Naná Vasconcelos's Saudades

Daniel B. Sharp

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501345708
• eBook ISBN: 9781501345722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Jazz Music

The story of Afro-Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos stitches together histories of 1960s-1980s jazz, psychedelia, world music, experimentalism and post-punk. Based in Recife, Rio de Janeiro, New York City and Paris, Naná played with musicians as varied as Egberto Gismonti, Don Cherry, Pat Metheny, Ralph Towner, Arto Lindsay, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, Paul Simon, Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, Os Mutantes, and Milton Nascimento. This book traces the 15 years (1964-1979) leading up to Naná's Saudades (1979, ECM), an album evoking his sonic memories of Brazil that he recorded while in Germany. Saudades features berimbau, a one-stringed instrument that looks like a bow and arrow, alongside onomatopoetic vocals and the strings of the Radio Symphony Stuttgart. Daniel B. Sharp hears Naná's playing as a counterargument against dishonest notions of the primitive just as world music emerged as a genre. With a gourd, a stick, a wire, a wicker basket, and a stone, Naná made music as complex and contemporary as the ARP synthesizers in vogue at the time.

1 From Bossa to
Tropicália: Naná in Recife

The classic 1959 movie Black Orpheus, filmed in Rio de Janeiro and directed by French director Marcel Camus, introduced generations of viewers from all over the world to an alluring and exotic view of Brazil.¹ Set during Carnaval, it places the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice onto the hilltop favelas. Although the memorable music, lyrics, and screenplay were created by figures closely allied with bossa nova, such as Luis Bonfá, Tom Jobim, and Vinicius de Morais, the music is a bit too busy with filigreed melodies on guitar to be considered bossa nova proper. Black Orpheus succeeds, though, in setting the terms within which Naná began his career (the film’s use of racialized structural poverty as an idyllic setting, notwithstanding). On the soundtrack, quiet proto-bossa nova featuring one voice and one guitar appears alongside raucous polyrhythmic Afro-Brazilian samba percussion. This contrast provides the tension within which much Brazilian popular music was made in the late 1950s to mid-1960s, when Naná came of age. Born in 1944, Naná was around 15 years old when the movie was released.

In 1967, when Naná recorded an EP with the golden-throated singer, Agostinho dos Santos, heard as the voice of Orpheus in the film, it was a few years past the apex of bossa nova’s reign in Brazil and beyond. From the beginning of his career, Naná navigated musical terrain in which the strongly Afro-Brazilian sounds associated with the morros or favelas were filtered through and tempered by ways of assembling harmonies and melodies drawing from Western art music (Villa-Lobos, Debussy, and Chopin) and cool jazz (1950s Miles Davis and Chet Baker). The polyrhythms of samba, imbued with an aura of national-cultural authenticity, were understood to be modernized and made more sophisticated by the first generation of hip upper-middle-class, mostly white kids to live in high-rise apartment buildings built during an economic boom.

This “apartment building samba,” as critic José Ramos Tinhorão dismissed bossa nova,² turned thunderous layers of parade percussion into a new sound with quiet and minimal drumming to better feature the whispered and still vocals and unpredictable, dense harmonies. It is this distinctive sound that broke through to establish a global presence to this day: a precise, asymmetrical, straighter-eighths feel to contrast jazz swing. Yet, bossa nova icon Tom Jobim fought in interviews for the genre not to become subsumed within jazz. He saw it, rather, as a parallel development using the same musical/cultural flows found throughout the Americas: the musics of the African diaspora, and mid-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century Western art music.

By the time Naná was old enough to venture forth musically, away from his father’s dance band of Latin rhythms where he kept time to mambos and cha-cha-chas on bongos painted “Na” and “Na,” bossa nova was fraying. The years of the bossa nova republic, as a political scientist writing about the late 1950s administration of Juscelino Kubitschek put it, were years of economic optimism. Bossa nova served as a soundtrack to high economic growth, the construction of Brasilia, with its ultramodern mid-century architecture and Brazil’s first World Cup soccer win. The middle class held out hope that Brazil was on the verge of entering the ranks of the wealthy countries, deceptively categorized at the time as the “First World.” This hope proved to be illusory by early 1964, as rates of inflation grew, further destabilizing the already precarious left-leaning president João Goulart at the height of Cold War anti-communism. On 1 April 1964, the military orchestrated a coup that led to the violent repression and exile of many politicized musicians, as well as the censorship of their lyrics. Over three decades after a tangle of politicians, scholars and artists all with overlapping but distinct agendas raised Afro-Brazilian samba to the status of national popular music in the late 1920s and early 1930s,³ Brazilian Popular Music (MPB) had become an elastic category stretched to include sounds both hushed and raucous, with varying emphases on rhythm, harmony, melody, and timbre. It had become a complex field, where sounds understood as raw, authentic, and of the people, coexisted with sounds understood as modern, sophisticated, and elite.

