Month: May 2010

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Chico Buarque & João Cabral de Melo Neto – Morte e Vida Severina (1966)

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Day 4 of the Revolutionary Music Experiment at Flabbergasted Vibes

Morte e Vida Severina
João Cabral de Melo Neto
with music by Chico Buarque
Presented and performed by T.U.C.A
(Teatro da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo)

Recorded in 1965, released in Philips in 1966, (P 632 900) MONO

Vinyl -> Pro-Ject RM-5SE turntable (with Sumiko Blue Point 2 cartridge, Speedbox power supply) > Creek Audio OBH-15 -> M-Audio Audiophile 2496 Soundcard -> Adobe Audition 3.0 at 24-bits 96khz -> Click Repair light settings -> dithered and resampled using iZotope RX Advanced

Unfortunately I deposited this album in The Vault on a recent trip to my Kayman Islands tax and fallout shelter, and apparently neglected to photograph the front and back covers. This is a shame, as scouring the internet turned up nothing but a few low-resolution thumbnails. Anyone with something better please contact me. If I’m not mistaken the back cover mostly had a little biographical information on João Cabral and Chico and then a review of the theatrical performance from a newspaper.

This record is an important historical document, a recording of a theatrical piece performed by T.U.C.A. that sprung from a collaboration between Pernambucan poet João Cabral de Melo Neto and composer/singer Chico Buarque based around a poem Cabral had written ten years previously. But your mileage may vary with the album as a listening experience. If you lack knowledge of the Portuguese language, you are likely to hear a lot of over-acting interspersed with occasional music. If you are a fluent Portuguese speaker, you are likely to hear a lot of over-acting interspersed with occasional music. The crucial part of this is that the text is from one of the most important poets of the modern Portuguese language, João Cabral de Melo Neto. Delving profoundly into the stark inequalities in Brazil’s most unequal region, it is almost as if Josué de Castro’s “Geography of Hunger” was converted into poetry and set to music. It’s suffused with the struggles of landless peasants and retirantes driven from their lands by drought or insufferable labor conditions, with references to the capitol of Recife, of a land dominated by coronelismo and the sugar latifundia through which Brazil secured itself a place in the world system on the backs of slave labor. I am no literary critic, and too much has been written about João Cabral de Melo Neto for me to say anything that wouldn’t make me look stupid.

I wish I could tell you more about the record itself, since that’s what is really under discussion here. I can tell you that Chico Buarque only composed two pieces of music, one of which “Funeral de um lavrador” is an eternal classic and has been recorded by a number of people, Nara Leão probably most famously. Only at the beginning of his recording career, being asked by a poet of João Cabral de Melo Neto’ stature to collaborate was an honor that can’t be overstated. However, Chico does not play or sing anywhere on this record, and his name likely appears in such large letters in order to sell units. As the various reports I pulled together from some web research will show, this theatre piece was received by the public as a huge success and taken to Europe were it also received critical acclaim. It is somewhat incredible that this could happen in the midst of Brazil’s repressive military dictatorship, but the ball got rolling before the regime passed Institutional Act No.5, after which the repression became much more repressive. In fact during my skimming of rocks on the waves of the interwebs, I was surprised to find a photo of none other than the screaming-banshee known as Elba Ramalho, on the set of a production of Morte e Vida Severino from 1972 or 1973, which would have put them right in the middle of the worst, most violent years of the “anos do chumbo” during the Medíci regime. It is probably testament to the fact that João Cabral and Chico were such “respected” literary figures that the production was able to continue. It’s worth noting that Chico, while being a very frequent target for censorship by the military regime, was from a powerful literary family himself and was never kicked out of the country like some of his contemporaries, although he did “self-exile” himself to Europe in solidarity.

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1. De sua formosura
(João Cabral de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa)
2. Severino – O rio
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa)
• Notícias do Alto Sertão (Airton Barbosa-J.C. de Melo Neto)
3. Mulher na janela
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa – Chico Buarque)
4. Homens de pedra
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa)
5. Todo o céu e a terra
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa)
6. Encontro com o canavial
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa)
7. Funeral de um lavrador
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Chico Buarque)
8. Chegada ao Recife
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa)
9. As ciganas
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa)
10. Despedida do agreste
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa)
11. O outro Recife
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa)
12. Fala do Mestre Carpina
(J.C. de Melo Neto – Airton Barbosa)

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I – Caminho ou Fuga da Morte

1. (Monólogo) – O retirante explica ao leitor quem é e a que vai.
2.(Diálogo) – Encontra dois homens carregando um defunto numa rede, aos gritos de: “ó irmãos das almas! irmãos das almas! não fui eu que matei não!”
3. (Monólogo) – O retirante tem medo de se extraviar porque seu guia, o rio Capibaribe, cortou com o verão.
4. (Diálogo) – Na casa a que o retirante chega estão cantando excelências para um defunto, enquanto um homem, do lado de fora, vai parodiando as palavras dos cantadores.
5. (Monólogo) – Cansado da viagem o retirante pensa interrompê-la por uns instantes e procurar trabalho ali onde se encontra.
6. (Diálogo) – Dirige-se à mulher na janela que depois descobre tratar-se de quem se saberá.
7. (Monólogo) – O retirante chega à Zona da Mata , que o faz pensar, outra vez, em interromper a viagem.
8. (Diálogo) – Assiste ao enterro de um trabalhador de eito e ouve o que dizem do morto os amigos que o levaram ao cemitério.
9. (Monólogo) – O retirante resolve apressar os passos para chegar logo ao Recife.
10. (Diálogo) – Chegando ao Recife, o retirante senta-se para descansar ao pé de um muro alto e caiado e ouve, sem ser notado, a conversa de dois coveiros.
11. (Monólogo) – O retirante aproxima-se de um dos cais do Capibaribe.
12. (Diálogo) – Aproxima-se do retirante o morador de um dos mocambos que existem entre o cais e a água do rio.

