Vieira e Seu Conjunto – Lambadas das Quebradas Vol. 2 (1980)


Vieira e Seu Conjunto

Lambadas das Quebradas Vol.2
1980 Musicolor (104.405.359)
 
 
 
01 – Lambada do Rei
02 – Ela Voltou
03 – Bicharada No. 2
04 – Mariazinha
05 – O Seresteiro
06 – Duas Línguas
07 – Lambada do Mapinguari
08 – Joía
09 – Você Se Afastou De Mim
10 – Lambada do Sino
11 – Melô do Bode
12 – Sambista Brasileiro
 
 
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 at 32-bit float 96khz; Click Repair light settings, sometimes turned off; individual clicks and pops taken out with Adobe Audition 3.0 – dithered and resampled using iZotope RX Advanced (for 16-bit). Tags done with Foobar 2000 and Tag and Rename.
There are dozens of Brazilian musical genres that are not only mostly unknown outside its borders but also fail to garner the respect of the gatekeepers of taste that comprise the music-critic establishment (with some notable exceptions). There are dozens of factors in their critical invisibility, and geography is one, but you could boil them all down to the Brazilian elite’s ambivalent relationship to “the popular,” a term laden with racial baggage and class distinctions, and the stubborn refusal of o povo (’the people’) to like what the gatekeepers tell them they are supposed to like, whether it was the CPC or José Ramos Tinhorão or others. It bears reminding the foreign cultural cybernauts here that the “popular” in MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) has nothing to do whatsoever with record sales (it comprises a relatively small portion of the total) or demographic distribution (its consumption is pretty solidly restricted to the middle classes upwards). The construction of the category itself is fascinating and, for the curious, I highly recommend Sean Stroud’s recent book. In all fairness, though, it’s also not as if every musician’s overriding goal was to get a feature interview in O Pasquim magazine either, or that the vast majority of musicians cared passionately one way or another if Tinhorão thought electric guitars were the Devil’s imperialist plaything.  However, since the guitarrada of Mestre Vieira and his band (subject of this blog post, believe it or not) was played on amplified electric guitar, it’s no big surprise that it took years before the critics reluctantly took any notice.
In any event, in the late 1970s while the carioca middle class was at home drinking wine to their Djavan and Ivan Lins records, or out being seen at the Canecão, up in the north of the country there was a thriving music scene around the city of Belém, Para, and its environs: genres like carimbó and sirimbó, siriá, guitarrada, lambada and more. In spite of vowing to roll out some of this stuff over the last three or four years, I have been negligent in bestowing attention to it on this blog. There have been a couple stumbling blocks: first is that I find most of these records in average to poor condition from street vendors (the stuff is by and large “party music,” and thus typically much-played and poorly cared-for), and my obsessive-compulsive quirks – one of which is insisting on presenting the audio here in as good a state as I can get it – seem to get worse as the years progress. So I look at this pile of records, play them with their crackles and pops, and put them away again. The second major stumbling block is my own lack of context – hell, I still haven’t been to visit Belém! So what can I authoritatively say about what made these records resonate with their public, enough to sustain some of these folks with careers that spanned decades? How can I account for this “regional” music being popular enough to still regularly turn up on the sidewalks of Recife two thousand kilometers away and yet barely registering as a blip on the radar of most accounts about Brazilian music? Why does some of it sometimes remind me of Peruvian chicha, or cumbia or merengue, of soukous or calypso, or even West African jùjú music? Can I say such things without the musicological technical wherewithal and jargon to back it up?
I’ve resolved to put those qualms aside and just share some of the music. The impetus for this is profound, originating in a spiritual epiphany I had while under the spell of a viral video about goats yelling like people, while recording one of my podcasts, and deciding to play a song about a goat off this album. Serendipity! This is the second album by one of the founders of both the guitarrada and lambada genres (in fact he is pretty much The King of guitarrada), Joaquim de Lima Vieira, born on October 29, 1934, in the city of Barcarena, in the state of Pará. He is still alive and kicking too, here is a recent photo:

 photo mestrevieira_zps88c621ea.jpg photo mestrevieiranotheatrodapaz_foto_luciana_medeiros1_zps80631aec.jpg

(this gorgeous photo on the bottom was taken by Luciana Medeiros, and I will take a wild guess and say it was probably taken inside Belém’s famous opera house.)

This is animated music and should be an interesting and even an exciting listen, especially for the guitarists out there. The rawness and rough edges are refreshing in an era when MPB had lost any shred of spontaneity and punk rock hadn’t quite arrived yet in Brazil to give folks a shot in the arm, with the band playing cheap instruments that have trouble staying in tune, and a vocalist to match. The only virtuoso here is Vieira himself and that is fine by me. The drummer cracks me up: half the time he engages in sloppy tom-tom fills that remind me of my first garage band, while the rest of the time he pulls off these bad-ass tight snare fills and turnarounds that sound like he’s been listening to ska and rocksteady all day. Check out the intense interaction with the guitar in  Lambada do Maringuari (in the Soundcloud player below).  He even injects some sambalanço into the final track, “Sambista Brasileiro,” which also features some tamborim (small drum played with a stick in samba music). A lot of the record is comprised of instrumentals, and of the tracks that do have vocals the lyrics run the narrow range of romantic/lovelorn songs (Mariazinha, Ela Voltou, Você Se Afastou de Mim) to humor and wordplay (Duas Línguas, Melô do Bode, and Maringuari, this last being about a creature that is sort of the Amazonian Bigfoot). Even the instrumentals have a sense of humor, with ‘Bicharada No.2’ featuring some guitar runs intended to evoke farm animals. I mean in terms of sonic resemblance, not as in evoking with a magic circle chalked on the ground and some incantations. That I suppose that could work too. Another good instrumental is the brega-seresta of “O Seresteiro”As I mentioned earlier, this record was pretty ‘well-played’ in its time, a polite way of saying it’s pretty beat up.  (Check out that awesome seam split repair on the front cover!)  This being the case, I didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time trying to clean up the audio (although probably a lot more time than you would believe after hearing it..).   Do you really need this in 24-bit?  Not really, it’s pretty certainly overkill unless you want to take a stab at going through it with a fine-toothed comb and cleaning up it better for yourself.  But I offer it here anyway.  Until I pick up a better copy, this will have to do for now!

