P.S.

I couldn't find a good version of "Tem mais samba" on YouTube but as compensation here's Chico Buarque and Donga singing the first samba song ever, "Pelo telefone," which is from 1916. Donga, the man singing with Chico, is the man who wrote it. Also in there is Pixinguinha, the Brazilian choro master and saxophonist.

More Samba

There's a 1 minute and 44 second song, by Chico Buarque, from the mid-1960s, the song is called "Tem mais samba," (loosely translated: "There's more samba") that I decided to translate. The lyrics are below, in English; they're just great lyrics. The original is below that.

There's more samba in the meeting than in the wait
There's more samba in meanness than in the wound
There's more samba in port than in the sail
There's more samba in forgiveness than in a goodbye
There's more samba in the hands than in the eyes
There's more samba in the ground than in the moon

There's more samba in the man who works
There's more samba in music from the street
There's more samba in the chest of those who cry ...

There's more samba in the tears of those who see
that good samba doesn't have a place or a time
Heart on the sleeve
Samba without meaning to
It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

-----

Tem mais samba no encontro que na espera
Tem mais samba a maldade que a ferida
Tem mais samba no porto que na vela
Tem mais samba o perdão que a despedida
Tem mais samba nas mãos do que nos olhos
Tem mais samba no chão do que na lua
Tem mais samba no homem que trabalha
Tem mais samba no som que vem da rua
Tem mais samba no peito de quem chora
Tem mais samba no pranto de quem vê
Que o bom samba não tem lugar nem hora
O coração de fora
Samba sem querer
Vem que passa
Teu sofrer
Se todo mundo sambasse
Seria tão fácil viver

The Twisted Angel

I've decided to dedicate a post today to Torquato Neto (1944-1972), a Rio de Janeiro poet, lyricist and newspaper columnist who died young but enjoyed a short efflorescence in 1970s Brazil. His poems and lyrics are simple and honest, but I think emotionally incisive. It was his talent to put a few words together to explain the most complex worlds of feeling, which is why so many of Brazil's best-known musicians have utilized his lyrics. He's one of a certain kind of poet that seemed to flourish in Rio in the 1970s, people like Waly Salomão, Paulo Leminski, Ana Cristina Cesar, and others; either they were directly connected to the counterculture, as Leminski, Salomão and Neto were, or they shared a certain sensibility, a pessimism and self-involved dark-tinged romanticism that was nothing like the bombastic near utopianism and optimism of the Tropicália crew (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, etc.), although the two groups intersected in many ways.

Essentially Nocturnal Poem

In the absence of someone,
today I'll also love the absence of the old feelings,
and I'll remember that the days once were sunlit
and the nights only dark
when we didn't know the word fear
or we didn't feel fear.

I'll love the old feeling of chaste tenderness
palpable, in those days, within me
or distributed among the big house's rooms
the front entrance's three steps,
the sun rising through the points of the mosquito net
and warming the walls of the nun's school
(it's just that these memories are not enough).

Because the person isn't there,
and I walk sad through the streets of Rio
and I arrive at no destination, because I have none
I will love the distance that separates me as a child
from myself here, desperate,
and I'll lose myself in the paths tangled up in one another
and I'll roll with pleasure in my shadow,
I'll cry afterward because I don't know how to return.

(translation by me)

There's a good website out there (in Portuguese), called "Twisted Angel," which is about his life and work. He committed suicide in 1972.

O Que Será

There are a couple of times when this video starts to look like a Benson & Hedges commercial, but it's Chico Buarque and Milton Nascimento in the same room, having a good time, intense, but technicolor and all that. So it's worth watching. "O Que Será," it's a very philosophical notion too: what will be will be, and so on, the year is 1976 ...

Five years without Mr. Sailormoon

Poet Waly Salomão, aka "Waly Sailormoon," was a key part of Brazil's literary/musical/artistic counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s and remained influential until his death in May 2003. He published criticism, poetry and wrote song lyrics for many of the greats to emerge out of the ferment of the Tropicália movement: Gal Costa, Maria Bethania and her kid brother Caetano Veloso, and perhaps most significantly, since their collaboration was a deep ongoing partnership between poet and musician: Jards Macalé.

