Acabou chorare E-Book

Marcio Gaspar

• Herausgeber: Edições Sesc SP
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 108

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The second book of the Brazilian Music Records series features Acabou chorare, a mix of Jimi Hendrix's distorted rock and João Gilberto's bossa nova beat, with Novos Baianos at their best. In the book, the journalist Marcio Gaspar interviews musicians and other artists linked to the large Novos Baianos community to review the history of the album that blended rock, samba, bossa nova, experimentalism... and had an unprecedented impact on social behavior. As Paulinho Boca states in the book: "We were perhaps the first opinion leaders of Brazilian youth. Leaving the buildings for the squares, a new race". The Brazilian Music Records series, published in Portuguese and English, is edited by the music critic Lauro Lisboa Garcia.

Leseprobe

To Luísa and Gabriel, who gave meaning to my existence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Afonsinho, Ana Deriggi, Anna Riso, Armandinho, Bebel Prates, Dadi, Gato Félix, Gilda Mattoso, Harumi Ishihara, Henrique Dantas, Leila Reis, Leonardo Khedi, Luis Chagas, Luiz Bueno, Maria Amélia Rocha Lopes, Marília de Aguiar, Mário Manga, Marisa Monte, Moraes Moreira, Patrícia Gasppar, Paulinho Boca de Cantor, PH de Noronha, Ramiro Zwetsch, Ricardo Carlos Gaspar, Roberta Sá, Sérgio Pugliese, Solano Ribeiro, Tulipa Ruiz.

The greatest thing you can do to cultivate true wisdom is to practice the consciousness of the world as a dream.

Paramahansa Yogananda

CONTENTS

PRESENTATION Danilo Santo de Miranda

PREFACE Lauro Lisboa Garcia

INTRODUCTION: ONCE UPON A TIME... 1972

_1 B.A.C. - BEFORE ACABOU CHORARE

_2 AND BY THE NATURAL LAW OF MEETINGS, I GIVE SOME AND TAKE SOME

_3ACABOU CHORARE, EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL

_4 PEPEU, BADASS GUITARIST!

_5 A.A.C. – AFTER ACABOU CHORARE

_6 BEYOND ACABOU CHORARE

ALBUM NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As an artistic expression and form of knowledge, music offers fertile ground for the observation of man, of his time and imaginary world. A vast territory of experiences, ranging from the songs of native peoples to religious and classical music, from modinha, lundu, maxixe and choro to pop, rock and electronic music, via samba, bossa nova, baião and xote, musical creation has proved to be one of the most fruitful, present and striking cultural manifestations of Brazilian life.

Supported by the history, heritage and symbolic worlds of different groups that came together in Brazil, the love for music was reflected in the interest with which the country’s modern and urban life welcomed inventions such as the phonographic record and the radio. It was a time when male and female singers and musicians of all styles became popular idols and young composers wrote songs and carnival marches that would endure across the decades.

This pathway of musical creation is the guiding thread of the present series, Brazilian Music Records. Edited by the journalist and critic Lauro Lisboa Garcia, it features in each volume the story of a striking album in the history of Brazilian music, whether for its aesthetics, social and political issues, influence on public behavior, artistic innovation or market reach.

This volume of the series revisits the album Acabou chorare, by Novos Baianos. The journalist Marcio Gaspar interviews musicians and others artists linked to the large community formed by the group to review the history of this indisputably outstanding title in the list of great works of Brazilian music.

Written in clear and straightforward prose, the Brazilian Music Records series is developed from the twofold perspective of appreciating musical memory and observing the echoes and reverberations of those creations in current music production.

Danilo Santos de Miranda

Director of Sesc São Paulo

From the fobica1 came the trio elétrico musical float, from the “electric pole” came the Bahian guitar, from the queen of choro Ademilde Fonseca came part of Baby Consuelo’s vocal exuberance, from Jimi Hendrix’s distortion effects came the sound of Pepeu Gomes’ guitar. Before them there were Dorival Caymmi, Assis Valente, João Gilberto and the Tropicalists.

