Pinduca – No Embalo do Carimbó e Sirimbó – Vol. 9 (1980)

 

 

 

Pinduca
No Embalo Do Carimbó E Sirimbó – Vol. 9
1980 Copacabana COELP 41320
 


 
A1     O Rico e o Pobre (public domain, adapted by Pinduca)    2:53
A2     O Ricardão (Pinduca)    2:46
A3     Fuma Porque Pode (Pinduca – Maria Gonçalves)    2:24
A4     Festa de Umbanda (Pinda – Deuza)    2:35
A5     Marcha do Top Less (Pinduca – O. Roosevelth)    2:55
A6     Curichão da Saudade  (Pinduca)    2:44
B1     Sentando a Puã (Pinduca – Maria Izabel Pureza)    2:24
B2     Terra Boa É o Pará (Pinduca)    2:20
B3     Vou Dar Risada (Pinduca – Deuza)    2:55
B4     Joaninha, Meu Bem (Pinduca – João Antonio de Oliveira)    2:58
B5     Chorando À Beira Mar (Pinduca)     2:32
B6     Doce Menina (Pinduca)    2:31 
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 Vinyl -> Pro-Ject RM-5SE turntable (with Sumiko Blue Point 2 cartridge, Speedbox power supply); Creek Audio OBH-15; M-Audio Audiophile 192 Soundcard ; 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&Rename.
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Episode 9, in which we discover that Pinduca was a police sergeant and also harbored a secret desire to be a male stripper.   Songs about how you can never trust a women. Songs about women who smoke, about umbanda parties, topless bars, and Tarzan – all this and more in the ninth installment of No Embalo do…..

Aw Christ who am I kidding, I don’t have anything to say about this record.  This is the very definition of “phoning it in.”  I’ve had a really crap week, or as I would be able to appropriately say if things had turned out better for me, “this week has been total shite.” Although if things had turned out better then I wouldn’t need to say my week was shit, rendering these last few sentences irrelevant.  Not redundant, because nothing has been repeated, but possibly I have become redundant in the British sense, in that I might be imminently replaceable.  If fact I encourage readers to write their own description of this album in the style of Flabbergasted Vibes.  Please post your writing sample in the comments section, along with a CV, three professional references, and a statement of your goals and theoretical contribution to the discipline.  Eligible candidates for the position will demonstrate a clear commitment to uncompensated writing and chronic anxiety about your future.

Enjoy the music, you bastards.

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

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
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 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)

Front cover of "Lambada Volume 3" showing a woman in knee-high white boots and a white onesy leotard dancing with Candango do Ypê

 

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”:
 photo DKW_Candango_1960_zpsxjbiqvnn.jpg

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….

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Marinês e Sua Gente – Nordeste Valente (1976)

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)

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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.

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Pinduca – Muito Pinduca (1979)

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PINDUCA
Muito Pinduca
Released 1979
CD Pressing, Copacabana 99471

Carímbo is a type of music with roots in the Tupí indigenous culture of Brazil, in particular what was going on in what would become the state of Pará. The story goes that when African slaves where brought into that part of Brazil, they took the carimbó rhythm and Africanized it somewhat, making something else out of it that would morph further into modern carimbó music.

The Artist Known as Pinduca was putting together his own bands as early as 1957 but did not release his first album until 1973. Associated with Belém de Pará, he is actually a native of Igarapé-Mirim, in the interior of Pará, from a musical family and with 12 brothers and sisters. Since 1973 he has released something on the order of 30 albums. This compilation from the late 70s is pretty damn fantastic! I am for once at a loss for words on how to describe this stuff — some sort of electric cumbia-ska-Afro-Brazilian party with rocking maracas, sax solos, trombones, electric guitars playing infectious rhythms, sometimes organ, drums drums drums, and of course PINDUCA singing his ass off — a huge band, always a huge band, always fun, catchy as hell.

It would be hard to be in anything but a good mood when you put this record on. Try it!!!!

Pinduca is known as “The KING OF CARIMBÓ” for a reason!!!

01 Sinhá Pureza – (Pinduca)
02 Siriá do Pará – (Pinduca – Menezes de Carvalho)
03 Carimbó do macaco – (Pinduca)
04 Dona Mariana – (Pinduca – Pai Reginaldo)
05 Garota do tacacá – (Pinduca)
06 Boi bumbá de Parintins – (Pinduca – Deuza)
07 Depois da chuva – (Pinduca – Deuza)
08 Areia do alto mar – (Pinduca – João Antonio)
09 O caçador – (Domínio público)
10 Marcha do vestibular – (Pinduca – Lacram)
11 Terra boa é o Pará – (Pinduca)
12 Dança do carimbó – (Domínio público)
13 Sem você nada é bonito – (Pinduca – Otavio Roosevelth)
14 12 horas sem te ver – (Pinduca – Nenem)

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