II – O Presépio ou O Encontro com a Vida

13. (Presépio) – Uma mulher, da porta de onde saiu o homem, anuncia-lhe o que se verá.
14. (Presépio) – Aparecem e se aproximam, da casa do homem, vizinhos, amigos,
duas ciganas, etc.
15. (Presépio) – Começam a chegar pessoas trazendo presentes para o recém-nascido.
16. (Presépio) – Falam as duas ciganas que haviam aparecido com os vizinhos.
17. (Presépio) – Falam os vizinhos, amigos, pessoas que vieram com presentes, etc.
18. (Conclusão da Peça) – O carpina fala com o retirante que esteve de fora, sem tomar parte em nada.

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Gravação ao vivo do espetáculo “Morte e Vida Severina” – Auto de Natal Pernambucano – texto do poeta João Cabral de Melo Neto, encenado pelo elenco do Teatro da Universidade Católica de São Paulo, o TUCA. Foi consagrado no Festival Mundial de Teatro de Nancy (França, 1966), e recebida como revolucionária produção estética. É muito comum blogs musicais confundirem este disco com o álbum “MORTE E VIDA SEVERINA” (Airton Barbosa, Marcus Pereira-1977), trilha sonora do filme “Morte e Vida Severina” (direção de Zelito Viana, Embrafilme-1977).

O texto é escrito em 1955, sob encomenda de Maria Clara Machado, que não ousa encená-lo naquele momento. O poema ganha alta estatura no panorama da literatura brasileira, tendo o crítico Décio de Almeida Prado, na crítica ao espetáculo, afirmado que o poema “tende a tornar-se rapidamente para o nosso século aquilo que O Navio Negreiro foi para o século dezenove”.

A escolha do texto pelo TUCA, com o intuito de realizar um trabalho mobilizatório, com a coordenação cultural de Roberto Freire, atende a um duplo objetivo: um texto de alta qualidade artística aliado a um tema que permita que sejam explorados seus aspectos sociais. Na fábula, o retirante Severino desce o rio Capibaribe em busca do mar e da cidade do Recife, cruzando, em seu percurso, com diversas paisagens marcadas pela morte e a miséria. Ao chegar à cidade, nos manguezais periféricos, assiste a um parto, onde a vizinhança traz seus presentes ao bebê, novas demonstrações da pobreza, rebatida pelo pai da criança com a única esperança: o próprio ato de nascer um novo ser humano.

A precariedade material é assumida pela concepção da encenação, assinada por Silnei Siqueira, e pela cenografia de José Ferrara. A construção da cena parte do trabalho dos atores: com movimentos ondulantes de braços, imitam o canavial batido pelo vento; dois atores, com os braços abertos, figuram a casa e a janela onde a personagem dialoga; procissões, levando redes e ferramentas de trabalho, cruzam todo o tempo o espaço cênico – um pequeno praticável sinuoso recoberto com sacos de estopa. A iluminação tira partido das sombras, projetadas no ciclorama. Muito do encanto da montagem provém da música de Chico Buarque, que ressalta a dureza dos versos do autor ou a pulsação rítmica e melódica com que estão construídos.

Após bem-sucedida carreira em São Paulo e outras cidades, o espetáculo parte para a França, em 1966, obtendo o primeiro lugar no Festival de Nancy. A encenação recebe verdadeira aclamação, deslocando-se em seguida para o Théâtre des Nations, Paris, estendendo-se por mais 50 dias. Porto e Lisboa, em Portugal, são igualmente visitadas, aumentando o prestígio do espetáculo e do grupo realizador, que é convidado a encenar outro espetáculo para o Festival, resultando em O&A, mimodrama de Roberto Freire, apresentado no ano seguinte.

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O Teatro Universitário e “Morte e Vida Severina”

Em abril de 1965, cartazes espalhados pelo campus da PUC anunciavam: “O TUCA vem aí”. E a idéia de teatro universitário com função conscientizadora foi assumida pelo Departamento Cultural do Diretório Central dos Estudantes, que fez três contratações: Roberto Freire seria o diretor-geral do grupo de teatro, Silnei Siqueira, vindo da Record, seria diretor de atores e José Armando Ferrara responderia pela cenografia.

Depois de um contrato de liberação de verba com a Secretaria de Estado, estava formado o Teatro dos Universitários da Católica. Foram feitos testes para a seleção de atores e o texto “Morte e Vida Severina”, de João Cabral de Melo Neto, foi escolhido. Ele reunia muitas razões a seu favor: seu autor era brasileiro, tratava de um tema da realidade social, ia ao encontro da ideologia estudantil e poderia congregar um grande número de atores.

A montagem da peça envolveu vários setores da universidade. Alunos de Geografia, Direito, Letras e Psicologia, por exemplo, contribuíram substancialmente com seus conhecimentos em cada uma das áreas. O espetáculo foi musicado por Chico Buarque, que na época era estudante da Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da USP e participava com freqüência dos ensaios do TUCA.

No dia 11 de setembro de 1965, o Auditório Tibiriçá foi inaugurado com a estréia de “Morte e Vida Severina”. Aplaudido de pé durante 10 minutos, reverenciado pelo público e pela crítica especializada, seria o grupo que emprestaria, a partir de então, seu nome ao teatro.

Os Limites da Censura

As idéias de renovação da cultura iriam chocar-se com as barreiras estabelecidas a partir de 1968. Com a declaração do Ato Institucional Nº 5, a repressão atingiu seu patamar mais alto, que se manteria até por volta de 1975.

