difficult to translate into English, but I make an effort to do it,” says Heilpern.

A song, for Heilpern, “is a tool of interpretation it’s very malleable. Interpretation is very important. The same song can be sung as a tango, blues, rock’n’roll, and be expressed in different kinds of bands and projects.”
His “other kind” of music will be presented November 17 at Mountainview Studio. This band, Tangomen, is the one in which he puts “a lot of energy into the listening aspect” of the music. Though you can dance to it, “it’s more of a concert idea,” Heilpern says.
Tangomen draws on the same sources as Mambo Daddy, namely South American folk music: the chacarera, samba (from Argentina), zamba (from Brazil), bolero, mambo and tango. But, Tangomen has “another kind of elaboration,” notes Heilpern. “It’s more of an acoustic group. There’s more content in the arrangement and more American influence, like pop, plus reggae, ska.”
Heilpern will be joined at Mountainview by Michael Espositio on bass, Stuart Brown on guitar and Jimmy Giampa on conga.
“Life is only one, even if people say there is another one,” says Heilpern, summing up. “If you lose the opportunity to do whatever is possible, you lose it. I am the kind of person who likes to take a challenge. I jump in in a blind way. You have to have faith. Go and do it… It’s risky,” he concedes. “I think of that all the time, too”

By Debra Bresnan