Daniel B. Sharp contributes to the Bloomsbury ‘33 1/3’ series’ Brazil list by taking a biographical approach in his treatment of Saudades, giving relatively little space to the album itself to understand the many choices and fortuitous events in the life of Brazilian musician Naná Vasconcelos (1944–2016) resulting in its creation. The book traces a genealogy of Vasconcelos’ musical innovations during the 1960s and 1970s, as the artist contributed to music scenes in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Manhattan, Paris and Europe, before working on this album with Egberto Gismonti, released in 1979 (p. 12). Thinking about this varied and global career, in which Saudades is just one moment – Vasconcelos recorded through the 2000s – Sharp argues that ‘jazz is the glue’ (p. 82). In tracing Vasconcelos’ musical career centred around his virtuosity on the berimbau, a folkloric instrument he employed in many jazz and electric psychedelic rock compositions drawing on an ‘accumulated musical vocabulary’, Sharp underscores how artistic creators learn from each other and how these relations affect ideas; his chapters are divided into significant encounters with people or places (105). Sharp's greatest contribution is his preference for particularising detail over homogenising sociological abstraction, with an engaging narrative style focusing on his subject's life and the local influences that formed his approach, which previously have not enjoyed a similar attention in English.
Vasconcelos was from Pernambuco, the Brazilian northeast, where the Brazilian counterparts of jazz swing are suinge and balanço, with ‘ecstatic, interlocking polyrhythms’ (45) influenced by Xangô toaque, a variety of Candomblé percussion. Vasconcelos escaped the stifling role of ‘culture bearer’ many Brazilians adopted abroad, argues Sharp, because 1960s Pernambuco itself reveled in experiment over stasis, serving as a laboratory for Paulo Freire's educational ideas and movements advocating state policies. Vasconcelos participated in several popular theatre collectives, before moving from the northeast to Rio, then abroad, in search of musical growth. In New York, Vasconcelos developed a consciousness of the importance of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian popular culture, living with documentary filmmaker Glauber Rocha, a time of mutual influence. During the next decades, Vasconcelos collaborated extensively – he played tabla on Clementina de Jesus’ ‘Taratá’; brought together Arto Lindsay and Pat Metheny to watch Knicks vs. Celtics and make music; worked with tabla player Trilok Gurtu; recorded an album with guitarist Agustín Pereyra Lucena, El Increíble NANA; jammed with Gato Barbieri; and contributed to several projects with Don Cherry, a rich engagement that joined musical traditions from Africa, America and Asia, incorporating local chance sounds. Their collaborations included jazz trio Codona and the album Don Cherry’s New Researches featuring Vasconcelos’ Organic Music Theatre, featuring mouth noises and body percussion; the group toured in a VW Camper customised for driving in lotus position (80), where Naná played a glass version of the ghatam, or South Asian clay pot. Cherry's fascination with combining South American and Afro-diasporic styles with South Asian percussion, influenced by Indian Karnatak vocal melodies with devotional lyrics replaced by ‘ah’ and ‘eh’ sounds, coincided with Vasconcelos’ interest in rhythmic textures crossing geographical boundaries.
With Gismonti, Vasconcelos discovered an ‘explosive and complementary musical chemistry’ that resulted in Dança das Cabeças (1970), then Saudades (p. 13). Sharp depicts the encounter as a moment of latent possibilities made manifest. Vasconcelos loved the sound images of Héctor Villa-Lobos and Karlheinz Stockhausen, while Gismonti was ambivalent toward erudition. Saudades was recorded in March 1979, with Gismonti's string orchestration. Their label, ECM, is known for its recording locations such as monasteries and concert halls favouring the creation of atmosphere, as well as its contemplative detail and acoustic-enhanced realism captured with highly precise top microphones. Vasconcelos’ participation was a product of the political situation; Gismonti invited Nana to record with only 48 hours’ notice, since the military government made travel difficult for his band. Those were the anos de chumbo, or leaden years, when Tropicalists were imprisoned and exiled to London, and Milton Nascimiento had to replace the censored lyrics of his 1973 Milagre dos Peixes with wordless vocals.