Like early samba, the sound waves of Bahia rolled all the way to Rio de Janeiro, and while the ferry of hippy-inspired libertarian adventures crossed the troubled waters of the military dictatorship, there emerged Acabou chorare, the surprising and daring second album by Novos Baianos (Moraes Moreira, Luiz Galvão, Baby Consuelo, Pepeu Gomes and Paulinho Boca de Cantor), drawing on all this wealthy heritage, somewhere between Brazilian Northeastern tradition and the planetary revolution, half bossa nova, half rock’n’roll, blending João Gilberto and Hendrix, among other sources. It became a kind of hallmark of Brazilian 1970s counterculture, but over time evolved from modern to eternal.

It was 1972 and Bahia once again set Brazil and the world on the path to modernity. In the early years of that decade, Novos Baianos and their contemporaries were decisive for the consolidation of the experimental work that Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Gal Costa, Mutantes and Nara Leão had developed with the conductor Rogério Duprat in the late 1960s. Secos & Molhados, Rita Lee & Tutti Frutti, Tim Maia, Raul Seixas, Alceu Valença, Luiz Melodia, Sá, Rodrix & Guarabyra, Jards Macalé, Jorge Mautner, Clube da Esquina (led by Milton Nascimento): each one with their own style, accent and daring created pioneering musical hybridisms at the time.

Just as Caetano, Gil and Gal Costa were influenced by João Gilberto’s beat and introduced the electric guitar – then rejected by traditionalists – in Brazilian popular music together with Mutantes and Beat Boys, Novos Baianos not only absorbed those experiments but expanded them, innovating in musical aesthetics as a whole, in lyrics structure and in behavior.

Since then, Pepeu Gomes has become one of the greatest exponents of the Brazilian electric guitar. Moraes Moreira, responsible for the bossa nova approach to the acoustic guitar derived from João Gilberto, especially in the album’s title track, was also an enthusiast of Dodô e Osmar’s inventions since the days of the old fobica and became the first trio elétrico singer of Salvador’s carnival. The group’s instrumental core gave rise to A Cor do Som, with the bassist Dadi, who later accompanied Marisa Monte, one of the great heirs of the group’s musical concept.

Marcio Gaspar, a journalist who has rubbed shoulders with a multitude of first-rate artists in major record labels and newspaper and magazine newsrooms, is a witness to this story and the author of the second title of the Brazilian Music Records (History and Background of Anthological Albums) series, published by Edições Sesc. Here he tells stories and curiosities that prove the worth of these intrinsically Brazilian artists. Much of the blending of rock and Brazilian popular music in the following decades took its cue from Acabou chorare, this vast field of swinging music.

Lauro Lisboa Garcia

1 Small musical float on which was played instrumental music only, precursor of the larger trio elétrico.

ONCE UPON A TIME... 1972

I was 15 when Acabou chorare, the second album by Novos Baianos, was released. Sometime earlier, João Gilberto’s presence had changed the group’s life. And it is no exaggeration to say that Novos Baianos changed my life.

First, because Acabou chorare opened my eyes and ears to Brazilian music; second, because three years later, meeting them personally and interacting with the group for some time were decisive to my professional choice related to music.

Barely a year before Acabou chorare came out, Paulinho Boca de Cantor had declared in an interview to Jornal do Brasil newspaper that when it came to Brazilian music, Novos Baianos liked only Caetano, Gil and Luiz Gonzaga2. Not by chance, É ferro na boneca [It’s Tough Going] (their first album, from 1969) can be described as “Tropicalist pop-rock”.

My own taste in Brazilian music at the time was even more limited: Caetano and Gil, period. I was interested in the rock of Beatles, Stones, Traffic, Neil Young, Clapton and The Who; the progressive music of Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Genesis; and the electric fusions of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Frank Zappa and John McLaughlin.

However, 1972 was a particularly inspired year in Brazilian music, marked by the releases of Caetano Veloso’s Transa [Lovemaking], Gilberto Gil’s Expresso 2222 [Express Train 2222], and Clube da esquina [Local Club], by Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges. The album by the Minas Gerais duo particularly caught my attention for its surprising connection between Brazilian music and progressive rock. That feeling would be reinforced the following year with A matança do porco [Pig Slaughter], by Som Imaginário, which was a kind of instrumental offshoot of Clube da Esquina. As for Transa and Expresso 2222... those albums were already born eternal. With such high-level contenders, it would be very risky at the time to wager that Acabou chorare would stand the test of time. But the album survived, and in great style, by the way.