A cassação dos direitos políticos, a censura e o exílio de grande número de intelectuais, foram fatores que interferiram na produção artística e cultural. Os teatros universitários eram prejudicados também pela desagregação do Movimento Estudantil.

Entre 1969 e 1974, o espaço voltou-se à apresentação de trabalhos de artistas de alto nível, que contribuíram para a educação e para a abertura de novos caminhos no campo artístico. Espetáculos musicais e teatrais expressivos fizeram parte da programação do Teatro, levando ao palco artistas como Elis Regina, Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, Vinícius de Moraes, Gianfrancesco Guarnieri e Fernanda Montenegro, que em muitas ocasiões enfrentaram a censura.

Entre 1977 e 1984, a programação organizada pelo Instituto de Estudos Especiais, fez com que o Teatro fosse lembrado também por seu alto significado político. Era um palco privilegiado para simpósios, encontros, debates e atos públicos. Nele, o debate sempre foi possível, as idéias expressas claramente, assegurando às palavras sua força de resistência.

taken from
http://www.teatrotuca.com.br/historia2.html

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Esta cova grande em que estás com palmos medida/É a conta menor que tiraste em vida/É de bom tamanho nem largo nem fundo/É a parte que te cabe neste latifúndio”. Este é um dos trechos mais famosos do poema Funeral de um lavrador, da peça Morte e Vida Severina, de João Cabral de Melo Neto. Em homenagem aos 40 anos de estréia dessa peça, o Tuca, teatro da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP), faz uma apresentação especial gratuita do espetáculo, no dia 22 de setembro. As comemorações também contam com exposições, vídeos e uma instalação virtual.

“Esta cova grande em que estás com palmos medida/É a conta menor que tiraste em vida/É de bom tamanho nem largo nem fundo/É a parte que te cabe neste latifúndio”. Este é um dos trechos mais famosos do poema Funeral de um lavrador, da peça Morte e Vida Severina, de João Cabral de Melo Neto. Em homenagem aos 40 anos de estréia dessa peça, o Tuca, teatro da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP), faz uma apresentação especial gratuita do espetáculo, no dia 22 de setembro. As comemorações também contam com exposições, vídeos e uma instalação virtual.

Musicada pelo cantor e compositor Chico Buarque de Holanda, a premiada peça foi encenada pela primeira vez em 11 de setembro de 1965, no próprio Tuca. Foi um enorme sucesso na época, o público aplaudiu de pé a história da viagem do retirante nordestino Severino que abandona o sertão em direção ao Recife, em busca de melhores condições de vida. A estréia marcou um efervescente momento histórico, político e cultural do país, no qual a arte foi usada como instrumento de manifestação política contra a repressão iniciada no golpe militar do ano anterior.

“A peça fez com que o estudante universitário acordasse para a sua participação cultural e encontrasse no teatro um veículo de comunicação veemente e interativo. Ele é tão persuasivo que continua até hoje”, diz a professora Lucrecia D’Alessio Ferrara, da PUC-SP, doutora em Literatura, que participou da montagem da peça na época. Segundo ela, Morte e Vida Severina despertou o estudante universitário para a poesia de João Cabral de Melo Neto, que passou a fazer parte do currículo do ensino médio e dos vestibulares.

Na época, para colocar o projeto em prática, o Diretório Central dos Estudantes (DCE) da PUC-SP convidou o psiquiatra e escritor Roberto Freire (diretor-geral do grupo), Silnei Siqueira (diretor de atores) e José Armando Ferrara (cenógrafo). O espetáculo só foi possível, porque contou com o apoio financeiro de muitos estudantes e artistas. Chico Buarque, na época cursando a Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da USP, chegou a vender seu fusca velho, apelidado de Clóvis, para investir no espetáculo. Roberto Freire rifou a linha telefônica e o artista plástico Aldemir Martins doou seus quadros. Foi até criado um diploma simbólico, pelo publicitário Carlito Maia, chamado “Ordem do Tucano”, para distinguir aqueles que colaboravam. Ao final das apresentações, havia “canjas musicais” com grandes nomes como Elis Regina, Dorival Caymmi e Geraldo Vandré.

A peça foi apresentada em várias regiões do país. A repercussão junto ao público e à crítica foi tão grande que o espetáculo viajou para a França, onde recebeu o prêmio do 4º Festival Universitário em Nancy, em maio de 1966. Morte e Vida Severina excursionou também pelas cidades de Lisboa, Coimbra e Porto, em Portugal. Na volta da turnê internacional, o grupo teatral foi recebido no aeroporto de Congonhas por muitos estudantes e seguiu em carro aberto para o Tuca.

“Com o endurecimento do regime militar, aos poucos o grupo acabou se dispersando. O teatro universitário não deslanchou para a sociedade brasileira, os movimentos de valorização à cultura popular foram dissipados pela ditadura e desde então a PUC-SP não teve um projeto cultural daquela envergadura”, diz o professor de teologia e jornalismo dessa universidade, Jorge Cláudio Ribeiro, responsável pela pesquisa e elaboração do site em homenagem aos 40 anos.

in 320kbs em pee tree

in FLAC LOSSLESS AUDIO

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João Cabral de Melo Neto, with what appears to be a Photoshopped pair of eyeglasses propped up against his chin…
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Silvio Rodríguez – Al final de este viaje (1978)

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Day Three of the Revolutionary Music Experiment

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Silvio Rodríguez
“Al final de este viaje 1968/70”
Released 1978

1. Canción del elegido
2. Familia la propiedad privada y el amor
3. Ojalá
4. Era esta pariendo un corazon
5. Resumen de noticias
6. Debo partirme en Dos
7. Oleo de mujer con sombrero
8. Aunque no este de moda
9. Que se puede hacer con el amor
10. Al final de este viaje en la vida

Silvio Rodríguez was a driving force behind the nueva trova movement of folk song in Cuba, the counterpart to the nueva canción music happening elsewhere in Latin America. But unlike artists like Victor Jara and Mercedes Sosa, I spent far too long of my life being unaware of his greatness. I have two theories on why this might be, which are not mutually exclusive. 1) I have an allergy to most music recorded after 1980, and since that is the decade when Silvio really became a huge international success, it’s possible I was just avoiding him for purely medical reasons. Or, 2) the fact that I am a citizen of a country that tried to destroy his and, failing that, suppress it in any way possible.

