Pará – Flabbergasted Vibes

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Pinduca – No Embalo do Pinduca Vol. 10 (1981)

By Dr. Vibes November 25, 2015 June 6, 2019 Carimbó

Pinduca

No Embalo Do Pinduca – Vol. 10

Beverly BLP 83070-A (1991 Reissue)

Original release 1981 Copacabana COELP-41561

A1 Lambada Da Birita (Aquino) 2:34

A2 Urubajara (Pedro Américo – O. Roosevelth) 2:40

A3 Mambo Rabo De Saia (Pinduca – Mário Gonçalves) 2:56

A4 Rosa Em Botão (Pinduca) 3:14

A5 Esta Zinha Meu Amor (Pinduca) 2:06

A6 Poeta Do Mar (Pinduca – Vidinho) 2:48

B1 Siri Mole, Siri Duro (Pinduca – O. Roosevelth) 2:34

B2 Tabatinga (Pinduca – Deuza) 3:03

B3 Siriá Gostoso (Pinduca – Deuza) 2:32

B4 Vizinha Linguaruda (Pinduca – Maria Izabel Pureza) 2:49

B5 Santos De Casa (Pinduca – Tânia) 2:45

B6 Passa, Passa Do Viaduto Do Chá (Carimbó De São Paulo) (Adalberto Pires – Pinduca) 2:36

Artistic direction – Luiz Mocarzel

Executive producer – Pinduca, Talmo Scaranari

Arranged by Pinduca

Recording and mixing engineer – Zilmar Araújo

Mastering – Silvia R. Nascimento

Recorded at DO-RE-MI studios in São Paulo in 24 channels

Photo – Carlos A. Gordon

Layout and design – Jurandir G. Silveira

————————————————————————-

Vinyl; Pro-Ject RM-5SE with Audio Tecnica AT440-MLa cartridge; Speedbox power supply); Creek Audio OBH-15; M-Audio Audiophile 192 Soundcard ; Adobe Audition at 32-bit float 96khz; clicks and pops removed with Adobe Audition 3.0; dithered and resampled using iZotope RX Advanced (for 16-bit). Converted to FLAC in either Trader’s Little Helper or dBPoweramp. Tags done with Foobar 2000 and Tag and Rename.

In this tenth album from master of the carimbó and siriá styles, Pinduca deepens his exploration of the themes he has developed throughout his oeuvre – the nuances of drinking, nosy gossiping neighbors, shellfish, and dancing. Although it may be difficult to immerse yourself in the details if you’re jumping in at Volume 10, it’s not exactly Swann’s Way, so I think you will be alright.

In fact, one might legitimately ask why I am finally delving into my Pinduca collection at this particular disc. There is no particular reason other than I had taken this LP down off the shelf while I was collecting tracks for my most recent podcast. I ended up not using anything from it, but I have wanted to share some whole records by this guy for a while, so I finally quit putting it off and did the quickest vinyl transfer I’ve ever done. Plus it is a nice round number, 10. I even considered doing a countdown all the way to number 1, but I am missing a few crucial integers that would make such an undertaking eminently frustrating.

The sound is fuller than on some of his earlier albums, since by this point Pinduca was recording in 24-track studios. He also knows his audience well and plays to them: there are a couple of forró numbers here and even a track that is kind of brega, as if he is showing his gratitude to the working-class crowds that had made it possible for him to have a music career without any real push from the industry. Carimbó music was actually somewhat in vogue during the latter half of the 1970s. MPB singer Eliana Pittman recorded a full album or two in the genre. Fellow paraense* and emergency flotation device Fafá de Belém would eventually score a huge hit with Pinduca’s “Sinha Pureza”, which remains his most famous song to this day. So though he may not have been getting reviews in O Pasquim magazine, he was definitely appreciated by fellow musicians and reaped some benefits from that attention. In fact, remarking on the momentous occasion of a tenth LP, he has a sweet note on the back cover thanking everyone in the world for helping him along, from record store owners to the civil and military authorities. (*A paraense a person from the state of Pará)

Although the forró tunes are cute, what you came to hear are the selections of animated carimbó, lilting siriá, and frenetic lambada. Tight horn arrangements and fast tempos are offset ever so slightly by the Farfisa-like organ that leans on chords in a loungerific way. There is even a blast of synth in the bridge of the opening cut, “Lambada da birita.” Check out some highlights below:

I really should not add to my trail of broken promises on this blog, but I intend to share some more of this fun music. I have been wanting to enthuse about it here for years now and never seem to get around to sharing. I shall make a genuine effort at it now, because as a Buddhist sage once said, “How do you know you won’t die tomorrow?” Check the comment links.

