Learning blues in Buenos Aires
José Luis Pardo grew up musically in Buenos Aires, where an established blues scene offered models close to home as well as access to American recordings. In an early interview he recalled trying rock and punk before a short passage of blues guitar in a television advertisement caught his attention. Discovering the recording behind that sound helped give his playing a direction. He was still in his early teens when blues became the music he wanted to pursue.
Albert King, B.B. King and Freddie King were central influences. Pardo also listened to Robert Cray, Jimmie Vaughan, Ronnie Earl, Little Charlie Baty and Johnny “Guitar” Watson, finding different approaches to timing, tone and phrasing. His Argentine experience included the Albert King Tribute Band. Through that group he played with Pappo, who sometimes used its musicians for informal blues appearances. Those encounters connected an emerging guitarist to an older generation of Argentine players.
The Mojo Workers and the international circuit
Pardo’s early albums included As the Years Go Passing By and That’s Right!, and he developed his own performing project with the Mojo Workers. Other recordings include Country and City Blues, Live in Madrid and Live in San Isidro. The range of formats reflects a career that grew through club work, touring and recording rather than through a single breakthrough release.
International opportunities began to expand that work. Pardo has recalled playing in Memphis with the Albert King Tribute Band and appearing at the Springing the Blues festival in Jacksonville, Florida. At the latter event, an invitation to join musicians associated with Muddy Waters, including Bob Margolin, became a particularly meaningful experience. The engagement brought him into direct musical contact with players whose records and band histories had shaped his interests.
Touring in Spain revealed a circuit on which an independent blues musician could build regular work. Pardo returned and settled there in 2008. Madrid became a base for his own projects and for accompanying visiting artists. His collaborators and touring employers included Michael Burks, Jimmy Burns, Peaches Staten, Tail Dragger, Bob Stroger and Willie Buck. These jobs required a different kind of authority from leading a guitar-centered set: he had to understand another performer’s repertoire and make the band work around that musician.
Madrid sessions, production and teaching
Songs for Muddy brought Pardo together with Willie Buck and harmonica player Quique Gómez. Issued by Gaztelupeko Hotsak and also known as The Madrid Session, it placed Buck’s singing at the center of a project devoted to Muddy Waters’ music. For Pardo, the recording extended his practical work with American blues singers into an album carrying the names of all three principal collaborators.
Another project in his catalog is Do the Siesta with Lorenzo Thompson, Gómez and Big Yuyu. Madrid Blues Ghetto brought together musicians associated with the Escuela de Blues de Madrid, including several singers rather than a single frontperson. Pardo’s production work became part of this activity, alongside his playing and bandleading. The albums reveal overlapping musical partnerships, with players moving between their own releases and shared sessions.
By the early 2010s he was helping build the Madrid blues school, which he subsequently directed. He described its beginnings in a small rehearsal room and its growth into both a teaching organization and a center for producing musical work. That combination gave his influence a practical outlet: students could learn the music in a setting connected to working bands, recordings and visiting performers. His own experience as a touring accompanist was part of what he brought to that role.
Original songs and a broader musical language
With 13 formas de limpiar una sartén, Pardo moved beyond the expectations attached to the Mojo Workers name. In a 2015 interview he described the album as the beginning of a different path under his own name, allowing songs he had accumulated to reach an audience. The record drew on blues but also accommodated pop and other influences. Much of the writing was in Spanish, with English and a Portuguese contribution from Alana Sinkey also part of the project.
Producer Gabriel Cabaglia helped shape its instrumentation and sound. Pardo described wanting to sing his own stories after years spent developing as an interpreter of other people’s music. The change did not end his work in traditional blues. It gave him a second outlet for songs whose rhythms, language or arrangements called for something broader.
Ruccula for Dracula followed in 2016. The project began at the blues school with ideas for a more direct, sparsely arranged record, though Pardo said the songs eventually demanded fuller production. Its thirteen compositions returned more strongly to blues and related Black American musical forms, with English lyrics prominent. Guests included Kenny “Blues Boss” Wayne, Bob Stroger and saxophonist Doug James; David Salvador and David Carrasco were also among the musicians featured. The record therefore combined original writing with partnerships developed through years of accompanying touring artists.
Serving the singer and finding his own voice
Pardo’s account of his guitar playing consistently places the song and vocalist ahead of the solo. In his Cutaway interview he explained that a guitarist’s first task is to give the singer a strong setting, using the solo space when it arrives rather than competing throughout the performance. His enthusiasm for Albert and Freddie King’s string bending sits alongside that preference for disciplined accompaniment.
He also values the different possibilities of acoustic and electric work. Acoustic solo or duo performances allow rhythmic freedom, while his strongest personal attachment remains electric blues. His catalog and touring work have made room for both. This flexibility matters in a career that includes leading bands, supporting singers, teaching and producing sessions with different combinations of musicians.
In a 2025 interview, Pardo described being more moved by lyrics than by the technical speed that had attracted attention earlier in his career. He distinguished the stylistic responsibilities of accompanying a Chicago artist from the freedom he wanted in his own songwriting, where soul, groove and Spanish-language material could lead elsewhere. His later outlook continues the questions present in his earlier records: how to understand the music deeply, serve the performer beside him and still find subjects and sounds that belong to his own life.