Whatever the case, I am thankful to a dear friend and a card-carrying member of the American Socialist Party for turning me on to Silvio, as well as other things. By which I just mean music, of course. Like helping me to finally “get” Charlie Garcia by dropping some Sui Generis on me. It’s friends like that who make this journey worthwhile.

Although this is Silvio Rodríguez’s second LP, all of the material on it was written while he was working on a fishing boat in 1969 and, according to him, writing more than 10 songs a day or something like that. Unlike his first album “Días y flores” which had a backing band on it, this record is just Silvio and his guitar. The result is a pretty stunning experience. Although song titles like “La familia, la propiedad privada y el amor” make you expect heavy-handed paeans to Engels, his songs are much more subtle than that and force the listener to hear them as personally as the writer felt them. His intimacy and romanticism are, in that sense, not terribly different than what Robert Wyatt (yesterday’s featured artist) does in his best work. His particular way of reminding us that the personal is political develops even further on his next record, Mujeres.

“Ojalá” is easily his most famous composition and its anthemic tension makes it pretty easy to see why. If you go and look around Youtube you can find clips of him playing this live before audiences that are singing every word. Kind of boring to watch, actually, as I’d much rather hear the man himself. This reminds me, I have a third theory in this blog post. 3) If the Domino Theory had been anything other than a bunch of jingoism, the opening guitar figure of Ojalá would have taken the place of the opening stanzas of Stairway to Heaven as the most overplayed guitar part in popular music. “Resumen de Noticias” is also wonderful and rich with strong melodies as is the epic “Debo Partirme en Dos”, although the latter has a “b” part with a chord progression that annoys the living hell out of me for some reason, and song goes on about one minute too long. “Que Se Puede Hacer con el Amor” is f-ing gorgeous as well, and the the last track is good enough to name a whole album after it.

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Silvio Rodríguez – Al final de este viaje (1978) in 320kbs em pee tree

Silvio Rodríguez – Al final de este viaje (1978) in FLAC LOSSLESS AUDIO

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The Revolutionaries – The Revolutionaries (1976)

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reggae

Well since I missed an opportunity to post something appropriate for International Workers Day at the beginning of the month, I thought I might make up for it by setting myself a challenge of posting one politically-oriented post a day for the last week of May. They will run the gamut from overbearingly obvious to more nuanced material, and I reserve the right to stop the experiment at any time should my real life get in the way. The write ups will be briefer than they have been lately, but since the music tends to speak for itself I figure that’s okay. Like this record — you should really pay attention to the lyrics!

What better way to start this off than with a reggae album featuring tracks (HIT songs, no less) with names like M.P.L.A. and Angola and a rendering of Che Guevara on the cover before he began to appear on baseball hats made in sweatshops? Additional acroynmic titles pay homage to the A.N.C. and the P.L.A. These early days of The Revolutionaries were when Sly & Robbie were infiltrating the reggae universe with their subversive, machine-tight (perhaps overly so..) rhythmic propaganda. All they lacked was their own airplane from which to drop these tracks over the impoverished masses hungry for Rasta socialisim across the globe. The record is also notable for the polemical sax playing of Tommy McCook and the class consciousness of guitarist Chinna Smith.
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Original release 1976 on Well Charge
CD pressing, Channel One (#JJCD 034)
Also known as “Revolutionary Sounds”

M.P.L.A.
Earthquake
Why War
Leftist
Sudden Attack
Angola
P.L.A.
I Need A Roof
A.N.C.
Right In Ah It
Death In The Arena
Death Trap
Headache
Toothache

Producer : Joseph Hoo Kim

Engineer : Ernest Hoo Kim & Ossie Hibbert

Backing Band : The Revolutionaries
Drums : Sly Dunbar
Bass : Ranchie & Robbie Shakespeare
Lead Guitar : Rad Bryan & Tony Chin
Keyboards : Ansel Collins & Tarzan
Trombone : Don D. Junior
Tenor Saxophone : Tommy McCook
Alto Saxophone : Herman Marquis
Percussions : Sticky

Studios :
Recording : Channel One (Kingston, JA)
Remixing : Channel One (Kingston, JA)

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reggae
in 320kbs em pee treeeeee
) in FLAC LOSSLESS Audioooooo

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Mississippi John Hurt – The Complete Studio Recordings (2000)

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Blues for all seasons and any time of day.

I must have been about seventeen years old when I came across a copy of Mississippi John Hurt`s album “Today” at what was then one of two shops that sold vinyl in the small city where I was working as either a dishwasher or a line cook or something and living in a crappy apartment. They kept all their vinyl in a cellar downstairs from the CDs and VHS rental business that was probably paying their bills. On this particular week they were clearing out a bunch of stuff that had been there forever and which I guess they assumed nobody really wanted. I went home with armloads of Junior Wells, Memphis Slim, Professor Longhair, and other delights. I remember with great clarity specifically flipping through this one stack of albums and finding “Today” on Vanguard Records, still sealed, and being struck immediately by the cover. Here was this serene, smiling man radiating warmth and some kind of otherworldly understanding that I needed to buy that record, right then and there, and take it home so it would change my life.