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Candango do Ypê – Vol.3: Lambada (1979)

By Dr. Vibes April 13, 2015 October 29, 2019 Brazilian, Carimbó

Candango do Ypê

Vol. 3 – Lambada

1979 Copacabana COELP-41213

Carimbó das Guianas

Carimbó Agarradinho

Carimbó de Dezembro

Carimbó da Crioula

Carimbó dos Namorados

Gafieira Pernambucana

Feira de Troca-troca

Forró Lascado

Ciranda do Navio

Marcha da Cobra

João Felicidade

Festa de Nazareth

Arrangements – Pachequinho

Recording engineer – Deraldo

Mixing engineer – Zilmar

Recorded at Somil (Rio de Janeiro) and Dó-Ré-Mi (São Paulo)

Cover photo – Micheloni

Lay-out – Impulso Marketing & Propaganda Ltda

Direção artistica – Paulo Rocco

Direção de Produção – Talmo Scaranari

Vinyl -> Pro-Ject RM-5SE turntable (with Sumiko Blue Point 2 cartridge, Speedbox power supply); Creek Audio OBH-15; M-Audio Audiophile 2496Soundcard ; Adobe Audition at 32-bit float 96khz; Click Repair light settings; individual clicks and pops taken out with Adobe Audition 3.0 – resampled (and dithered for 16-bit) using iZotope RX Advanced. Tags done with Foobar 2000 and Tag and Rename.

As I have mentioned repeatedly in the sparse posts over the last six months to a year, it’s been a very busy time for Flabbergast, filled with momentous “real life” things that were extremely demanding and required all of my attention, and thus have kept me away from blogging. Foremost among these been the absorbing work I put into proposals for the Lego Ideas initiative whose mania is sweeping the nation! Unfortunately my efforts brought me nothing but frustration and headaches. My first attempt was a scale model of Motown Studios which I designed after one visit to their Detroit museum back in 1999 and a postcard that I’ve kept ever since as a souveneir. It was going pretty well – I even had the moveable drum riser, built out of Legos! – when I received a “cease and desist” letter from Berry Gordy’s estate and was forced to abandon the project. The last thing I needed right then, especially when trademarking my name back in 2013 failed to produce any revenue whatsoever, was a lawsuit. Sadly, litigation was exactly what I would get from my next project, a scale model of the Berlin Wall. The city kept telling me that I needed something called a “permit” and told me that the armed Lego guards were scaring the townsfolk. But what really killed the project was a lawsuit from both Phil Spector and ex-Pink Floyd guy Roger Waters, who had heard about my run-in with Berry Gordy’s people and automatically assumed my giant Lego wall must be music-related and so obviously somehow about them. I think I had a pretty good chance of winning the court case, but since I couldn’t find a lawyer who would accept payment in Reddit gold, I decided to just abandon that project too. For payback, I mailed Spector a Lego gun but apparently the prison deemed it an unacceptable gift. But don’t worry about me, I always land on my feet. I’m not interested in any trendy get rich quick schemes anyway, I’m a guy who likes to commit to the long haul. Legos! It’s such a fad, I’ll bet you twenty dollars (in Reddit gold or possibly Bitcoin) that nobody will even remember what they are five years from now.

Alright, so let’s just establish right at the outset that I bought this record because of the cover without knowing anything about it. It was definitely buying it just from the front photo – after all it has popcorn in it, sitting next to a bowl of ice! But then I flipped it around and saw that more than half of it was carimbó music, which would have sealed the deal had I not already made up my mind.

Rather fittingly for the cover, in the grooves is a so-so party record of tunes that will grow on you but that probably won’t end up on your regular party playlist. In spite of being called “Vol.3 – Lambada” there is only one tune which flirts with that genre here, the outright awful “Carimbó das Guianas.” The tightest thing here is the track Carimbo de Dezembro, a funky little number meant for celebrating New Years Eve, and which I included on Flabbergasted Freeform No.10 . The runner-up might be Carimbó da Crioula which starts out at a slower tempo and keeps speeding up until it’s pretty frenetic. Candango gets bonus points for authoring all his own tunes, with a handful of writing partners, including Pinduca on one track.

Mr. Candango has kind of a weird voice, one that is suited for the forró music here. Based on the range of his repertoire and his accent, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he might have been a Northeastern transplant to Pará, the birthplace of carimbó. A little lazy searching turned up the fact that he apparently lived for a while in Ilheús, Bahia. If he wasn’t a nordestino then he was certainly playing to an audience that appreciated the region’s music. Along with some genres native to Pernambuco (which is, as a matter of fact, where I found this record) like frevo and ciranda here, you also get fandango / marujada, and the aforementioned forró. But then he also takes a stab at a samba de roda. He seemed to be a jack of all trades, as further sleuthing turns up that he made at least one record of seresta / serenata music, as well as an entire album of fandango. But I know little else about him. He may have worked in construction of the modernist capital city of Brasília: candango is a name given to the construction workers there, and he seems to have been old enough to have done it. He could have invented this off-road Jeep, the Brazilian version of the German “Munga”:

If anyone wants to replace this speculative biography of the mystery man known as Candango do Ypê, feel free to leave a comment. Also feel free to click the links button!

Incidentally, as you will hear, this record wasn’t in the best of shape and neither was the cover. I did a little “restoration” on the glorious cover art, you can see the original state it was in here below. I left a little of the wear and tear to keep the “authenticity” in tact….

16-bit 44.1 khz

password: vibes

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Aldo Sena – Solo de Ouro (1984)

By Dr. Vibes June 9, 2014 January 3, 2018 Guitarrada

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:

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

By Dr. Vibes May 31, 2013 February 3, 2018 Brazilian, Guitarrada

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:

(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!

password: vibes