With Macalé, Salomão wrote two of the best-known songs ("Vapor barato" and "Mal secreto") on Gal Costa's famous 1971 live album FA-TAL, Gal a todo vapor, a late brilliant product of Brazil's by-then beleaguered counterculture, which had gone semi-underground or been scattered to the four winds by the military dictatorship. Salomão also wrote a third song on that album, "Luz do sol," in collaboration with Carlos Pinto. Not only that, but he directed the live show, which went down as perhaps the most influential single live pop music performance in Brazilian history. This is how poet and journalist Torquato Neto described the show in the October 25, 1971 edition of his newspaper column "General Jelly," which evaded censorship with its cryptic, fragmentary, poetic, mystical language: "Gal's show, friends. FA-TAL is decisive, there's no drama in this fact. The poet Sailormoon, thank God, does not wash his hands. And how many blind and defeated people are out there, with well-scrubbed hands, my friends. Everything flowing, everything is an understatement, everything was on that stage ...

Macalé's second album Aprender a nadar (1974), a deeply textured and melodic sonic adventure, was also the product of a meeting of minds with Salomão. Their musical partnership was also anthologized in a more recent Macalé album called Real Grandeza. On its cover, there's a picture of the two chilling out together, in the hairy, bearded days of the so-called desbunde (slang that can be loosely translated as "letting loose"). This was the generalized term for the hedonistic, individualistic, somewhat post-ideological 1970s aftermath to the more protest-oriented late 1960s in Brazil.

Salomão is also known for his own poetry and a reflective critical biography of visual artist Hélio Oiticica called Qual É o parangolé? When he died, in May 2003, Salomão had been appointed four months before to head a national books promotion program by Culture Minister Gilberto Gil. In the Youtube video below, you can see Salomão recite part of his "Mal secreto" while sitting in a Rio bar; the song is then performed by Luiz Melodia.

Fania Rumbles in Kinshasa (1974)

Researching something totally unrelated the other day I came across these videos of the FANIA collective and their performance in Zaire ahead of the historic "Rumble in the Jungle," between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. The two videos are priceless: Hector Lavoe's oversized glasses, red pants hiked up above the belly button, green shirt; Celia's exuberance, completely effortless, obviously, what a smile. There's a case to be made for Fania as one of the most interesting artistic avant gardes of the 1970s in the Americas. People like to talk about how the avant garde died after Dada and the heyday of crazy art for art's sake in the 1920s, "the religion of art" as Malcolm Cowley calls it. But I think the avant garde spirit just leaked into the space between art and life, and manifested in the form of a joyous philistinism, an art of living, and art that can't be recognized as such, singing, dancing, and walking down the street, or brushing your teeth, "nothing in your pockets, no ID," to quote Caetano Veloso. In short, the spirit of spontaneity, openness and flow embodied by Fania's musicians, individually and collectively.

RIP Andy Palacio

I had just begun to get excited about Andy Palacio's music and his 2007 release Watina, when, shortly after arriving in New York, I learned he had died on Jan. 19, at the age of 47, of a massive stroke. A couple of weeks ago I attended an event at New York's City Hall where he was honored by proclamations and speeches; in attendance was Paul Nabor, a remarkable octogenarian who toured with Palacio's Garifuna Collective through Europe and elsewhere. It could be said that Palacio was to Belize and especially the Garifuna culture, what Bob Marley was to Jamaica and the Rastafarians in the 1970s and early 1980s. The Garifuna are descendants of African slaves shipwrecked in the 17th Century who intermarried with Arawak Indians; their unique language is a mixture of African and indigenous and also borrows from English and Spanish. The Garifuna live in Belize, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua, but arguably, their spiritual Mecca is a little fishing village in Belize named Hopkins. In Hopkins the local elementary school teaches kids in Garifuna, and generally the village is the most faithful repository of Garifuna culture and language (it is also the setting for the video below). The Garifuna are now even more a diaspora community than ever, with tens of thousands living in the Bronx, and in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities. Palacio was instrumental in inspiring Garifuna youth to identify with their endangered culture, and elevate their music (including raucous Punta Rock) into the world music pantheon. Here is "Watina", an exemplar of the mellow parranda genre:

The brief life and long, increasingly influential after-life of Andrés Caicedo

Andrés Caicedo is bound for iconic status. With his long hair, goggle-like, thick-rimmed glasses, and penchant for emotive, savage prose, this kid from Cali, Colombia, who wrote all his fiction, essays and criticism in the late 1960s and 1970s, and who committed suicide in 1977 at age 25, is already firmly a part of the Latin American counterculture canon. And if some of his current champions have their way, he'll ascend to the list of the all-time greats as well. Lately, with Caicedo-mania flaring across Latin America, it doesn't seem like that day is too far distant.

