Shirley Collins & Davy Graham: Folk Roots, New Routes (1964)

Of all the strange, celebrated, hypnotically good musicians who emerged during the English folk revival of the 1960s, probably none was more astonishing--and, among listeners this side of the Atlantic, as puzzlingly neglected--as Shirley Collins.  Collins is an artist whose eerie, disembodied voice seems to call out to us from a world far removed from our own--an agrarian England something akin to Thomas Hardy's Wessex, where great houses dominated swathes of unspoiled green acreage; sweaty peasants, faces ablaze with warm stout, whirled round the May-Pole on Whitsun; and tender young dairymen like Angel Clare, suicidal with desire, pined after flaxen-haired girls like Tess Durbeyfield.  It's a world Collins resurrected with the diligent care of an archaeologist, undertaking, in her youth, a disciplined study of the English folk tradition going back to the Middle Ages, which yielded fruit on her first four to five records especially.  Nor was her curiosity limited to England: in the summer and fall of 1959, Collins traveled through the rural American south with folklorist and then-lover Alan Lomax, gleaning songs from visits to churches, prisons, chain-gang outings, and all manner of communal gatherings (she captured the experience in a remarkable book, America Over the Water, in 2004).  Most of Collins's songs are shot through with a concentration of bare feeling that I'm seldom quite ready for; about the best ones, one can say what Robert Frost said of really good poems: you know, the moment they strike you, that you've taken an immortal wound.  They cut deep, and you never entirely recover.

A blogger, faced with the task of picking one record to feature from Collins's discography, is spoiled for choice: there's Anthems in Eden (1969), which, equipped with a "natural orchestra" of crude rustic instruments, chronicles the downfall of traditional England during World War I; the watershed No Roses (1971--that magic year for British music!), when Collins went electric for the first time; and then there are the stripped-down early albums, which strike me as her best.  The finest of these last, for my money, is her 1964 collaboration with virtuoso guitarist Davy Graham, Folk Roots, New Routes.  What makes it special is, in part, its intimacy--its sixteen songs feature only Collins's austere singing underpinned by Graham's guitar--and in part, of course, its plain repleteness with great tunes, with gorgeous, fresh-hewn melodies like those of "Hori Horo" and "Reynardine."  But most, what sets it apart is its eclecticism: this is a record that places traditional songs of regions like Sussex and Northumberland alongside those of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta; makes homages to contemporary jazz ("Blue Monk"); and, most hauntingly, suffuses the lot of these with Middle Eastern and Indian sounds.  Its signature track might be "Pretty Saro," about a man who immigrates to the States to flee his debts and leaves his lady-love behind ("I came to this country in eighteen forty-nine / I saw many true-loves but never saw mine").  The song has a rich history.  Dorothy Scarborough, who conducted an investigation of Appalachian folk music in the 1930s--and fleshed out her findings in the book A Song-Catcher in Southern Mountains (1937)--encountered it while passing through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in 1930.  She describes the experience in Song-Catcher:

"Mrs Stikeleather sang it into my dictaphone and contributed it to this collection. She told me that while the date ‘eighteen forty-nine’ is used in some of the versions of the song, ‘seventeen forty-nine’ is more probably correct, as that year witnessed considerable immigration to North Carolina from Ireland, and Scotland, and this old English song was no doubt adapted to its new setting at that time."

Fascinating stuff.  Whether Collins discovered the song through Scarborough's transcription is something we probably can't know; more interesting, I think, is the way she and Graham reinterpret it.  In their hands it assumes an almost ghostly call-and-response form, with Collins pouring out the vocals and Graham replying with weird, sitar-like inventions on guitar.  It's the perfect meshing of traditional Anglo-American poetry and melody with the eastern influences that Graham became famous for incorporating throughout his career.  We never question this strange marriage; rather, we assent, instinctively, to its naked, pre-rational power.  We greet it as the beautifully chilling expression of loneliness, of eviscerating nostalgia, that it is.  Every bit as noteworthy is the next song, "Rif Mountain," a jaw-dropping showpiece for Graham that will make you want to take up the acoustic guitar if you don't play it already.  It's a blistering slice of eastern trance-music in which Graham (pictured above) succeeds--even more than on "Pretty Saro"--in making his guitar ape a sitar.  Devotees of Zeppelin's will quickly hear echoes of any number of acoustic folk songs that appeared on that group's records, particularly the eastern-inflected "Black Mountain Side" from Led Zeppelin (though that song comes even more directly from Bert Jansch's version of the traditional Irish piece "Black Waterside").  Jimmy Page was an assiduous student of the English folk guitarists whose ascendancy preceded his own by a decade or so, particularly Graham and Jansch; that he heard Folk Roots, New Routes seems beyond question.  He clearly learned his lessons well.  While this review has focused primarily on Collins, I ought to point out that this album is as much Graham's as it is Collins's.  No mere accompanist, Graham proved a wildly imaginative partner for Collins, one whose contributions here (to say nothing of his solo albums, especially The Guitar Player) laid the foundation for a whole generation of guys who took his lead.  He himself, it should be noted, was deeply indebted to the slide guitar work of Mississippi Fred McDowell, whom Collins discovered on that influential journey she took through the deep south in her twenties.  McDowell's ghost hovers over much of this album.