I had never heard anything like it before. I was well-groomed in the harsher, rough-shod, angrier Delta Blues of Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Fred McDowell. I had begun a love affair with blues piano players and was convinced I wanted to move to New Orleans after I saved some money, maybe sometime after I turned eighteen. But I had no real context for Mississippi John Hurt. There was just no way I could imagine Keith Richards shooting heroin while listening to this stuff. Sure, it had sadness in it, but also tranquility. Listening to John Hurt was an instantly soothing experience, more gratifying than any of the drugs I was currently poisoning myself with. His voice was incomparable, carrying in it all the clichés you could possibly think of about old wise black men who have transcended their suffering somehow. Resigning myself to never being to able to sing like him, I quickly devoted myself to learning how to play “Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor.” Somehow that tune represented much of what I was loving in his sound, the syncopated movement, upbeat but not hurried, complex but not flashy, reminding me of what Scott Joplin might have sounded like if he were a guitarist, and then adding a major-7 chord change that just kills me every time it comes around. Most guitarists will recognize that Hurt’s playing may sound deceptively simple and natural but is actually quite complex. And the way his hands and voice working together was wonderful, often finishing a vocal line with his guitar rather than singing it. This was basically the only John Hurt song I would ever play, which is odd, because I am pretty sure I could have picked up quite a few of them after understanding his cross-picking patterns to the extent that I did. I think there was something about the magical quality of listening to that album for the first time, of hearing this man play his delicately strident, quietly confident guitar underneath his warm but also frail voice — something about that felt like a holy experience that I did not want to spoil by trying to learn all the man’s “secrets”. There are not too many male blues artists whose work was capable of evoking this level of nuance and beauty, haunting but never haunted.

This collection of this three studio albums is a godsend. The music could have been crammed onto two discs but not without splitting up one of them into two parts, and I appreciate the integrity of keeping the running order intact. The liner notes by John Milward are a good read, supplying a lot of essential background, anecdotes, and a sense of what it was like for John Hurt to be a black man performing for an almost exclusively white audience during the blues and folk revival of the 1960s. Although Hurt had recorded quite a few songs for Okeh Reocrds in the late 1920s, he had not been actively performing for decades before a couple of blues enthusiasts, inspired by the 78’s he cut for Okeh (two of which were included on the influential Anthology of American Folk Music released by the Folkways label in 1952) resolved to track him down. They found him where he was still living in the small unincorporated community of Avalon and working as a sharecropper, and convinced a reluctant and suspicious Hurt to travel with them to Washington D.C. and make some recordings. Listening to the results of those recordings made for the Library of Congress (collected in two volumes and issued recently as “D.C. Blues” on the Fuel 2000 label), you can hear that while his voice is still warm, his finger-picking is not quite as strong as it had been, or would be again. Simply an issue of being out of practice, something that would soon change, and quickly. Hurt would soon become a darling of the new folk revival of the 1960s.

The fairy-tale story of the performer floundering in obscurity (otherwise known as normal, daily existence for most of us) and being rediscovered is such an overworked trope it merits its own Jungian archetype. Someday I want to make a catalog of them all in a table or spreadsheet, starting with people like John Hurt, and Cartola (born Agenor de Oliveira) who although he had been one of Brazil’s foremost and in-demand samba composers in the 1930s had been ‘rediscovered’ working at a car wash in the mid-1950s by a music journalist who recognized him. Although getting a chance to live out the last of your days playing the music you love to adoring audiences in cozy clubs or massive folk festivals is not a bad note to go out of this world on, he didn’t get rich from it and never made a dime off his own recordings. As John Milward writes, Hurt was still a subaltern in American society, “the only difference was that the white people he worked for now didn’t own farm or cattle, but coffeehouses and record companies.” Milward recounts how Hurt befriended another southerner and Vanguard artist, white folk singer Patrick Sky, who produced the sessions that became these three albums, and spent much time with Hurt hanging around with Dave Van Ronk and getting loaded. Sky had to more or less lock everyone else out of the studio to get Hurt to loosen up enough to do his thing and capture these moments. Something I never realized until coming across this collection of all three albums was that Mississippi John Hurt never even got to see the impact of these recordings, as he passed away in the same year they began to be released.

While many blues enthusiasts — purists as many of them tend to be — swear that the 1920s 78s are superior, I am very attached to these recordings, particularly “Today.” Perhaps because I am, at heart, a romantic, and it was in this aural context that I encountered John Hurt. I am also a sucker for well-made recordings rather than scratchy 78s, and my hipster friends who love scratchy 78s can laugh at me if they want, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

john hurt

“Today”
Released 1966 on Vanguard VSD-79220

Of the three albums presented in this collection, “Today” still remains my favorite. As I already stated, sentimental reasons come into play here, but it is also a very, very strong listening experience. The aforementioned “Pallet” which — unbeknownst to me at the time – was largely a reworking of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train”, and which was also covered by none other than Gillian Welch years after I discovered the song. “Corrina, Corrina” is also a song that’s always been dear to me and has taken on unintended nuances I never expected, folding my own stories into his. “Coffee Blues” definitely gets and award for the best product-placement in a mid-60s acoustic blues song. Then there is the immortal, gorgeous rendition of Louis Collins. In fact “Today” features a whole lot of the songs he cut for Okeh, with the very notable exception of “Frankie” which is strangely left off all of these discs. But how many albums in your collection have the line, “Goddamn them sheep, goddamn them sheep” on them? None? That’s what I thought. So obviously, you need this album in your life.

john hurt

“The Immortal Mississippi John Hurt”
Released 1967 on Vanguard VSD-79248

“The Immortal Mississippi John Hurt”, released after his death, is just a vital even if not quite as strong as “Today.” The gospel of “When I Lay My Burden Down” is as uplifting as any hymnal, “Moaning the Blues” lays an accent on a low bass note that brings out the swamp in Hurt’s delta. The song also introduces a second-guitar (played by Sky if I am not mistaken) for the first time on these records. They would take this approach only a few times across the three days of recording that produced these albums, and it works quite well. Other highlights are “I’ve Got The Blues and I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and of course the iconic Stagolee, which is about a very bad man. Like bookends, the album closes with another gospel tune, “Nearer My God to Thee”.

