June 2014 – Flabbergasted Vibes

Marinês e Sua Gente
Nordeste Valente
1976 CBS 104333

01. Nordeste valente (João Silva – J. B. de Aquino)
02. Casa de marimbondo (Djalma Leonardo – Antonio Barros)
03. Carimbó de vovó sinhá (Naldo Aguiar)
04. Flor de croatá (João Silva – Raymundo Evangelista)
05. Sou o estopim (Antonio Barros)
06. Grilo na moringa (G. de San – José Gomes Filho)
07. No laço do carimbô (Naldo Aguiar)
08. Você me machucou (Kim de Oly – André Araujo)
09. Mestre mundo (Julinho – Luiz Bandeira)
10. Nosso amor está morrendo (Antonio Barros)
11. Maracá de menino (Assizão)
12. Como vai passando (Cecéu – Ademar Caetano)

———————

Here’s a thoroughly pleasant album by forró singer Marinês, the Queen of Xaxado, because I’ve been remiss in commemorating the Festas Juninas this year. It probably won’t knock your socks off or anything, but the arrangements and playing are very tight and a make for fun listening. There are also no less than three tracks of carimbó here, a style that is northern rather than northeastern, proving again that Nordestinos embrace good dance music no matter where it’s from. And also that the carimbó was getting super popular in the second half of the 70s.

What keeps this record from rising above merely average is the sparsity of stand-out compositions on it, a failing of a lot of records in this genre from the time. I mean, the first song is kind of an earworm. I’ve always liked that word, “earworm.” For me it always seemed like an earworm ought to be a sinister psychic phenomenon from the world of Dune. You are stranded somewhere on Arrakis with a song you can’t get out of your head. You start tapping your foot involuntarily, and within seconds a gigantic spice-crazed sandworm has appeared from the ground and swallowed you. My point is that earworms can kill you. As further evidence I present “Sou o estopim” – I am the fuse – which is clearly intended to manipulate the listener, Manchurian Candidate-style, into blowing up a government building with homemade explosives.

Actually the latter song was written by Antônio Barros, composer of a ton of forró and a performer in his own right along with partner Cecéu, who also has a credit on the final song of this record. Look, I don’t want to compare all songwriters of forró or baião to Zé Dantas or Humberto Teixeira, because that would be like comparing every English pop band to The Beatles. It’s not fair. I also don’t know nearly enough about Antônio Barros to make bold claims, but there is something formulaic in his writing that just doesn’t do it for me. It’s sort of the “hook school of songwriting” that pushes all the buttons you are supposed to push to make a catchy memorable song, but still ends up producing something that is essentially forgettable as soon as the next catchy song comes around and pushes it out of your ear canal. He’s got song credits all over the place, including Jackson do Pandeiro’s albums from the 1970s that nobody remembers.

I feel the opposite way about the track featured here from João Silva (and Ronaldo Evangelista), “Flor de Croatá.” It has a beautiful melody, one that works at different tempos with equal effect. Check out these two very different versions, the one from this album and another from Jacinto Silva

Good, innit?

Well, enjoy the Festas Juninas if you have one in your area. If not, and don’t have any trendy Euro-American faux forró bands playing in a gentrified neighborhood near you, at least you can put on this record. It’s fun for a least a spin or two.

password: vibes

Aldo Sena e Seu Conjunto
SOLO DE OURO
1984 RGE 309.6006

01    Big Show
02    Lambada Do Papão
03    Juliana
04    Lambada Do Campeão
05    Paraíso
06    Gosto De Você
07     Solo De Ouro
08     Lambada Do Leão
09     Menina Do Cinema
10   Lambada Do Bomba
11     Festa Do Amor
12    Transfusão De Bordão

This post is obviously coming far too late in the day for you to break it out at your Sunday barbeque or churrasco, but there is always next weekend. It’s been a while since I posted anything and I’ve been told that it is of paramount important for your “brand” to stay constantly active in social media.

This is Aldo Sena, one of the greats of guitarrada, a party music from Pará listened to by working class people, and hence largely ignored by the Brazilian cultural elite because they only care about poor people when they can be turned into folklore. The songs on this record comfortably move between related styles like lambada and brega, and there is even a reggae-brega that isn’t half bad. When I first heard the vocal tunes on this record, I felt like they were
filler, but I no longer feel that way. They are pretty good,
especially Menina do Cinema which has that strum-along sing-along Jovem Guarda thing going, and I like Gosto de Você although it may
be the least dread faux-reggae song you’ve heard in a while (hopefully
you won’t find it dreadful..).

Most of Aldo’s repertoire here is instrumental music, centered on his electric guitar that has a clean tone you might associate more with surf music than Brazilian music. A lot of the popular music of northern Brazil has as much if not more in common with things happening with its neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean than with the sounds found in MPB. You are more likely to hear music that sounds like bachata or cumbia than bossa nova. Mestre Vieira, who is kind of the godfather of this stuff (more James Brown than Corleone of course), used to play lots of choro and chorinho at the very beginning of his career, but also played lots of mambo and merengue, an omnivorous music appetite that would have caused music critic José Ramos Tinhorão to begin foaming at the mouth. If guitarrada suddenly came on the scene today, there would be people using words like “transnational” and “hybrid” and “postmodern,” but in the 70s and 80s the gatekeepers of taste would have been, well, unlikely to use those words. Words weren’t really necessary anyway when you could just keep people from being part of the conversation from the beginning.

Things have changed, though, with Aldo Sena having been featured as the youngest member in a “supergroup” called Mestres de Guitarrada along with Mestre Vieira and Mestre Curica. They received attention via showcase presentations at Itaú Cultural in far away lands like São Paulo, and a CD of music released in a great looking but highly impractical wooden box format that has been pretty much out of print and scarce since it the week it was released. Neither of those things would have happened without the intervention of researchers and producers with access to the cultural elite. So it goes with “cultural preservation” and “rescue” missions. You can see a clip of one of these Itaú Cultural shows below, with some of the audience restricted to chair-dancing until finally people can’t resist any longer and end up dancing in the aisles.

Although the power of AM radio airplay should not be underestimated, the bread and butter of artists like Aldo Sena was in live performances. The other live clips, filmed more recently by an audience member at a small club in Ceará, proves that he still sounds great, and the people still dance. Boy do they dance. In the clip that I’ve put first, the band rips through the song “Melô do Bode,” a song by Vieira e Seu Conjunto that is one of my favorite things in the whole world (you can find it here), and the clip below it featuring the fabulous dancers is a carimbó. The last two clips below that are studio tracks from the actual album featured in this post.

password: vibes

** Interesting side note: this needledrop is from an LP that once belonged to Rádio Tamandaré, an AM station in Recife that began in the 1950s and has since converted to an entirely evangelical Christian format (100% Jesus!).

Videoclipes:

Month: June 2014

Marinês e Sua Gente – Nordeste Valente (1976)

Aldo Sena – Solo de Ouro (1984)