Anyway, that's all for now.  Enjoy!

 
Folk Roots, New Routes

1. Nottamun Town (3:40)

2. Proud Maisrie (4:03)

3. The Cherry Tree Carol (3:20)

4. Blue Monk (3:06)

5. Hares on the Mountain (3:00)

6. Reynardine (2:31)

7. Pretty Saro (4:18)

8. Rif Mountain (2:26)

9. Jane, Jane (2:42)

10. Love is a Pleasin' (2:34)

11. Boll Weevil, Holler (3:01)

12. Hori Horo (2:15)

13. Bad Girl (2:44)

14. Lord Greggory (3:37)

15. Grooveyard (3:03)

16. Dearest Dear (3:05)

Jorge Ben: Ben (1972)

Sweet Jesus!  I had no intention of featuring this record so soon, but was hustling down the street this morning to "Fio Maravilha" on my iPod and became swept up in the song's operatic grandeur, in the seismic power of its chorus.  What could prepare one, conceivably, for the ecstatic 45-second chant with which it ends--for the sweet rush of its vocal layerings, its ridiculous whoops and howls?  Nothing like it anywhere.  (Of course, the amusing irony about "Fio Maravilha" is that it essentially amounts to a play-by-play commentary on a soccer play that Jorge witnessed--but don't let this ruin its sublimity for you.)  I was tramping through the snow-cloaked roads of Madison, blasting this song for what must have been the billionth time, when it suddenly occurred to me that I was long past due for a Worlds of Wanwood post.  And, well, Ben (1972), though it is certainly not one of the very best Jorge albums, is still gifted with four or five of the artist's most blissful acoustic sambas, and on the strength of these alone it easily merits its place as the fourth installment of my special Jorge feature.  What's more, until the relatively recent advent of file-sharing, it was exceedingly hard to obtain: a "holy grail" of sorts for Jorge aficionados and for Brazilian music enthusiasts generally, for years it remained all but impossible to find and prohibitively expensive.  I myself came across it while stalking some vinyl crates at an outdoor sale in the Santa Teresa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro last August, but by that time I'd already found it on any number of blogs, downloaded and played the hell out of it.  You should do the same.

To the extent that Ben sold when it initially came out, its main selling-points were "Fio Maravilha," the fluffy, summery-lovely "Caramba!...Galileu da Galileia," and a stripped-down version of "Taj Mahal," the earliest iteration of a chart that would reappear in the form of a massive bacchic chant on Gil & Jorge (1975), and the following year on Africa Brasil.  Yet Ben has more to recommend it than these three tracks: there's the fun, propulsive "Morre o burro" that opens the record; "Domingo 23," a hypnotically repetitive song showcasing Jorge's typical interest in heraldry; and "Moça," the album's emotional crux.  "Moça" is a song to become obsessed with, an anguished five-minute plea for a girl's love that features some of the most starkly beautiful acoustic guitar work--and desperate, dolorous singing--you are ever likely to hear.  Lyrically it's nothing terribly original, but musically the song is laced with such naked affective force, such forthright sadness, as to render it all but unbearable to listen to.  The ending, in which Jorge frenziedly repeats, "Eu conquistaria voce, moça!" ("I would win you, girl") while a shrill synthesized violin rises relentlessly in the background, has an eviscerating power that remains mostly unblunted after countless listens.  If there's a parallel elsewhere in pop music, it might be the final minutes of Lennon's "I Want You (She's So Heavy)"--but this is considerably rawer and creepier.

The album isn't without its weak points, of course--on the whole Ben's strength seems concentrated on its first side, though "O circo chegou" and "Paz e arroz" always sound flat to my ears.  Like most Jorge records, it's a bold experiment in fusing samba with North American elements of soul and blues, only it makes fewer concessions to the listener in the way of catchy hooks and riffs than his better-known records.  If it falls flat some of the time, then when it does succeed it does so pretty unforgettably.  Of particular note--in addition to Jorge's blistering dexterity on acoustic guitar and keening vocals--is the bass-work, which on Ben's best songs is little short of astonishing. Whoever contributed this--his or her name doesn't appear anywhere on the album info--provided a remarkably agile foundation to the music on this challenging, wholly worthwhile record.