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“Last Sessions”
Released 1972 on Vanguard VSD 79327

“Last Sessions” is sort of the clunker of the bunch. There are no bad songs on it (although his reading of ‘Goodnight Irene’ doesn’t do much for me personally) but it seems obvious to me why this material was kept in the vault until the 70s and left off the first two releases in favor of more inspired material. A lot of it just lacks the inspiration found on the material collected on the first two. Still, it has some essential music on it. “Poor Boy Long Ways From Home” is a blues touchstone, “Farther Along” is another spiritual anthem,”Shortnin’ Bread” stands out and makes me hungry, and “Good Morning, Carrie” shows a subtlety not found in a lot of blues, a song of unrequited love upon news that the object of his affection is about to be married to another. The second guitar on this one works really well. My favorite here, though, has to be “Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me” which has some of the best lyrics anywhere on this entire collection:

Blues all on the ocean, blues all in the air.
Can’t stay here no longer, I have no steamship fare.
When my earthly trials are over, carry my body out in the sea.
Save all the undertaker bills, let the mermaids flirt with me.

I do not work for pleasure, earthly peace I’ll see no more.
The only reason I work at all, is drive the world from my door.
When my earthly trials are over, carry my body out in the sea.
Save all the undertaker bills, let the mermaids flirt with me.

Vanguard did a very nice job on this set, albeit a little sparse on packaging and photography. The mastering is quite nice, superior to the CD pressing I’ve heard of “Today” (the only one I’ve ever come across on CD). In fact the mastering engineer was able to restore bass frequencies that were rolled off of the original vinyl pressings, although I have not sat down to do an A/B comparison to have any opinion about that.

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Gato Barbieri – Bolivia (1973) with Lonnie Liston Smith

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Gato Barbieri
“Bolivia”
1973 on Flying Dutchman Records (FD-10158)
This pressing 2001, BMG France

Merceditas
Eclypse / Michellina
Bolivia
Niños
Vidala Triste

Produced by Bob Thiele

Bass – J.-F. Jenny-Clark , Stanley Clarke
Drums – Airto Moreira, Pretty Purdie (Merceditas only)
Guitar – John Abercrombie
Percussion – Airto Moreira , Gene Golden , James M’tume* , Moulay “Ali” Hafid
Piano, Electric Piano – Lonnie Liston Smith
Tenor Saxophone, Flute, Vocals – Gato Barbieri

The corporeal memory of pleasures briefly known and longing barely quenched. Her skin still ageless, her scent rich in my lungs, we drifted off together in exhaustion. She left me there sleeping, a note on the kitchen table. She left me there dreaming the Bolivarian dream of an America united across the hemispheres. She left me a folheto she bought from a street hawker who recited it for us from beginning to end and offered to continue with more. She may have bought it just to silence him and send him on his way, a bribe to leave us to our own private somnambulist poetry. A crowded street in the old city, as he walked away from us I barely noticed that all sound faded into a steady hum of a single note in the dark regions of my awareness, hearing only her voice; of all color fading into a uniform grey, seeing only her pale skin in the half-light. All senses withdrawn into one still point of awareness. She left me lost in the Bolivarian dream as she went back to the arms of the beast that bore me, the colossus of the north yawning and stretching its million arms to every corner of this dying earth. Our homes were exchanged in a backroom trade between our saints arm-wrestling the invisible hand that feeds us. They lost. The body memory of longing never quenched and peace in the future conjunctive. Even the strongest of unions could barely hold out against the fading of that dream.

—————–

This is another beautiful record from Gato Barbieri, making music quite unlike anything else going on at the time and with an ensemble that’s hard to beat. Lonnie Liston Smith receives co-billing on the front cover, and its no coincidence as his Cosmic Echoes band was putting out their first album on Flying Dutchman the same year. The opening track “Merceditas”, having no less than Pretty Purdy, Airto, and M’tume playing together, would seem to be a climax before foreplay, and in any other hands that might be the case. Barbieri pulls this off, though, as the strength of the rest of material is more than enough to carry the album. The title track is particularly rich, beautiful and terrifying. It is difficult for me to write about this record because the liner notes from Nat Hentoff, a much better writer than I’ll ever be, humble the movement of my pen. I will, however, freely quote from him:


“The life-affirming, surging spirit of these performances – with their supple range of colors, rhythms, soaring melodies – is the essence of that basic, visceral beauty that gives hope to lovers and revolutionaries and to all those who believe in real life before death. His music is an embodiment of perennial possibility that is made of blood and flesh rather than vaporous dreams. Gato, in sum, is among the the least abstract of musicians because he is so explosively, specifically alive.”

