A Byrne-féle Brazil Classics-trilógia nyilván nagyon alap, elsőkörös belépő Brazíliába, de közben biztosan az egyik legjobb kezű válogatás is, lényegében megunhatatlanul mehet körben egész nap. Főleg az O Samba.
Day 7: An album that made you feel like you were really hearing music for the first time
Various Artists, Brazil Classics Vol 1: Beleza Tropical (Luaka Bop, 1989)
I thought I would keep compilation albums out of this project, but this one really hit a nerve with the topic for today -- a lovely, resonant nerve.
This is the first album in the Brazil Classics series put out on Luaka Bop, a label founded by Talking Heads visionary David Byrne dedicated to Latin American music. Luaka Bop has been pretty prolific: there are 7 or 8 titles in the Brazil series alone.
Byrne makes a claim somewhere to the effect that he tried for years to make the music he was hearing in his soul and felt like he failed, and then heard this music and recognized it as the music his soul was telling him to play, already made. The album for me was a gorgeous mix of pop sensibility and a wide range of beat, mood, tone, and composition, by people who are and were well known but to me at the time were exotic strangers: Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Jorge Ben, Milton Nascimento, and others.
It sounds and plays like party music, if you accept the chill music at the end of the party as “party music” as well. I met a writer from Brazil who told me that all the songs were rebel songs, rebellion songs, street poor and peasant worker songs disguised as party music so the master couldn’t understand it. I don’t know enough Luzo-braziliero, and especially Brazilian slang, to judge the claim, but I like the fantasy alright. I dig that reading as a version of the way DuBois discusses the double talk of sorrow songs that parallels the double consciousness of Africans in the Americas (in Souls of Black Folk).
The “scales falling from my ears” moment was that the mix of double talk, pop accessibility, funk, anger, terror, joy and love, all that mixed together, that WAS music for me. I had a moment where I was like, WAIT! They do that in Brazil too? Not just LA and New York and Detroit and Chicago and Atlanta and London and Birmingham? So like, people must do this EVERYWHERE!
*head to desk*
*repeat*
That realization really made me a less provincial, more open, less judgmental, more enjoying person. I hope so anyway.
Any of these cuts are magnificent (and I’d listen in order, of course), and the live version of "San Vicente" by Milton Nascimento is just epic. Talk about syncretic hybridity: he starts crooning like a muezzin calling you to prayer and runs through guitar folk to latin jazz and back by the time it’s all through. Stunneroo. As King Stimie might say, Dig It If You Dig It.
Cut: “Um Canto de Afoxe Para O Bloco do lle (Ile Aye)” - Caetano Veloso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTE8R488nMs
Cut: “Quilomba, o el Dorado Negro” - Gilberto Gil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W75Q1NZBHVk
Cut: “Equatorial” - Lô Borges
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhpicjQnAPY
Cut: “San Vicente” - Milton Nascimento (live - ao vivo)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0BLHm7uyO0
There is no WIki for this project, but here’s the Luaka Bop page that references it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luaka_Bop
Up next: a Sad Album, though if you were able to keep a dry eye through the magnificence of “Equitorial” I congratulate you already!
Part of the fun of listening to Brazilian music is making up my own lyrics since I don't understand Portugese, and so much of it sounds light and up-beat, but as it turns out this song is about slavery. Specifically the settlements set up by escaped slaves, which are called quilombos. Whoops.