I'm including a video here of a live version of "Domingas" (off the self-titled 1969 album) that Ben performed, seemingly as part of a television special in 1970, backed by Trio Mocoto (which supplied the accompaniment on Força Bruta).  I don't think it quite lives up to the original studio cut, but it's still arrestingly good and worth checking out.  It's also too funny how the perv camera-man keeps focusing on attractive young women in the audience who are apparently entranced by the performance (like the one clawing her seat at 3:28), at the exclusion of anyone else.  Anyway, enjoy all this material--album and video both.  I plan to feature more videos here at Wanwood in posts to come.  Until next time, adieu and godspeed!





Ben

1. Morre o burro, foca o homem (2:06)
2. O circo chegou (2:44)
3. Paz e arroz (2:04)
4. Moça (4:59)
5. Domingo 23 (3:49)
6. Fio Maravilha (2:11)
7. Quem cochicha o rabo espicha (3:28)
8. Caramba!...Galileu da Galileia (2:29)
9. Que nega e essa (3:33)
10. As rosas eram todas amarelas (3:52)
11. Taj mahal (5:29)  

Milton Nascimento: Clube da Esquina (1972)

I've been rather fearfully avoiding this double LP since I founded this blog a few months ago, in part because I sense that a good portion of my modest readership is only too familiar with it already, and in part because of its plain immensity.  Clube da Esquina is, after all, something akin to a vast and mind-bogglingly varied terrain, a continent unto itself, even; you may journey into it equipped with all the knowledge you've ever gleaned from all the records you've previously heard, but there will still be something hopelessly strange--something fundamentally beguiling and bizarre--about this recording (especially if you're not Brazilian and hence haven't been weaned on Milton's music).  It is one of the distinctive qualities of Clube da Esquina that its best tracks will retain much of that alien beauty even after you've heard them fifty times.  Early and late, it arrests and hypnotizes.

Nearly everyone who undertakes to review this album seems to feel compelled to compare it to The Beatles, released three years before.  The comparison is justified to a point: Clube da Esquina does consciously position itself in the rich tradition of venerable double LPs, and two or three of its songs do, undeniably, invoke Beatles songs (see, for example, "Nada Sera Como Antes," which echoes "Getting Better").  That there are such echoes, however faint, to be found here is hardly surprising, of course: Clube da Esquina (the Corner Club) originated as a group of young guys who met up at a bar in Belo Horizonte to drink beer, jam on their instruments, and talk about their mutual love for Lennon and McCartney.  The nucleus of the group was a duo consisting, first, of Nascimento himself (pictured above, far left), freshly moved to Belo Horizonte from the smaller provincial city of Tres Pontas; and Lo Borges (far right, next to brother Marcio), who, though not yet twenty, was already possessed of a bracingly eccentric musical vision, along with the aplomb to trust in that vision and communicate it in highly wrought sonic structures. Of the two men, it was Nascimento who would achieve international stardom, teaming up with the likes of Wayne Shorter on albums such as Native Dancer (1974) in the years to come.  Why it was Nascimento, and not Borges, whom the rest of the world ended up emphatically embracing, is a moot point.  It may simply have been Borges's weirdness (heard, for example, in the whacked-out orchestral interlude halfway through "Um Girassol da Cor de Seu Cabelo"); or perhaps it was the fact that Nascimento was gifted with the most effortlessly seraphic voice of his generation--a voice that, on songs like "San Vicente," seems to call out to us from a place above the mire and the mess of this world, wafting us to it.  It's a voice, in short, that would sound lovely in most any context, so musicians were quick to snatch him up as a collaborator.

Whatever you think about the respective oeuvres of both men--or of any of the many other people who contributed to Clube da Esquina--there can be little doubt that they were never better than they were here.  This is a gem-studded collection, remarkable not merely for its richness but also for its stunning scope, for the almost jaw-dropping range of distinct sounds to be found on it.  Yes, as stated above, a couple of the songs conjure up late Beatles, but honestly, would any right-minded listener who didn't know better hear Clube da Esquina and think of The White Album, or of Sgt. Pepper's?  The parallel is overhyped, and it suggests, a little annoyingly, that this record even needs a point of reference in Anglo-American pop from which to derive its legitimacy.  The real musical wellsprings of Clube da Esquina are pure South American: its miracle was to dig its tubers deep in the cultural soil of Minas Gerais--and occasionally of Chile and Paraguay (in the guitar and bass work of "San Vicente," for example)--and, drinking in the folk traditions of these places, transmute and update them into tracks that were wholly contemporary, fresh, forward-looking.  Just beneath the surface of its best songs--"Clube da Esquina no. 2," "San Vicente," "Os Povos," and others--we can hear the faint roar of these folk traditions, epochs-old, which Nascimento and company harnessed the way engineers harness water-power.  They bear these songs forward inexorably.