I first heard of Caicedo on the blog maintained by Alberto Fuguet, a Chilean novelist (most widely known, to his occasional chagrin, for the McOndo movement) who is generous with his discoveries and has turned into one of the world's main proponents of Caicedo's work. This isn't the first enthusiasm I've shared with Fuguet after being tipped off about something on his blog, but this particular author has really become important to me. It's not only because of the quality and vitality of Caicedo's writing, or the fact that he was foreshadowing some of the post-Boom writer's innovations while most of the world was still under the thrall of Gabriel García Márquez & Co. (some of Caicedo's fiction is reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño, Manuel Puig and César Aira, for reasons of tone, mood, and technique more than content). To me, Caicedo is most interesting because he embodies something distinctive about Latin American culture in the late 1960s and 1970s, and that is it's ability to be hybrid, its tendency to create artists and movements that thrived on fusing and appropriating from a host of mediums, combining art, literature, and music, bringing everything together and refusing to be highbrow about it.

Caicedo was a graphomaniac, a short story writer, a film critic and filmmaker, and a novelist, who was saturated with the language and visual sense of the screen (he also wrote and directed movies), and was drunk on music-- specifically the brand of salsa that was being pumped out of New York and the Caribbean in the 1970s and struck such deep roots in Cali (Colombia's salsa capital). The craze for 1970s-style salsa in Cali became a sort of epiphenomenon of the worldwide salsa explosion. The early salsa of legends like Richie Ray and Bobbie Cruz or Hector Lavoe and the FANIA collective would never go out of style in Cali, and Caicedo, also a Rolling Stones, Cream, and Beatles-head, was there for its first efflorescence, as Caleños embraced as their own a musical renaissance with its epicenter elsewhere (and dominated by transplanted Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Panamanians). Caicedo documented this period in Cali's musical history in ¡Que Viva la Música!, his most widely read novel. It is narrated by a beautiful young woman named María del Carmen Huerta, a blond, who becomes a walking salsa encyclopedia, a consummate dancer and a frequenter of all of Cali's salsa bars and clubs.

¡Que Viva la Música! ends with a comprehensive discography listing all the songs that influenced the writing of the book, an impressive list. And I recommend, for anyone wanting to read Caicedo, to first get their hands on some of the tracks on that list, before turning to this novel, or the rest of his work. Sadly, I suspect none of his prose has been translated into English, though I'd like to translate a couple of his very short stories and post them on this website if time allows. For now, I'll provide the aforementioned list, and a portfolio of links that collectively offer a nice introduction to the life and work of a tormented, madly creative, neurotically brilliant, precociously dark soul. Caicedo committed suicide in 1977, the same day he had received, in the mail, his advance copies of ¡Que Viva la Música!, his first published novel. A slim autobiographical novel, El Cuento de mi vida, which contains self-analytic pieces and eerily melancholic accounts of his depressive periods, was also recently published. In Bogotá in December, I also bought an anthology of his short fiction called Destinitos Fatales, published in 1984 by Colombian publisher Oveja Negra.


1. Definitely, I would begin with this very attractive and easy to use website put together by the major public university in Cali. The website reviews his life, work, and legacy. There's a bibliography, but I would go directly to the section called music ("Música"), where you can hear tracks that play as MP3s embedded on the site, while you read related passages from ¡Que Viva la Música!

2. These are all relevant Caicedo-related posts from Alberto Fuguet's blog (the link takes you to a page with all his posts that include the search term, Caicedo). The latest big news is that editorial Norma is publishing Caicedo's autobiography, which will be assembled from published and unpublished autobiographical writings with Fuguet as the editor, and this book will be available in all of Latin America (Caicedo's other books were only available in Colombia, despite the fact that they have all gone through many editions, which makes Fuguet angry).

3. Now for a contrary opinion: Here is a review of Caicedo's ¡Que Viva la Música!, which questions whether or not Caicedo's newfound popularity has more to do with his romantic figure, his tragic suicide, and his tendency to write about drugs, sex and violence, than with his real ability as an artist (which, reviewer Valeria Luiselli claims, he might have not really had time to develop given his early death). The review is from grumpy Mexican magazine Letras Libres, which might have been expected to try to deflate enthusiasm for Caicedo's under-appreciated work. Here's a bit from the review: "In his literary incursions, Caicedo suffers from literary bulimia: his writing is a self-provoked vomit, more self-complacent than provocative." Damn, she's grumpy ...