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Gary Bartz NTU Troop's "Juju Street Songs" (1972) vinyl

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From Michael Jackson to Malcolm X: Gary Bartz NTU Troop’s “Juju Street Songs” (1972) vinyl

Gary Bartz at his best created music that heals the soul and lifts the spirit. This may sound trite to you. So be it. If language was sufficient to express what I hear in the best jazz musicians’ work, there wouldn’t have been any reason for them to compose and play it. The signifier and the signified. Beyond the reach of the word, this time, and found in the sustained note of a saxophone or the modal chord changes of an electric piano. The spirituality effervescing from this music is, perhaps, of a piece with the time it was created. A time when radical politics danced with eastern philosophy and African religious ideas, when Franz Fanon sat next to the Koran and the Sutras on the same bookshelf. I had an exchange, one of those conversations that is somewhere between a debate and an argument, about the idea of racial pride and specifically black pride. My interlocutor was stoically against the idea of any pride based around the concept of race. The argument was elaborated in a way that was similar to or identical to others I had heard before, on the streets of Chicago or in the halls of higher learning, or over drinks in the country that imported more slaves from Africa than anywhere else on the planet. On the level of abstractions, where most people contemplate such questions, the argument holds some water, but tends to leak like a British oil rig the minute flesh-and-blood people in actual historical contexts are factored in. It’s a reasonable enough argument usually found on the lips of white people, who invented the very idea of race as a means with which to categorize, catalog, and compare humanity along a sliding scale of value. And easy enough for whites to then discard the idea as of little analytical worth once it becomes inconveniently reclaimed and rearticulated by the racialized. White people can do this because of the common epistemology that they are colorless, some sort of neutral human template, rather than part of the dialogic process in which racial identities calcify. Do not think I’m skipping lightly over the heterogeneity that is glossed over by these terms — it is no more analytically rigorous or accurate to talk of “white people” than it is “black people,” merely chromatic poles in a spectrum, yet there are generalizations that can be made, MUST be made, as a starting point of any meaningful analysis. Dissimulation, the refusal to make assertions and critique, is a poor substitute for nuance. In a historical situation of dominance where deliberate concerted efforts were made to not only strip away a peoples’ cultural lifeways, but even their very ability to identify their own family – the forbidding of slaves to keep surnames, for example — we simply cannot look at “black pride” with the same optic we might use for “white pride.”

But in a way these thoughts were all beside the point. To throw a blanket statement over the fire of racial pride and (re)valorization, to call it essentially destructive and polarizing, is to utterly decontextualize the dynamic situations where such movements take place. And they are movements in every vibration of that term – collective, with a particular understanding of the past, and a particular vision for remaking the world. In the Afrocentric spiritual jazz of the 1960s and 70s you are dealing with musicians old enough to remember segregation, young enough to remember there was more to the civil rights struggle than just Dr. King, equally inspired by Charlie Parker and Motown, and emboldened by a solidarity, symbolic or otherwise, with the victims of dislocation, colonization, and imperialism around the globe. Musicians who were active when Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist enemy of the state, and who watched as a score of African nations struggled for and won their independence in the 50s and 60s. A time when any hopefulness gained from desegregation and decolonization was tempered by the violence in the streets, of black and brown-skinned people as canon fodder in Vietnam, of the scourge of heroin in the ghettos. Ghetto, a word that dates to the seventeenth century and was used throughout Europe since that time and well into the twentieth century to denote a Jewish neighborhood. From Webster, Etymology: Italian, from Venetian dial. ghèto island where Jews were forced to live, literally, foundry (located on the island), from ghetàr to cast, from Latin jactare to throw. It also referenced the iron foundries and slag heaps of the Venetian island where the word came into usage. After the liberation of the concentration camps came the concentration of more and more brown and black skinned peoples into the marginalized landscapes of urban U.S. cities, populated by the human slag heaps of four hundred years of dehumanizing capitalist accumulation. The ghetto, a signifier so dire in its valence that even the most celebratory of Afrocentricities could not celebrate it. It is nearly always condemned as a particular circle of a Dantean hell; if spoken of with warmth or nostalgia it is accompanied by extreme qualifiers that leave no doubt as to its demoralizing enervation. This is different from the barrio of Puerto Ricans (many of them also black, but until right around this time more historically likely to distance themselves from the African-American as long as they bought into the white dream of upwardly mobile meritocracy). The barrio could represent resistance, preservation of cultural values across time and space and against odds for the Latino enclaves dislocated by transnational flows, or crossed by the border. The ghetto, on the other hand, was always only a few steps away from an ethnic cleansing by the dominant power. And in this case, that was white America. Not even Nina Simone, a luminous torch of the civil rights movement, could bring herself to thoroughly trust the white people around her in the music business. Smart woman, Nina.

So when Gary Bartz dedicated Harlem Bush Music to Malcolm X, we should really pay attention to that. It is not a footnote. It is an exclamation point and a wake-up call.

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What does all this have to with me, with my comfortable middle-class childhood and existence? What does all this have to do with my mixed-race home and its aspirations to the American Dream? What does any of this have to do with me – culturally white, politically red, spiritually yellow? Perhaps nothing at all.* Maybe nothing to do with me or perhaps it’s better for me to do nothing.

But everything to do with me when I pick up this album on a night when I don’t know if I’ll make it through to the next day, and find there a spirit to meet me half way and whisper, “Time is running out, time is running..” Music that makes me close my eyes and open my heart and find the stain of self-hatred so old it’s faded, like scar tissue from a clumsy surgeon. When I play this record I am filled with the compassionate joy that the buddhists talk about. There is a comfort, not a reassurance, but a comfort and camaraderie in having someone else show you, with their music, that everything is NOT alright, but that you will survive. Because you have so far. And because there are few other choices. I want to be where you are. The longing for oneness, peering into the gaping maw of transcendent consciousness, obliterating the individual, the longing for union with god, with a lover, with one’s true self. Know thyself, you dig? In the first two minutes of this track we are brought through all the changes of death, repose, and rebirth – of solemn reflection followed by exultation to be simply alive.