By way of commentary on the songs themselves, I'll say this: the tracks I love most from Clube da Esquina are, in many cases, the ones that seldom get cited as the "hits," and a couple of the hits I actually find rather forgettable.  For all its acclaim, I've always found "O Trem Azul" a numbingly boring song, but you might disagree.  For me the album's apex has always been its middle third.  There are, to begin with, "Dos Cruces"--the only song sung in Spanish--and "Um Girassol" right after it, a couple of melancholy, even wrenching pieces with the power to tear out your innards.  "Dos Cruces," the less talked-about of the two, is in some ways the more intriguing, with its strangely shifting chord progressions that refuse to settle in either the major or the minor mode, its full-throated culmination, and galloping outtro.  The quiet torment of both songs then gives way to the more joyous, and much less earthly, "San Vicente," which those familiar with David Byrne's well-known (and entirely worthwhile) anthology Brazil Classics vol. 1 will quickly recognize.  The song dies down, eclipsed almost imperceptibly by a peal of church bells--a delightful little conceit--and, after these in turn vanish, we come to a half-minute, Borges-sung interlude called "Estrelas," ineffably gorgeous in its own way, however fleeting.  But this turns out to be merely the prelude to the geographical--and spiritual--heart of the record, "Clube da Esquina no. 2."  I've listened to this song upwards of a hundred times, but am still at a loss to explain its peculiar power.  It's essentially two melodic themes--the first hummed by Nascimento in perfect unison with an acoustic guitar (you almost don't even notice him), the second played by a string section--that alternate atop a scaffolding of guitar, upright bass, light drumming, and violins.  No amount of analysis can account for its mysteriously serene mood, though: it's as if it's saturated with the wisdom of several lifetimes, and is entirely at peace with what it knows.  This is light, almost weightless music, but it's also wonderfully profound, music bronzed in the forge of experience.  It's a talisman, inexplicably healing, and we're drawn back to it again and again for its renewing force.

But these songs, like the entirety of Clube da Esquina, more properly speak for themselves.  And though plenty of the tracks will probably grab you immediately, this is a recording that will take a good deal of time to unfurl itself fully.  Just keep listening, and know that its wages, while bountiful, are meted out gradually over time.  I will say, in closing, that the music gained an added level of meaning when I visited Minas Gerais, the region where Clube da Esquina was recorded--and where most of the group's members are from--this past summer.  It's a mostly rustic, mountainous state, not at all the beachy paradise one thinks of when one imagines Brazil.  Farmland abounds, goats graze on vast greeny pastures, mineral spas dominate the south, and little waterfalls, which the locals call cascadinhas, are always coming upon you suddenly in unexpected places.  (The New York Times did a cool feature on Minas about a year ago, titled "The Other Brazil: Minas Gerais."  Check it out.)  But it's also an intensely spiritual place--deeply Catholic, of course, a fact that shows itself in the stunning colonial Portuguese churches scattered about the region (as in Ouro Preto, the whitewashed town pictured above), and in the general piety of the people; and also, less obviously, in mystical hippie havens like São Thomé das Letras (the rural landscape pictured above), places that have an ambiguous religious magnetism that can't be ascribed to any one creed, but whose pull you feel unmistakably when you visit them.  (You can hear this reflected, perhaps, in the mood of melancholy spiritual yearning that above all defines Milton's music.)  I remember passing long hours on buses traveling through Minas, listening to Clube da Esquina and other Milton albums on my iPod, gazing out the window at the undulating, sheep-flecked landscape, and somehow feeling as if the music made a great deal more sense against its rightful backdrop.

Enjoy!

This post is for Leide, who will probably never read it.

Clube da Esquina

1. Tudo que voce podia ser (2:56)
2. Cais (2:45)
3. O Trem Azul (4:05)
4. Saidas e bandeiras no. 1 (0:45)
5. Nuvem cigana (2:59)
6. Cravo e canela (2:31)
7. Dos Cruces (5:22)
8. Um girassol da cor de seu cabelo (4:12)
9. San Vicente (2:46)
10. Estrelas (0:28)
11. Clube da esquina no. 2 (3:38)
12. Paisagem da janela (2:55)
13. Me deixa em paz (3:01)
14. Os Povos (4:27)
15. Saidas e bandeiras no. 2 (1:27)
16. Um gosto de sol (4:17)
17. Pelo amor de deus (2:02)
18. Lilia (2:30)
19. Trem de doido (3:56)
20. Nada sera como antes (3:20)
21. Ao que vai nascer (3:20)

  

Herbie Hancock: Empyrean Isles (1964)

In a word, terrifying.  The incendiary brainchild of four artists in the first bloom of their careers, Empyrean Isles remains one of the most daringly imaginative titles ever to appear under the Blue Note label.  Its best tracks--none better than the astonishing closer, "The Egg"--possess a nervous energy, a panicky urgency suggestive of some imminent crisis over which the music broods.  The percussion crackles; the piano skitters about, its notes like supercharged ions crashing into one another; and the trumpet, meteoric, burns through it all, with all the brashness--with the piercing swagger--we'd expect, not quite from Clifford Brown, but perhaps from Brown's rebellious bastard child.  The whole is a seething mass that, for all the flashy originality of its individual performers, somehow coheres beautifully: the players keep on goading each other--and us--to audacious new heights, to lushly exotic musical terrains.  This is music, in short, that we're still learning how to listen to.
 

