Chello is taking over town

He is a funky multitalented son of a musician that has lived all over the world. Now his heart is set on making it big in Los Angeles.

“Oh my God, is that the time?” Marchelo “Chello Dachance” Diaz Devillegas, jumps up, but relaxes when he realizes the clock hasn’t been set to day-light-savings-time.

He is in a hurry. Before he starts the Über-app and goes on the roads of Los Angeles, he’s going shopping for his daughters, Luna, 17 and Bianca, 11, who live in Argentina with their mother. Chello will spend the holidays there but gigs in LA are already booked in January, so he can’t be gone for long. His mind seems to be drifting. Maybe he’s thinking about the project he is working on now, which he describes as “manifesting songs that positively transform lives.”

Chello’s arms and legs show plenty of tattoos. A yin-yang-symbol sits in the back of his neck, he wears bracelets, necklaces and the blue shirt is barely buttoned. He describes his music as “Indy funk pop” and he puts his music into three sections. “Sappy love material, happy off-the-wall fun stuff that you can dance to, and the conscious rebellious material.”

He is just like the way he talks - very much an artist.

He has only lived in Los Angeles for seven months. Before LA he lived in Oakland, two years in Miami before that. He talks about his life and then changes direction, out of the blue he explains he used to live in Mexico with his then-wife. He once, a long time ago, left all his belongings in an apartment in New York and left the city. “I don’t care, it’s just stuff, it will come back to me.”

He meditates, believes in extra-terrestrial life and can improve the feng shui of your home. Not only that, he can build your home. The house where his ex-wife and daughters live outside of Cordoba, Argentina, is a home he built with his own hands. He shows pictures of a terracotta-colored house with soft edges and green and black bottles placed here and there in the walls.

“They are for letting in the light.” It’s beautiful and certainly creative.

Besides the Über, he works as a DJ and a producer. “And I sing in a cover band.” He is the artist that has made it in all the other places he’s been, put now “swims in the big pond” with all the other musicians that flock to LA. “It seems like the place I need to be right now.”

And the big break might be just around the corner.

“It’s actually happening right now, every minute it’s happening. But I’m afraid of success, it’s so close now and I got my head on right this time. I feel good about me, for the first time in a long time.”

Chello was born in 1969, in Buenos Aires. His mother is Argentinian, and his father was Italian.

When he was less than a year old the family got ready to move to the U.S. because there was work for his father in the States. “Then my father got sick. He stayed back while my mom and I left by ourselves. She got news three months later that he passed away. She was left here widowed, without speaking the language. I just remember her working all the time.”

Some years later his mother married a man that adopted Chello.

“I didn’t know that he was my stepfather until I was about eight years old and I never knew anything about my biological father until I was 25. By then I went to Argentina on a trip and I ran into a cousin. She sat me down every night, made me Italian food and just told me all these stories about my dad. She had boxes full of pictures. In all the pictures of my dad he is with his band, rehearsing, carrying a guitar. There is a picture from a smoky bar room and he is way in the back in the corner with an accordion.”

By this time Chello’s career as a musician was well on the way, not even knowing that his father had been a musician too. Chello had started very young and at the age of 25 he was on tour in Europe.

“I came back from Poland, went to my house in Brooklyn and dropped of my winter clothes. I got my summer clothes, went back to JFK and on the very same day I went to Argentina. There I started meeting my family. It was weird to learn about my father.”

The music obviously runs in his veins.

“I have always considered myself to be funky,“ he says, before he’s out the door.