July 19, 2022 2:13 pm
Despite the military dictatorship, the seventies in Brazil were a period of great musical ferment. After the international success of bossa nova in the 1960s, Brazilian popular music continued to open up and absorb elements from Europe and the United States. Not only that, Brazilian music has also begun to look within and proudly recognize its African roots. It is precisely the syncretism, so typical of Brazilian culture and spirituality, which allows the great musicians of that period to travel, even with their feet planted in Rio de Janeiro or Salvador de Bahia, anywhere in the world: from swinging London to psychedelic San Francisco , from Lisbon to Luanda, from the Detroit of Motown to the New Orleans of the early blues. What was once the ancient slave ship route becomes a crossroads of cultures, styles and sounds. And Brazil, a huge and half-breed country-continent, becomes a permanent musical laboratory where everything mixes and everything evolves.
Jorge Ben, born in 1939 (and not in 1942 or 1945 as he still insists) from a Brazilian port worker father and an Ethiopian mother, began in the sixties with bossa nova. His but nothing, in 1963, helped make the genre hugely popular in the United States and Europe. In the early seventies, however, Ben moved further and further away from acoustic guitar and bossa nova to get closer to electric guitar and rock: his albums black is beautiful (“Black is beautiful”, 1971) e release the peacock (“Unleash the peacock”, 1975) begin to incorporate, on a samba basis, more and more elements of funk, rock and afro rock. Jorge Ben looked away: to the north, towards James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone, and to the east, towards Fela Kuti’s Pan-African rock.
Africa Brazil it came out in 1976 and the title is already a manifesto. The first notes are enough, the memorable electric guitar riff that opens African Spearhead (Umbabarauma) before he launches into a jagged and choir-punctuated funk, to understand how distant the sixties are. Jorge Ben tunes in not only with African American music but also with the civil rights movements and pan-Africanism of the seventies. African Spearhead (Umbabarauma) is a song about football and possibly the best sports song ever made. “Jump, run, fall and get up”, sings Jorge Ben supported by an electrifying funk, “vibrate and thank you: look, the city is empty because on this beautiful afternoon everyone is here to see you play”. Percussion runs like on a football field: tambourines, drums, atabaque (a cylindrical drum similar to conga cubane) and of course the cuíca, a friction membranophone with that typical sound halfway between percussion and the call of a monkey or a tropical bird. The footballer is a popular hero, a legendary knight, his deeds are the stuff of epic poetry; so it is not strange to go from the football field to the esotericism of Hermes Trismegistus wrote, dedicated to the Egyptian philosopher and magician Hermes Trismegistus who wrote his “wonderful hermetic treatise with a diamond point on an emerald plate”. The funk continues to pulsate and from the popular myth of the football player we enter the typically Afrofuturist rediscovery of Egyptian mysticism as the root of the most ancient African knowledge. Mysticism and eroticism are also intertwined in Taj Mahal, perhaps the most famous song of Africa Brazilwhich cost Rod Stewart a plagiarism lawsuit for unscrupulously copying it in the chorus of Da ya think I’m sexy?
In xica da Silva we talk about a legendary heroine of the Afro-Brazilian tradition, “a negra”, the slave who became mistress of the plantation by marrying a rich farmer white. And the redemption of the woman who, thanks to her beauty and her elegance, transcended slavery is reflected in the George’s story, a little boy who learns to fly: “Fly Jorge, fly!”, sings Ben, “fly up there and get me a star”. Another topos of the legends and songs that the chained slaves sang to each other: flight as a metaphor for freedom. African and Afrofuturist mythology is full of black men and women who know how to fly, who leave everyone speechless by levitating in the air to escape free as birds. Jorge, the child who knew how to fly, could have been an officer of the Mothership, the Afro-futurist spaceship of Parliament-Funkadelic, another powerful metaphor for the liberation of black bodies and minds through funk.
The popular legend of football continues to intertwine with the Afro-Brazilian tradition, on the thread of a percussive carpet of impressive variety and richness: in immaculate horse rider (“The knight with the immaculate horse”) the percussion is so detailed and meticulous that it looks like a painting point list, made up of tiny, very precise brushstrokes that all together form a complete image. The last piece of the album, Africa Brazil (Zombie), is dedicated to Zumbi dos Palmares (1655-1695), the leader of a community of runaway slaves who had founded, in Pernambuco, a rebel community that opposed the Portuguese colonial government. And Jorge Ben invokes him as a divinity of candomblé. First he describes the plantations, on one side the sugar cane on the other the coffee, and then the sitting gentlemen watching the cotton being harvested by black hands. But then “When Zumbi arrives what’s going to happen?” Ben wonders. “He is the lord of war and demands, when Zumbi arrives it’s Zumbi who commands”.
Africa Brazil it did not have a great commercial success when it came out: it was too radical for the European and American audiences who essentially expected an exotic escapism from Brazilian music. But over time it has become a classic of Brazilian music, thanks also to David Byrne who, in 1989, opened his compilation Brazil classics: Beleza tropical volume 1 just with African spear point. Resent today a forgotten masterpiece as Africa Brazil makes us understand how much the “world music” label, thanks to which the album was rediscovered in the nineties, is actually cramped and Eurocentric. This is not so much “world music” as a whole world told in music.
George Ben
Africa Brazil
Philips, 1976