The record's frenetic, high-octane sound was, in part, the sound of youth.  This is an album cut by a cadre of kids, essentially: Hancock was freshly 24, though he'd already released two titles as a bandleader; Freddie Hubbard (cornet) and Ron Carter (bass) were only slightly older; while Tony Williams (drums), that most freakishly precocious of jazz prodigies, was, at 18, not even old enough to be legally admitted into the nightclubs he played at.  Hancock, Carter, and Williams were still active members of Miles's legendary second quintet, and had yet to record most of the records for which that group became famous: Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, The Sorcerer, and others.  But Hancock, in organizing his own independent projects on the side, clearly was after something different from the old master: if Miles was interested in raw, at times soupy and formless, explorations into the unknown--jointly spearheaded by fast-rising star Wayne Shorter--then Hancock revealed, by contrast, a fascination with hard bop, a style that had peaked in the mid 50s but was still enjoying relative popularity.  Yet this wasn't the same hard bop that guys like Horace Silver and Cannonball Adderley had made famous a decade before; it was bop with an avant-garde twist.  True, cuts such as the opener, "One Finger Snap," and the contagious "Cantaloupe Island" (later recycled by US3 as "Cantaloop" in what would become Blue Note's best-selling single of all time) are straightforward enough.  But the moment we venture upon "The Egg" or "Oliloqui Valley" (especially the superior alternate take) we're confronted with vast, unwieldy soundscapes that, in their experimentation, remind us that this was also the year that A Love Supreme was recorded.  Soaking up both versions of "Oliloqui Valley" will reveal how adventurously inventive these wunderkinds were--how willing to branch off in completely different directions from one take to the next.  But one keeps coming back to "The Egg," which, in its solos, its almost telepathic interplay among the four players, and its sinister middle section--where the music slows to a creeping pace and Ron Carter takes a bow solo while the others chime in furtively--seems to distill the essence of the Empyrean Isles project.

It's tempting to pick out one member of this supergroup and say, "He's the one who makes this session tick."  But there's really no one who jumps out more than anyone else.  Yes, the man-child Tony Williams is frighteningly good, showing off the constant speeding-up and slowing-down of tempos and range of rhythms that propelled the Miles quintet.  But so is Freddie Hubbard, who delivers in Empyrean Isles what must be one of the single best, and most confident, studio performances on a trumpet (actually, it's a cornet) of the 1960s.  Among hard bop trumpeters during his own lifetime, he had only the brilliant but doomed Lee Morgan for company.  Ron Carter is always damned good as far as I'm concerned, and, well, Hancock is simply the only jazz pianist post-1950 who could stand toe-to-toe with Bill Evans.  If Evans was the contemplative, Debussy-influenced impressionist--the "quiet fire," as Miles dubbed him--then Hancock was the young punk whiz-kid who thrived on complexity for its own sake, the guy who, in his spare time, took apart gadgets and put them together again, and read Buddhist scriptures.  A student of engineering who was obsessed with electronics, he was one of the earliest and most ardent proponents of the fusion music that came along some years later.  And his intriguing later records (Crossings, Mwandishi), startlingly different from this one, show that he was one of the most successful practitioners of that style.  But in a sense he was never better than he was on his stripped down, visionary early albums, Empyrean Isles and, to a lesser extent, the more celebrated but less bold Maiden Voyage (1965).


Empyrean Isles

1. One Finger Snap (7:23)
2. Oliloqui Valley (8:30)
3. Cantaloupe Island (5:34)
4. The Egg (14:01)
5. One Finger Snap - Alternate Take (7:36)
6. Oliloqui Valley - Alternate Take (10:47)

Curtis Mayfield: Curtis/Live! (1971)

Has there ever been a sub-genre as electrifying, as cool, or, at its best, as transcendentally moving as 1970s soul?  Some forty years after their original release, the greatest soul records still shine like burnished steel, still radiate much of the brutal honesty, the visionary hope, the frustrated bitterness that they did when they first appeared.  Lyrically and musically, the stuff goes on speaking to us with an urgency and, in many cases, an operatic poignancy almost unique among the music of the last several decades.  When I think of the best American soul artists--like many people, I'd imagine--I think of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield; they're forever paired together in my mind, perhaps unfairly, a tandem representing the twin blossoms of the Detroit and Chicago soul scenes, respectively.  Of the two, I've always had more admiration for Mayfield, a musician who has held me consistently in thrall for the last decade or so, a fixture through all my countless listening phases.  Although Gaye is the one who's received more accolades, by far--he's the "Prince of Soul," after all--when the smoke clears, it may be that Mayfield will emerge as the more awesomely gifted of the two, the guy who, to speak simply, wrote more great songs and was more genuinely bent on effecting social change through his art.  Indeed, anyone who has listened to their respective masterpieces, What's Going On and Superfly, side by side, knows that the latter is superior: What's Going On is essentially three stunningly good songs placed at the beginning, middle, and end of the album, with filler interspersed between; Superfly, on the other hand, is hair-raisingly good from start to finish.  Gaye claimed that with What's Going On he finally began "writing with his head instead of his penis," but even after that record he reverted to making songs about fucking, his enduring theme; Mayfield, though, spent his entire career crafting tough, cerebral, and often overwhelmingly beautiful--if tragic--jeremiads about the nightmarish plight of America's inner city, elegies on drug dealers left to die on corners, and celebratory songs reminding black people that they were beautiful, winners second to none, in case they'd forgotten.  We are still sifting through his mind-boggling legacy.

