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.