Within this complex field of Brazilian Popular Music, Brazil’s racial geography and history of labor migration shape a story where different regions of the country are assigned different roles. Concentrations of Afro-Brazilians in the former slave ports and sugarcane-cultivation zones of the Northeast of the country, most notably Salvador, Bahia, and Naná’s home cities of Olinda and Recife, Pernambuco, have led musical fieldworkers to treat the Northeast as a repository of folklore and tradition. In contrast, the industrialized Southeast of the country, most notably Rio de Janeiro, stands for the place where Afro-Brazilian musical systems mixed with European ways of music-making to create the quintessentially Brazilian modern samba. Despite the best efforts of scholars to tell a more complicated story,⁴ the way the history of samba is popularly understood to this day is still one in which Rio in the Southeast is centered, while the Northeast is relegated to serve essentially as the source of raw musical resources. The advent of bossa nova in the late 1950s, as Naná came of age, only cements this imagined geography further, as bossa nova treats samba as its raw materials to transform, just as Rio-based samba had considered northeastern samba de roda. That is to say that, even before Naná left Brazil, being an Afro-Brazilian from Olinda, Pernambuco, in the Northeast, one of the first areas that the Portuguese dominated the Indigenous peoples of Brazil, and one of the first areas where enslaved Africans were forcibly brought, positioned him to be received in Rio as a bearer of age-old traditions.

Naná could and did play the role of culture bearer that, as he traveled, marked him in many contexts, from Rio to Oslo. Despite the risk of being pigeonholed as a keeper of tradition and thus having his complexly modern, cosmopolitan sensibility erased, the role of culture bearer provided him the opportunity to carve a distinctive niche in music scenes throughout the world. But the role of culture bearer was also, in certain ways, a straitjacket that he impressively managed to escape from, again and again. And when he couldn’t escape from it, he tried to use it to his advantage in order to tell his story through sound, as he does on Saudades.

Growing up, Naná had a certain proximity, through his uncle, to the polyrhythms played by several interlocking percussion parts—conga-like ingome drums, gourd shakers, and an iron bell—that usher in ecstatic states in dancing devotees at Xangô toques at the Casa de Xambá in Recife, religious events in which percussion plays an important role in facilitating the visits of West African deities into the bodies of the initiated, as Xangô members understand it. Xangô is a variant of the Neo-African Brazilian religion Candomblé, that draws significantly from West African Yoruba religious and musical practices. It made enough of an impression on him that the full title of the centerpiece track of his 1973 record Africadeus was “Africadeus (Concerto pra Mãe Bio),”⁵ a dedication to a matriarch and religious leader of the Casa de Xambá. So, the label of culture bearer is not wrong, although there is little evidence that he actively practiced Xangô, at least as an adult. Naná later described his spiritual practice as a more personal mixture of beliefs with aspects of Buddhism and other religions—as was said about his longtime collaborator Don Cherry, he “believed in everything.”⁶ But, at the same time, from very early on, the notion that Naná is merely following the strictures of traditions that were handed to him is woefully inadequate. Still a preteen, Naná was not only exposed to the ingomes at the Casa de Xambá, but he was also playing in his father Pierre Vasconcelos’s dance band of Latin American rhythms.

The band, which played mambos, boleros, and cha-cha-chas from Cuba and elsewhere in Spanish-speaking Latin America, featured secular, pop versions of the same sorts of interlocking polyrhythms played on drums, shakers, and iron bells heard in the religious Xangô context. Before he was even a teenager, in order to play professionally as a minor, he received special permission from the state to play at the nightclub in the headquarters of the carnaval group Batutas de São José.⁷ He was also a featured member of a samba school largely made up of university students, The Bohemians of Sítio Novo University of Samba (USBSINO), where he built up experience on a large range of percussion instruments.⁸

The secular and religious versions of West African drumming traditions transformed in the Americas were not his only formative musical experiences, however. Not all of his musical contexts were Afrological, to use George E. Lewis’s term.⁹ He also played cymbals in the municipal band, earning a steady income. In the band, he was exposed to Eurological musical forms and aesthetics, including the reality of playing in an ensemble, in which the written score dictates what is played; in which there is an intricate hierarchy of prestige from instrument to instrument; and in which certain players are often required to play nothing for most of a given piece.

Complementing the various contexts in which he was performing, Naná also had a voracious appetite for listening to records that put him in touch with the broader world of popular music, as well as avant-garde music like Stockhausen. In his words:

I used to buy imported records in Recife. We had a large store where you would go to buy records. The American Center helped me a lot; I would say, “I want to listen to Thelonious,” or “I want to listen to Ornette,” or “I want to listen to Dave Brubeck.” They helped me to find all those imported records, which were very expensive at that time. My mother used to say, [shouting angrily]: “You’re going to eat albums!”¹⁰

Like many musicians who found themselves fascinated with Dave Brubeck and his band, famous for their hit “Take Five,” counted in groups of five beats, Naná credits Brubeck, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 From Bossa to Tropicália: Naná in Recife
• 2 Dictatorship and Counterculture: Naná in Rio de Janeiro
• 3 The Enchanting and Revolutionary Berimbau: Naná and Glauber Rocha in New York City
• 4 Naná and Don Cherry
• Interlude: Edition of Contemporary Music Records (ECM)
• Interlude: Creative Music Studio (CMS)
• 5 Naná and Egberto Gismonti
• 6 Utopia, Caricature, Satire, and Therapy: Naná in France
• Interlude: Naná’s Place Within the Fourth World
• 7 Race, Primitivism, and Counterculture
• 8 Voice, Body, Rhythm, and Special Effects
• 9 Saudades and Saudades
• Epilogue: After Saudades
• Notes
• List of Interviews
• Audio, and Film, TV, and Video
• References
• Index
• Copyright