Curtis/Live! is one of Mayfield's finest recordings, and one of the most intriguing live albums of the decade. On a freezing January night in 1971, Mayfield and three hired session men--Master Henry Gibson (percussion), Craig McMullen (rhythm guitar), and Joe "Lucky" Scott (bass)--appeared at The Bitter End, the intimate club on Greenwich Village's Bleecker Street.  The legendary performance that ensued is one defined by a sense of hushed intensity: Mayfield and his three-piece group hustle through these songs--most of them culled from his recently-released Curtis (1970), as well as the records he'd made with The Impressions--with a muffled urgency that derives power from restraint, a stripped-down rawness that makes for a fascinating set of takes on the album versions.  What drives this set above all is Gibson's wizardry on drums.  Gibson, a vastly underrated drummer who happens to be the world's most recorded percussionist (he appeared on over 1200 albums), veritably gallops along on drums and, occasionally, congas, lighting a fire under Mayfield's ass while the latter joyously pours out his trademark falsetto.  Motherfucker can play.  And, well, the songs themselves are simply a delight, contagiously danceable charts featuring Mayfield's patented social commentary, with political "raps" sprinkled in between: "For a country so far advanced, we seem to be able to do everything but get along.  There's even a bit of humor in it, when you think of such people as Agnew," he muses.  The crowd is clearly eating up the whole of it; Mayfield's rallying cries for black power are especially galvanizing.  "We're so goddamm undecided," he complains on the excellent opener, 'Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey).'  "I'm black and I'm proud!"  By the close of the set, his listeners are obviously transfixed.  One tries to imagine them crowded together in this rather small venue, struggling to keep warm but also utterly enchanted by the show, perhaps even conscious of the fact that they were witnessing a historic performance.

So that's really it.  The entirety of the album is very good, but in some ways the stretch beginning with "Check Out Your Mind" and continuing through "The Makings of You" is the highest point, and is worth the price of the whole record.  This last song is simply one of the loveliest, most unabashedly sweet pieces I've ever heard, and Mayfield gives it a fine treatment here, though I think I'll always prefer the lushly produced studio version.  Also worthy of note is a highly charged rendition of "Superfly" towards the end, a bonus track from a later show that was included on the compact disc reissue, and that gives a sneak peek of great things to come in Mayfield's career.  This is a record that catches Mayfield just as he's hitting his stride, and there's something wonderfully fun about hearing him discover his remarkable powers as a songwriter and performer.  Wear it out, especially late at night, when it seems to sound best.

Curtis/Live!

1. Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey) (6:56)
2. Rap (0:26)
3. I Plan to Stay a Believer (3:26)
4. We're a Winner (4:47)
5. Rap (0:51)
6. We've Only Just Begun (3:44)
7. People Get Ready (3:47)
8. Rap (0:34)
9. Stare and Stare (6:12)
10. Check Out Your Mind (3:53)
11. Gypsy Woman (3:48)
12. The Makings of You (3:28)
13. Rap (2:01)
14. We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue (6:46)
15. (Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Going to Go (9:27)
16. Stone Junkie (8:05)
17. Superfly (3:56)
18. Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey) (Single Version) (3:16)

Chico Buarque: Construção (1971)

Late one night on a recent trip to Brazil, I found myself at a very hopping club in the Lapa district of Rio de Janeiro, where a band was performing a catchy samba tune with great energy and gusto.  I was standing at the bar waiting for a caipirinha and tipsily swaying to the beat, when I suddenly realized I knew the melody, though I couldn't think of the artist.  The gal whom I was traveling with during this leg of the trip, a Brazilian, turned to me and said, "Oh, I love this song!  It's by Seu Jorge."  I paused a moment, then shook my head, troubled.  No, I thought, someone much older, and much more talented than Seu Jorge, wrote that song--but who?  Then it hit me: Chico Buarque.  It was the second song off Construção, though I couldn't come up with the title.  "No," I said to my friend knowingly, "It's by Chico Buarque.  Seu Jorge just covered it.  It goes all the way back to 1971."  My friend shot me a glare that said, "Jesus, what the hell is wrong with you?"  And I giggled.  The funny thing was, that was only one encounter with Chico Buarque among quite a few I experienced during my two weeks in Brazil.  In fact, more than any other musician, it was Buarque who came up in conversations I had with local people about Brazilian music.  "Do you know Chico Buarque?" one person after another would ask me.  And immediately I would hear the melody from "Valsinha" in my head, sung in that unmistakable voice, and swoon a little, then nod vigorously.