I had already heard of Novos Baianos in the early 1970s due to the success of É ferro na boneca and had enjoyed their participation in the last of the famous TV Record song festivals, singing “De vera” [About Vera]. I was also amused by the frequent presence of Baby and her forehead mirror on the Chacrinha show. However, in my adolescence, the most striking fact related to Novos Baianos before the release of Acabou chorare was when the group occupied the sofa of Hebe Camargo’s famous TV talk show. Asked about their families, Baby Consuelo, Luiz Galvão, Moraes Moreira and Paulinho Boca de Cantor answered, almost as one, something like: “Our families are ourselves; we have killed our parents”.

That was certainly a shock for the interviewer, a kind of spokesperson for the conservative middle class at the time. And a relishing and ambiguous mystery for me, who spent a few months digesting the meaning of that answer.

Acabou chorare did not sound right to me at first, and the main reason for that sense of strangeness was that the fact that it was, in essence, an album of Brazilian music. Certainly more so than Transa and Expresso 2222, both influenced by Caetano’s and Gil’s forced exile in England. But Acabou chorare, to the horror of my prejudiced ears, sounded basically like a samba record. And by a bunch of hippies, no less, which made everything even more bizarre.

Amazing: that group of oddballs threw in the face of a youth split between serious political engagement and indifference fueled by drugs and rock’n’roll an unusual appreciation of samba, a disparaged genre in those times in which youngsters in general turned their back on Brazil.

“Love it or leave it” was the revolting slogan of the military dictatorship, explicitly dividing the country into two. I – and much of that youth engaged in either political struggle or drug trips – naturally swelled the ranks of leave it, which meant forsaking, even if temporarily, everything that symbolized the country: samba was, naturally, part of that everything.

For the politically engaged, exalting a stereotyped image of Brazil meant endorsing the dictatorship; for the “peace and love” troops it was just plain squareness. However, Acabou chorare had the nerve to revive samba. More than that: it opened with a samba that exalted the country, “Brasil pandeiro” [Pandeiro Brazil], composed by Assis Valente.

In an interview to Jornal da Música in 1974, Luiz Galvão stated the case clearly:

It all started in 1969 and we were very different. We were anti-samba and violent; we wanted to deliver a harsh criticism of the world as we saw it. You know, there is a group of tough people who invented samba, who are as crazy as we are, people from the time when samba was for the streetwise. But those people were out of favor at that time. In 1969, samba was just a university students’ thing. Very bad, because university students make lousy samba.3

Three years after Acabou chorare, Novos Baianos moved to São Paulo and, through a mutual friend, Dinho Bandeira, I started frequenting the vegetarian/lysergic community on Rua Casa do Ator, in the neighborhood of Vila Olímpia. Those were days and nights of lots of music and metaphysical, rambling conversations, especially with Galvão and Paulinho Boca. We would also go out to simply roam São Paulo at night or to watch shows by other artists. I remember, for example, having watched with almost the whole troupe the debut of Doces Bárbaros in 1976 at Palácio Convenções Anhembi. A few years later, already working as a promoter at WEA Records, I helped launch Baby’s and Pepeu’s solo careers.

But let’s go back to the early 1970s, when a bright light shone down on Novos Baianos, redirecting their musical choices, illuminating the path to Acabou chorare and opening up new possibilities of identification and representation for youth of the time: the bright light of João Gilberto, which transformed everything.

That story leads to this book, which will try to give more details of the circumstances surrounding the creation, recording and release of Acabou chorare, with its consequences for the group and Brazilian music. It should be noted that the accuracy of the facts is somewhat affected by the absence of some key figures that have already left us and of others who, when asked for an interview, chose to remain silent; and also because, due to the very passage of time and the overall drug-induced haziness, I came across some facts reported in different or even totally opposite ways by characters who shared the same situation That, however, was already expected. After all, as someone has said: “Whoever lived through the 1970’s and remembers everything perfectly did not actually live through the 1970’s”.

Enjoy the book!

2 Ana de Oliveira, Acabou chorare, São Paulo: Iyá Omin, 2017, p. 182.

3 Luiz Galvão apud Ana de Oliveira, Acabou chorare, op. cit., p. 184 (in free translation, as well as the following quotations from works in other languages).