Can it be I stayed away too long?
Did I leave your mind when I was gone?
It’s not my thing trying to get back
But this time let me tell you where I’m at

This song is one of Michael’s huge early hit songs, released in 1972, written by Leon Ware and T-Bone Ross. I doubt they ever imagined it played this way when first putting it together.

I understand better now why bassist Stafford James plays his electric bass through some type of envelope follower or flange pedal. It makes his playing more elastic, the attack of the notes more susceptible to coaxing out the bottom end of rhythm, supporting but not overwhelming Howard King’s drums. Bartz blowing his sax like a mad dervish, sometimes modulating it with a wah-wah pedal in small, choice musical phrases. He runs this slice of Motown through a melodic meat grinder and gives us prime grade-a. Listen to Andy Bey`s chord inversions around the vocal melody while Bartz veers outward and beyond on modal flights of fancy. The last three or so minutes of this (cut from the version on the anthology posted at Flabbergasted Vibes previously) see the ensemble swinging the main refrain with heavy funk before is total deconstruction approaching the nine-minute mark, playing in free time and destroying the love-lorn pleas into a pastiche, threatening to put them all back together again for one final chorus, but instead leaving us hanging and still wanting to be where you are.

The next track is even more Motown. “Black Maybe,” a song written for Syreeta by her producer and one-time husband Stevie Wonder. Like “I Want To Be Where You Are,” this song also dropped in 1972. The sessions for this album were cut in October of that year, showing just how little time the NTU Troop wasted in restocking their ammunition. Slowing this song down to a slow burner with a blues feeling, you can still here Stevie’s hand in the melody. Andy Bey may not have the same vocal magic as either Stevie or Syreeta, but I love the guy’s voice and he was a perfect fit for Bartz’s musical vision. On this track you can also clearly hear the double-mic technique Bartz was using to get part of his sound. The microphone panned to the right channel is clean saxophone, probably with the mic placed above and slightly out in front; the left channel is the modulated signal run through a wah pedal, with microphone mostly likely stuck damn nearly right in the bell of the sax. The result is a sound that envelopes the listener in the aural equivalent of a vice grip, death via saxophone, but so sweetly a demise has rarely unfolded on this earth. Lyrically one of Stevie’s most intriguing, complex, and radical songs tackling racial and identity politics with an urgency to unsettle the mentality of pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-and-to-hell-with-your-brother that we can, once again, generalize as endemic to a white middle-class value system . If only people had listened more closely to the message of Stevie’s music more generally, MJ would never have bleached his skin and Will Smith would never have existed. Time is running out, time is running… out.

Bertha Baptist (b.1942, Atlanta, Georgia, d. 1980). Although having no familial relationship to Bertha Butt, the two were friends and frequently exchanged anecdotes and gossip at a Harlem hair salon. Due to her strict religious beliefs, Bertha Baptist was constantly turning down Bertha Butt’s invitations to go out for a night of dancing. Those places are for drunkards and hussies, she would say. However one day curiosity got the better of her and she accompanied Ms. Butt to a local jazz club (Miss Baptist kept calling it a “juke joint”), where as it happened the evening’s entertainment was Gary Bartz & NTU Troop. During one of Andy Bey’s funky electric piano solos, Bertha threw all modesty to the wind and astonished all onlookers as she performed dance moves she picked up working in a New Orleans brothel ten years earlier before she found The Lord her savior. It was the one and only time anyone in New York would ever see her dance. Bassist Stafford James wrote a song in her honor. He also looks curiously like Bertha’s only child, William, born about six months after this record was released.

Africans Unite. Feels like we´ve discussed this already. Pan-African transatlantic solidarity, percussion frenetic yet easy on the ears, a folk melody building to a chant of “Let’s do it now”. A Bartz original composition with fluid riffing over the stuttering rhythmic base. Teheran. Well it’s a few years too early to be about the Iranian Revolution. The song is as mysterious to me as it was probably intended to be, Bartz seducing us in serpentine Phrygian-mode rivulets of sound, a shimmering tapestry of gongs as a backdrop in the king’s palace, Howard King playing his toms and snare drums with mallets and laying down heavy on an open high-hat and cymbals. (Side note — this is the track that has the most ‘clicks and pops’ from the vinyl. The presence of so much sibilance from the cymbals and gongs and other percussion made it risky to try and remove these clicks and I opted to leave them in rather than potentially lose frequencies by trying to clean them up.)

Gary Bartz NTU Troop – Juju Street Songs
Prestige Records (P-10057) 1972

A1 I Wanna Be Where You Are 10:04
A2 Black Maybe 9:38
B1 Bertha Baptist 6:32
B2 Africans Unite 6:30
B3 Teheran 8:20

Vinyl -> Pro-Ject RM-5SE turntable (with Sumiko Blue Point 2 cartridge, Speedbox power supply) > Creek Audio OBH-15 -> M-Audio Audiophile 2496 Soundcard -> Adobe Audition 3.0 at 24-bits 96khz -> Click Repair light settings, remaining clicks removed manually in Audition -> dithered and resampled using iZotope RX Advanced

Alto Sax, Soprano Sax, Sopranino, Voice, Electric Piano, Percussion – Gary Bartz
Bass, Electric Bass, Voice, Percussion – Stafford James
Drums, Voice, Percussion – Howard King
Vocals, Electric Piano, Percussion – Andy Bey

Recorded at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, California, October 1972.
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Note that the file sets will actually have 1973 as the year, which is erroneous. Please correct this mistake yourself if it matters to you.

*(Look around the internet for some ‘user reviews’ of some Gil Scott-Heron albums — you the site I mean — and you may find the ranting of one reactionary man who insists Gil’s music has absolutely nothing of value to offer to white Americans like himself. Don’t take my word for it, go and look.)

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