It's no surprise, I suppose, that so many people are still talking so emphatically about Chico Buarque, and playing his music so ardently: since he began his career in the mid-sixties, the man has fashioned more jewel-like melodies--melodies perfectly wedded to clever lyrics--than all but a very small handful of his countrymen.  Whether or not you care for Buarque's renditions of his own songs, and particularly for his sultry-soft, Kermit the Frog-like voice, is a matter of personal taste.  You can't quibble, though, with his dizzying legacy, a mother lode of some thirty albums recorded over four decades, containing some of the most beloved and frequently covered tunes in Brazilian music--and some of the most sophisticated poetry MPB has produced.  Prettier than anyone has any business being, he nevertheless shunned the teen idol role from the very beginning, determined to carve out a reputation as a "serious" musician. And he started his career making records that, while ambitious enough in their own way, were relatively safe and conservative, both musically and lyrically.  By the early seventies, though, he had metamorphosed into a strident socio-political commentator, as Construção bears witness.  He spoke out with bold, if thinly veiled, indignation against political injustices in Brazil and especially in his native Rio de Janeiro (most famously in "Calice," his duet with Milton Nascimento), and was in fact temporarily exiled by the military dictatorship for his candor, spending a portion of the 1970s in Europe.

Most listeners who have really put in the time with Buarque's discography seem to agree that Construção is his greatest single recording, an album that, in its daring conception and richly diverse textures, outpaces anything he had done before or would do afterward.  Its centerpiece is the chilling title track, a mini-masterpiece that, like one or two other songs on the record, sounds rather like a fragment from a musical.  (In fact, Buarque had co-written a musical some years before, and this would appear to have prepared him for the writing of Construção).  "Construção" is an indictment of the dreary, dehumanizing lifestyle of the Brazilian working class, appropriately set against a monotonous rhythmic backdrop and sung in a rigidly robotic fashion.  Like The Beatles' "A Day in the Life," it tracks the progress of an everyman as he wakes up in the morning, gets ready for the day, and proceeds to go to work.  But Buarque's song is not a tale of postmodern ennui; it's one of grim economic determinism, in which people are forced to take on jobs that degrade and finally destroy them in order to make ends meet--and in the process relinquish their souls.  The dual opiates of sex and cachaça help numb them even as they're gradually transformed into machines.  In the course of the song, the protagonist, a construction worker who plies his trade atop a scaffolding high above the ground, leaps into the air in a moment of desperation, falling to his death in the street below ("He stumbled into the sky like a drunk / And floated in the air like a bird / And ended up on the ground in a limp bundle / Agonized in the middle of the street").  (I interpret this part as a suicide, though I concede it's ambiguous.)  In the song's bitterly ironic climax, Buarque repeats the phrase "Deus lhe pague" ("God shall reward you"), a reprise from the opening track, angrily targeting the empty promise of a heavenly afterlife that sustains these people through their otherwise unbearable lifestyles ("For the flies, insects which kiss and cover us / And for the final peace that will redeem us in the end / God shall reward you").  Admittedly, this sounds like deeply depressing stuff, but the experience of listening to it is a seriously stirring and invigorating one.

om: http://lyricstranslate.comhelp numb them even as they're gradually transformed into machines.  In the course of the song, the protagonist, a construction worker who plies his trade atop a scaffolding high above the ground, leaps into the air in a moment of desperation, falling to his death in the street below ("He stumbled into the sky like a drunk / And floated in the air like a bird / And ended up on the ground in a limp bundle / Agonized in the middle of the street").  (I interpret this part as a suicide, though I concede it's ambiguous.)  In the song's bitterly ironic climax, Buarque repeats the phrase "Deus lhe pague" ("God shall reward you"), a reprise from the opening track, angrily targeting the empty promise of a heavenly afterlife that sustains these people through their otherwise unbearable lifestyles ("For the flies, insects which kiss and cover us / And for the final peace that will redeem us in the end / God shall reward you").  Admittedly, this sounds like exceedingly depressing stuff, and it surely is to an extent, but the experience of listening to it, if occasionally terrifying (e.g. at 1:57 after the man's death) and even downright overwhelming at the end, is an oddly invigorating one.

One might go on for some time talking about the songs on Construção in this manner, since nearly all of them are as intricately crafted and hence bear the weight of serious commentary.  "Valsinha," a wrenching ballad, "A Minha Historia," a little oasis in the otherwise bleak soundscape that is Construção--these are a couple of the highlights that will keep you coming back to this album, and perhaps inspire you to venture further into Buarque's massive catalogue. 