4. Finally, here is the list of songs contained at the end of ¡Que Viva la Música!, which is a good excuse as any to fill up your music player with salsa and rock tracks from the late 1960s and 1970s:

— "Que viva la música", Ray Barreto (Fania).
— "Cabo E", Richie Ray / Bobby Cruz (Alegre).
— "Si te contaran", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Here comes Richie Ray", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Guaguancó triste", Ray / Cruz (VAYA).
— "Guaguancó raro", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "White Room", The Cream (Phillips).
— "Moonligth Mile", Rolling Stones (R.S.R.).
— "Ruby Tuesday", Rolling Stones (London).
— * "Llegó borracho el borracho".
— "Salt of the Earth", Rolling Stones (London).
— "She's a Rainbow", Rolling Stones (London).
— "Loving Cup", Rolling Stones (R.S.R.).
— "Amparo Arrebato", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Toma y dame", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "Bailadores", Nelson y sus estrellas (P.O.N.).
— "Bembé en casa de Pinki", Ray / Cruz (VAYA).
— "A jugar bembé", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "Piraña", Willie Colon (Fania).
— "Lo altare la araché", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Sonido bestial", Ray / Cruz (VAYA).
— "Te conozco bacalao", Willie Colon (Fania).
— "Feria en M", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "El diferente", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "Convergencia", Johnny Pacheco (Fania).
— "Agúzate", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— * "Sufrir... ".
— "El guarataro", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "Ay compay", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "Bomba de las navidades", Ray / Cruz (VAYA).
— "Bomba cámara", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Babalú", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Adasa", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Agallú", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "El hijo de Obatalá", Ray Barreto (Melser).
— "Iqui con iqui", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "La música brava", Andy Harlow (Melser).
— "Ponte duro", Roberto Roena, Fania 73 en vivo (Fania).
— "Ricardo Chaparro", Ray / Cruz (U.A.).
— "On with the Show", Rolling Stones (London).
— "Play with Fire", Rolling Stones (London).
— 'The last time", Rolling Stones (London).
— "Heartbreaker", Rolling Stones (R.S.R.).
— "Les only Rock'n roll butt I like it", Rolling Stones (R.S.R.).
— "I got the blues", Rolling Stones (R.S.R.).
— "Richie jala jala", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Colombia's bugalú", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Pa chismoso tú", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Che Che Colé", Willie Colon (Fania).
— "Quien lo tumbe", Larry Harlow (Fania).
— "Que se rían", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Colorín colorao", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Lluvia", Ray / Cruz (VAYA).
— "Lluvia con nieve", Mon Rivera (Alegre).
— "Ahora vengo yo", Ray / Cruz, Fania 73 en vivo (Fania).
— "Traigo de todo", Ray / Cruz (Alegre).
— "Guasasa", Harry Farlow (Fania).
— "Mambo Jazz", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Suavito", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Comején", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Qué bella es la Navidad", Ray / Cruz (Fonseca).
— "Micaela", Pete Rodríguez (Alegre)...
— "Se casa la rumba", Larry Harlow (Fania).
— "El paso de encarnación", Larry Harlow (Fania).
— "Vengo viaro", Larry Harlow (Fania).
— 'Tiembla", El Gran Combo (Melser).
— "Anacaona", Cheo Feliciano, Fania 73 en vivo (Fania).
— "Tengo poder", La Conspiración (Fania).
— "Si la ven", Willie Colon (Fania).
— "La voz", La Conspiración (Fania).
— "El día que nací yo", La Conspiración (Fania).
— "Alafia cumaye", Ray / Cruz.
— "La Peregrina", Ray / Cruz.
— "El abacúa", Ray / Cruz.
— "Trupetman H", Ray / Cruz.
— 'The house of the rising sun", The Animáis.
— "Canto a Borinquen", Willie Colon.
— "Salsa y control", Lebrón Brothers.
— "Bongó loco", Lebrón Brothers.
— "Monte adentro", Monguito con Fania 72 (?) en vivo (Fania).
— "Seis tumbao", La Protesta.
— "San Miguel", La protesta.
— "Mi guaguancó", Ray / Cruz.
— "A mí qué", Típica Novel.
— "La ley", Sexteto Juventud.
— "La canción del viajero", Nelson y sus estrellas.
— * "El gavilán pollero".
— * "Vanidad".
— *"La vida no vale nada".
— *"¿Qué será de mí"?
— "Pachanga que no cansa", Manolín Morel.
— "Oye lo que te conviene", Eddie Palmieri.
— "Changa con pachanga", Randy Carlos.
— "Charanga revuelta con pachanga", Randy Carlos.
— "En la punta del pie Teresa", Cortijo y su Combo.
— "Pal 23", Ray Pérez.