 

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0 Comments

  1. Thanks. I enjoyed the music and your exegesis. It's not far from the reality that white, middle class North American audiences like every form of black music except for the one currently popular with black audiences.

    I also hear analogues to Mozambican, and to a lesser degree, Angolan music. Love the turnarounds from the drummer that you mentioned.

    Thanks for broadening my world.

  2. The goat mix is hysterical. I used that video in a sound class where I was teaching them how to use a particular recording studio. We'd just done percussion multi-tracking, and I needed to show them how to record from the internet straight into the Pro Tools sound card. As an example we fed the goat video directly over the top of the percussion and it was spectacular 🙂

  3. Que overkill que nada, Flabber! Você não sabe o quanto eu adoro os seus vinis em 24/96. E outra, eu achei o som desse vinil MUITO BOM, você fez um trabalho excelente na limpeza desse disco.

    Eu não sou o cara mais doido por vinis. Por eu ser novo e não ter condições de comprar a aparelhagem necessária pra ter um som de qualidade eu tento não pensar muito nisso e dou preferência aos CDs pela facilidade que eles representam em matéria de obtenção de sua qualidade máxima. Mas tem uma coisa que me fascina quanto aos vinis: as obras que estão por aí e que provavelmente nunca vão ser relançadas em CD. Eu quero dizer, qual é a chance de uma gravadora relançar um disco do 'Vieira e Seu Conjunto'?

    Pra mim as pessoas que dividem essa cultura da música na internet são equivalentes a aqueles conjuntos dos números que a gente aprende bem cedo na escola. Existe um grupo grande que compartilha música e dentro desse grupo um grupo menor formado pelos que compartilham e se preocupam com os detalhes e com a qualidade dos arquivos, e ainda dentro desse estão uns poucos que fazem tudo perfeito buscando a maior qualidade possível e é aí que está você, Flabber.

    Existem alguns blogs brasileiros que disponibilizam uma quantidade impressionante de vinis, entre eles muita coisa rara, mas quantos deles tem um mínimo de cuidado na preparação dos arquivos (como a digitalização das capas e dos selos) e quantos deles fazem os arquivos com boa qualidade sonora ao invés de "mp3-tijolos" em 320kbps cheios de nada porque a frequência para aos 16Khz? Eu só consigo pensar em dois, o Loronix e o seu – e atualmente, só o seu.

    Esses rips do vinil em 24/96 que você faz são as coisas mais incríveis que você poderia fazer, não só por causa da qualidade – que já seria mais que o suficiente – mas também pela verdadeira eternização que isso representa para um disco, pelo menos ao meu ver. Sinceramente, escutar um disco desses tão esquecido, tão relegado a um segundo ou terceiro plano, mas tão gostoso e ainda por cima preparado com tanta meticulosidade é uma coisa impagável. Muito obridado, Flabber, isso foi fantástico.

  4. Sun Ira, I'm more familiar with Angolan than Mozambican music. Give me some good recommendations!

    Simon, glad you liked, it was easily the silliest half hour I spent in the month of may. Would have liked to have sat in on that class!

    Valladão, obrigado mesmo mermão. Mas falando sério, cada vez que escuto essa rippagem, estou ouvindo mais coisas melhorar e seria mais fácil achar outra cópia no final das contas. Por enquanto isso serve!

    No assunto de relançamento, fiz uma pesquisa e parece que o selo Stern's Music (de Inglaterra) lançou esse título nos anos 80 mas consegue esse deve ser díficil.

  5. thanks so much! I was looking for some Mestre Vieira music but it's kind of hard to find especially the "lambadas das quebradas". I'm a big fan of Mestre Verequete music too, speaking of Para's music. By the way, do you know the record "Isto É Carimbó" with compositions of Mestre Lucindo? it seems to be a treasure.

  6. Hi Boebis, I have some Verequete to share too, it's great stuff! I don't know that Mestre Lucindo album.

  7. Wow, in 24-bit 96?? This is some serious stuff! Thank you! Awesome collection

  8. Well, you got me with the samples on this one for sure and yes, the goat remix is absolutely too freakin' much fun! You make my head hurt with all of the references to sub-genres that I really have no knowledge of but feel like I need to learn more about. I guess that's a necessary pain for me. I do know that I have lots of Brazilian music that I love and that's really the final arbiter–Is it good and does it move me in some way? The more I know the wiser I become and wisdom tells me that there will always be more to learn. I appreciate your thoughtful discourse and excellent musical taste. Thanks!

  9. Thanks again & again…

    : )

  10. Hi, thanks for this! It was re-released in the 1980's as "Lambada" on the back of the Koama craze and is still available, if you want it, here: http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,196654,00.html

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