Construção

1. Deus Lhe Pague (3:20)
2. Cotidiano (2:50)
3. Desalento (2:48)
4. Construção (6:24)
5. Cordão (2:32)
6. Olha Maria (3:57)
7. Samba de Orly (2:40)
8. Valsinha (2:01)
9. Minha Historia (Gesubambino) (3:02)
10. Acalanto (1:39) 

Jorge Ben: Força Bruta (1970)

This is the third installment of a special feature I'm doing on Jorge Ben here at Wanwood. He's the first of a series of artists to whom I plan to give special attention, owing to their tremendous creative firepower, fecundity, and—in Jorge's case—peculiar neglect among listeners outside Brazil. My own thinking is that, with the advent of file sharing, and especially the remarkable flourish of music blogs over the past two or three years, the good news about musicians like Jorge—previously known only to privileged coteries—will gradually diffuse worldwide. Little by little, iPods everywhere are beginning to bounce and thump with grooves that, in decades past, were the exclusive domain of the vinyl-purchasing underground.

In a sense, all you really need to know about Força Bruta (1970) is distilled in the first, and arguably best, track on the record, "Oba, La Vem Ela" ("Oh, damn! Here she comes"). In brief, the song tells the story of a guy who spots a beautiful woman approaching—a woman whom he knows intimately though she is oblivious to him—and becomes irrepressibly excited in her presence, in spite of the fact that she doesn't notice him. The most obvious and frequently-drawn parallel is to "The Girl from Ipanema," but an even closer analogue is "Cyprus Avenue" from Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (1968). Both songs are, beneath the surface, about unbridled desire—specifically male desire—for a love object that remains unattainable, and about how ultimately it's of no consequence whether the feelings are requited or not. The real burden of the meaning in each far exceeds the literal sense of the words, which, especially in "Oba, La Vem Ela," are pretty bare bones: the speaker's gradually mounting excitement bordering on frenzy, the frustration and finally the rage of thwarted sexual need—these are emotional terrains that lie beyond the reach of language, but are bodied forth with all the clarity and force of revelation in the song's marvelous vocals, suave but eventually screaming. Critics of Jorge Ben sometimes complain that his music wasn't adequately subversive, since it didn't directly address the political injustices occurring in Brazil during the 1960s and 70s (unlike, famously, Caetano Veloso's and Gilberto Gil's). But I wonder if these same people have listened to the end of "Oba, La Vem Ela" (or for that matter "Africa Brasil (Zumbi)" off Africa Brasil, or any number of similarly furious Jorge songs): lyrically it's innocuous enough, but acoustically it's incredibly subversive, even terrifying. Much of Jorge's catalogue, in fact, crackles with a rebellious energy whose equal I find nowhere in Veloso's or Gil's music, no matter how politically defiant their lyrics might be.

And, oh, that voice! Yes, it's capable of snarling and shrieking, but most of the time on Força Bruta it's seductively mellow and relaxed. A commenter on YouTube puts it aptly: "Uuuuuugggghhhhhh that honey soulful voice melts my heart and makes me smile everytime!" Another: "Jorge Ben is more addictive than doritos, crack and cigarettes combined!!" Hyperbole, maybe, but not by much! Jorge's is one of the few voices, in fact, that withstand comparison with Van Morrison's: both have a rough-hewn gorgeousness that, when impassioned, can simply spellbind you with their intensity--their vocal pirouettes--and when subdued can seem like some blissful opiate.  And the latter, again, is how Força Bruta most often comes off, with Jorge--backed by the Trio Mocoto--piling one freewheeling samba pastiche on top of the other.  "Ze Canjica," "Charles Jr.," "O Telefone Tocou Novamente," and the ultra-catchy "Mulher Brasileira"--these are the gold nuggets of the record; and if your tastes are at all similar to mine, you'll get more pure mileage out of them than most any other Ben record.  It's quite true that it's not nearly as packed with ideas as its predecessor, the celebrated Jorge Ben (1969)--and some contend, in fact, that its stripped-down quality was a result of Ben's exhaustion after completing the prior album--but between the two of them, this is the one I nearly always go to when I need a fix.  Awash with strings, unflaggingly cool, the whole of Força Bruta sounds like it was recorded in a haze of cannabis smoke.  Turn it on, lie back, and drift away.

The password for this one, as for all of the Jorge records, is "vibes".  Enjoy!


Força Bruta

1. Oba, La Vem Ela
2. Ze Canjica
3. Domenica Domingava Num Domingo Toda de Branco
4. Charles Jr.
5. Pulo, Pulo
6. Apareceu Aparecida
7. O Telefone Tocou Novamente
8. Mulher Brasileira
9. Terezinha
10. Forca Bruta