Sharp addresses the common, sometimes allied struggle of jazz and ‘world music’ to make a space for themselves. A 1918 anti-jazz editorial ‘The Location of Jazz’, published in New Orleans Times-Picayune, speaks of the ‘denigrated status of rhythm within Eurological notions of music’, mentioning ‘the hum of the Indian dance . . . the thumpty-tumpty of the [Black] banjo, and, in fact, the native dances of the world’ (p. 23). In the case of Brazilian rhythms, the popularity of samba in the 1920s and 1930s gave way to the popularity of MPB and bossa nova, which reached global audiences through the soundtrack to the 1959 film Black Orpheus. In subtle ways, these patterns persisted through the 1970s. An essay by Manfred Eicher, head of ECM, ‘The Periphery and the Centre’, still operates in dichotomous terms: ‘Those who are serious about culture will try to position themselves at the periphery and see how they are mirrored from there. The meaning of a culture reveals itself in its plenitude only through encounter and contact with a culture different, even alien to it’ (p. 93). ECM press for Saudades reinforced the idea of Brazilian rhythms, and of Vasconcelos’ and Gismonti's jazz, as representative of a premodern past. Its contrast of jungle with conservatory evoked a first encounter, notions also linked to blackness and wildness, in parallel to the more famous case of Jimi Hendrix. Rhythm was associated with howling and savagery, and a clean, steady pitch with humanity and civilisation. This ‘nostalgia for primitivism’, argues Sharp, was present in a great deal of European writing of the time, tropes that Nana struggled with as he carried his berimbau around Paris; he found himself most comfortable working as resident musician with schizophrenic children in a French hospital (65).
Sharp also focuses on transformations in musical technology. As sound mixing moved from mono to stereo, Vasconcelos stood out for his ‘cinematic sense’ of the parallax, or three-dimensional stereo field, deploying a playful yet deliberate placement of sounds. Sharp additionally praises him as a master of timing, with acoustic practices that drew on percussive vocals and a creative use of the Foley process, blurring boundaries between speech, melody and shout. Vasconcelos’ dense harmonies layered ‘a composition on top of a composition’, to ‘tell stories through sound’ (p. 157).
The book ends with Sharp's brief track-by-track analysis of Saudades. In ‘O Berimbau’, the emphasis is on Vasconcelos’ berimbau, which he strikes with a stone; in ‘Vozes (Saudades)’, a voice alludes to freedom, the 1888 abolition of slaves and the Quilombo dos Palmares, a community of escaped Africans and allies in 17th-century Portuguese Pernambuco; in ‘Ondas (Na Ohlos de Petronila)’, lyrics focus on a drought-prone region and 19th-century millenarian preacher Antonio Conselheiro, who spoke of apocalyptic transformation reaching from sertão to sea, in a track where tabla drums are spaced at centre/left and conga drums at centre/right to paint a sonic image; in ‘Cego Alderaldo’, Vasconcelos becomes a troubadour of the cantoria de viola as the song follows a 12-pulse cycle for Indian tabla, according to Sharp correcting the Orientalism of Baden Powell's ‘O Cego Alderego’ that treated the Northeast and Amazonas as ‘others’ within Brazil; in ‘Dado’, Vasconcelos works at higher pitches, in a track that could be a friend's nickname, or in a more philosophical interpretation, a stock-taking of what life has given.
Here, as in many cases, Sharp's readings offer a refreshing alternative to more abstract or panoramic studies of Brazilian music, and justify the 33 1/3 series. An idiosyncratic figure like Vasconcelos, difficult to locate in national categories and musical genres, is well served by Sharp's more particular and speculative listenings made from his own sensibility, which infuse dense history with a more personal, indefinable nostalgia of remembrance, grief and love – his own saudades.
