Dona Ivone Lara – Alegria Minha Gente (1982)

Dona Ivone Lara
Alegria Minha Gente (Serra dos meus sonhos dourados)
Warner 1982 (WEA BR 20.077)
Reissue 2001 Warner Archives

1 Roda de samba pra salvador  (Ivone Lara)
2 Prea comeu   (Ivone Lara)
3 O samba não pode parar  (Paulo George, Fabrício do Império)
4 Lamento do negro  (Ivone Lara, Délcio Carvalho)
5 Nasci para sonhar e cantar  (Ivone Lara, Delcio Carvalho)
6 Sambas de terreiro ( prazer da serrinha )  (Carlinhos Bentevi, Manula, Paco, Antenor Bexiga, Mestre Fuleiro, D. Yvonne Lara)
– Serra dos meus sonhos dourados
– Orgia
– Alegria minha gente
– Eu ja jurei
– Me abandonaste
– Meu destino é sofrer
– Chorar não resolve
– Serra dos meus sonhos dourados
7 Coração porque choras ?  (D. Ivone Lara)
8 Vejo em teus labios risos  (Mestre Fuleiro, Delfino Coelho)
9 Uma rosa pro cartola  (Wilson Moreira, Nei Lopes)

Musicians:

Violão – Neco, Manoel Conceição (Mão de Vaca), Rafael Rabello, Ruy Quaresma
Harmonica – Rildo Hora
Cavaquinho – Alcei Maia, Mané do Cavaca, Puan do Cavaco, Neco, Carlinho (som 7), Luciano Rabello
Bandolim – Joel Nascimento
Bass – Bebeto (Tamba Trio)
Drums – Papão, Helio Schiavo
Percussion – Gordinho, Baiano, Luna, Marçal, Eliseu, Doutor, Geraldo Bongo, Everaldo
Ambiance – Conjunto Samba Som 7
Chorus – D. Ivone Lara, Zenilda, Dinorah, Zezé, Barbosa, Genaro, Galã, Edgardo Luis

Produced and arranged by Rildo Hora
Artistic Direction – Guti
Production assistant – Gregório Gomes Nogueira
Musical administration – Teresa Teixeira
Recording and mixing engineer – Toninho
Assistant recording and mixing engineer – Magro
Technical director – Dudu Marques
Studio manager – Laura Santos
MONTAGEM – Wilson Medeiros

Recorded and mixed at Transamérica studio, Rio de Janeiro
Mastering – Osmar Furtado (Odeon)
Photos – Juarez Cavalcanti
Cover art – Jatobá

Reissue technical info:

Remastered by Carlos Freitas and Jade Pereira at Classic Master, São Paulo, June-July 2001
Assistant: Jade Pereira
Digital editing by Carlos Freitas
Supervised by Charles Gavin

Equipment used:
Sonic Solutions HDSP Sonic No Noise
Cedar DeCracker/DeClicker
TC M60000 De Noise
Manley converters, equalizers, and compressors

Restauration, adaptation, and rescaling of covers and original artwork – Cilene Roso and Vaner Alaimo (NewXtension Design)
Proofing and graphic art coordination – Silva Panella, Claudia Lima
Production coordinator – Maria Creusa Meza

Another carnival has come and gone and I had nothing to say about it.

Today is the International Day of the Woman.  So let’s commemorate it with a post celebrating one of Brazil’s most remarkable women, a pioneer both in the fine art of samba, who also happened to support herself as an occupational therapist and social worker, one of the first black women to be trained in that profession in Brazil.  As a young woman, she wrote sambas for the first samba school she was associated with, Prazer de Serrinha, for which she never received credit – the songs had to be presented to the group by her older, male cousin, because the idea of a woman composing sambas was just unacceptable.  This changed when there was a mass migration of members to the samba school Império Serrano.  There, she became the first woman to parade in the clustered group of composers during carnival.  Her first classic composed for them was the song Não me perguntes.  

It is worth noting that in a 1975 interview with Sérgio Cabral (published in his handy book As Escolas de Samba do Rio de Janeiro), she cites this as her first contribution to Império Serrano that was all her own, without any collaborator.  And yet you’ll note that in the 1962 recording where it first took recorded form, two men managed to also take credit (one of them, her older cousin who introduced her to samba via Prazer de Serrinha).    In that same interview with Cabral, she notes that there were still enough awkwardness and discomfort around the idea of a woman parading in the composer’s “wing” of the carnival parade, that she chose to begin parading with the baianas instead.  This album doesn’t feature that song but it does have her other huge hit for Império Serrano – Serra dos meus sonhos dourados – in the long medley (track 6 here, which opened up Side Two of the original LP).

None of that seems to have soured her affection for Império Serrano very much, though, as evidenced by this 1982 homage to the group and their predecessar, Cabelo de Mano, in this album produced with Rildo Hora, who had worked with her on a number of other recordings as a backup singer.  Dona Ivone’s discography under her own name is in fact rather modest, having only begun to record in 1978, but her importance in the pantheon of samba looms large.  She’s been the subject of many tributes by other singers, installations at the Itaú cultural center in São Paulo, and (naturally) doctoral dissertations.  As far as I know, she continued as a social worker well into the 1970s and possibly longer, so she had other things to occupy her apart from the allure of the performing arts.   Nevertheless, here is some footage of Fabiana Cozza, Leci Brandão e Zélia Duncan talking about her influence, courtesy of that same Itaú project

Note Leci talking about the way Done Ivone worked partido alto into her work, Fabiana praising her ingenious use of interwoven countermelodies, and Zelia saying that to hear the songs of Done Ivone Lara is to know what it means to be Brazilian.  So, yeah, she’s held in pretty high esteem.  It is kind of shameful that it’s taken this blog so long to post something by her, especially since she’s been on the ever-growing “short list” of artists I’ve wanted to feature here since the beginning.  Hopefully this lovely record, a joy to hear from start to finish like most things produce by Rildo Hora, is some small recompense.

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