Shorn -- But Not Shot

2/12/2022

The legend of Caetano Veloso includes this: marched at gunpoint from his cell, to a mysterious doorway, where he had every reason to fear the worst.

Instead of taking a bullet in the back, he was divested of his flowing locks.
Soon he was flown to Europe, with no way of knowing if he could ever get home to Brazil.

This is the aura of the electric presence of a survivor, now 79 years old and still singing, surely to the annoyance of the current Brazilian dictator.

I have been trying to figure out how the New Yorker came to run a long and lush profile of Caetano Veloso, by Jonathan Blitzer, in its mid-February issue – a Valentine for Veloso fans, like me? A political comparison to other countries veering rightward, dangerously? Whatever the reason, thank you.

The kid lost his hair but not his life -- and later wrote "Narcissus on Holiday."

North Americans have come a long way with Brazil and music. When I was a kid, we had the movie,“The Road to Rio” with Crosby and Hope -- don’t bother – but in the early 1960s I first heard “Song of the Jet,” (Samba do Avião) a Tom Jobim song, sung by Tony Bennett, about a jet landing in Rio. Now we were getting somewhere.

In the same magnificent decade for music, we heard a version of “The Girl From Ipanema,” music by Antônio Carlos Jobim, in a collaboration by Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, and In the same decade, we got the bossa nova – Brazil ’66 – Sergio Mendes. About the same time, a skinny kid from Bahia captivated listeners and ticked off the authorities and lived to smirk about it.

I’ve been listening to Veloso for over a decade, partially because of my friends Altenir and Celia, but also for the music that flows so copiously, a veritable Amazon of Veloso -- love songs, political songs, tributes to indigenous people, their cultures disrupted by invaders from Europe.

On one of his CDs, there is a song called “Manhata,” in his reedy but purposeful voice, about “uma canoa,” as he describes a Lenape maiden piloting her canoe on one of the streams criss-crossing a certain island in North America. (The streams still exist in the basements of high-rise Manhattan. Surprise!)

About three minutes in, the peaceful gliding turns into a cacophonous stroll through modern “Manhata” – Blare of horns! Rattle of drums! That would make sense, since Veloso has often performed in the city and seems to find a higher level of ego and motivation in Bigtown.

In 2008, Veloso was the subject of a DVD, “Coração Vagabundo" (Wandering Heart) during his tour of Sao Paulo, Japan and Manhata – preening when pretty girls smiled on the street and cabbies honked their horns in recognition. His kind of town. (Blitzer informs us that Veloso keeps a flat in the East Village.)

As a writer and a fan, I am envious of the access Blitzer had with Veloso in Rio, and also with musicians I admire like David Byrne and Jacques Morelenbaum. Also, Blitzer’s article quivers with the presence of Tom Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil.

The article also takes us from the dictatorship that spared Veloso in the ‘60s to the current regime of Jair Bolsonaro, who considers it a good day when bulldozers take down dozens of acres of the rain forest.

But enough from me. Jonathan Blitzer writes the story so well. Perhaps you subscribe to the New Yorker, as I do, or perhaps you can call up a freebie from the website. Here is the link, and good luck:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/14/how-caetano-veloso-revolutionized-brazils-sound-and-spirit

Did I mention that Veloso also sings Cole Porter....and Michael Jackson (above) with a touch of Lennon/McCartney at the end ?

Also, for a great swath of contemporary Brazilian music, my friend Andrea Dunn plays two hours every Monday, from 1-3 PM, Eastern Time, on KDHX (88.1 FM) St. Louis https://kdhx.org/

Altenir Silva

2/12/2022 06:36:34 pm

George: You wrote a beautiful article about Veloso’s history. I read the article in The New Yorker. I loved it. Caetano is our pride. He has a new album. Here are the lyrics of Distorted Angels, where he claims and protests and understands these new times.

Distorted Angels

Some distorted angels from the Silicon Valley
Those that live in darkness while under light
Told me: Go be triumphant in your addictions
To the screens of a bluer shade of blue

Now my history is a dense algorithm
That sells blindfolds to real sellers
My neurons have gotten a new alternate rhythm
And more, and more, and more, and more, and more

Arab Spring - and soon came the horror
Wishing the world to end
Shadows of love

Stupid leaders blossomed, macabre
In the Empire and in its wide backyards
As ancient empires come back to life
Armed with complete control

Angels who are millionaires or even billionaires
Only command their millions, billions, trillions
And when we're not stupid
Listen to Shoenberg, Webern, Cage, songs...

Oh, beautiful girl
You're here
Without skin, screen to screen
Here we are

A vile post can kill
Who can represent salvation?
What cloud, if there's not even space
No time, no yes, no no
Yes: no no

But there are some poems like never before
Or unlike anything a poet has ever dreamed with
In the times that were sometime ago
And I'm going, why not?
I'm going, why not? I'm going

Some distorted angels from the Silicon Valley
Touched deep within the smallest grain
And as we ask ourselves about the beginning
Miss Eilish does everything in her room with her brother

https://lyricstranslate.com

George

2/13/2022 12:04:32 pm

Dear Altenir: Thank you for the lyrics of the new Veloso song. He gets a lot in there -- Arab Spring? Billie Eilish? His interests are wide --I probably should have mentioned all the references in his song, "O Estrangeiro," linking the creative people he admires -- Gauguin, Cole Porter, Claude Levy-Strauss, two blind singers, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, and the albino Hermeto Pascal "doesn't see very well." but is still performing at 85 -- the outsiders who taught us so much. Best to your family, G

Andy Tansey

2/17/2022 11:10:28 pm

Strong political statements in the context of good music are quite rare. Dylan could manage it quite regularly, but most others only occasionally at best. Thanks, George, for the introduction to this good music and powerful story.

I have heard plenty of backlash about musicians who are accused of co-opting other cultures' and races' music, for example: that jazz and the blues belong to Blacks; the criticism Paul Simon faced by some for merging cultures; I believe I heard some of this about David Byrne, too. To me, the best of music and society are found in the rich indulgence of cross-cultural exchange. One of my favorite vocal performances is John Lennon's on the Beatles' cover of "Slow Down," by Larry Williams - seething for reciprocation.

Of course, "Ipanema" - featured in Milton Okun's Great Songs of the Sixties, with a foreword by Tom Wicker - transcends all cultures with its subject's fixation on physical beauty - but then isn't Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman" - based in American blues - more or less the same song - what many singers secretly or not-so-secretly want - for she to look at or walk back to me? Lest I seem insensitive to my better half's half of the population, the failure of my favorite music to transcend gender-based stereotypes of desire is not lost on me, and I cannot say I am in favor of that much progressivism - the recent shunning of "Baby It's Cold Outside" recently is a shame.

Like the best music, I have the sense that only Brazil rivals our beloved Queens in melding races and cultures - not always without trouble - I guess Brazil has given us Bolsonaro, and Queens has given us Tr*mp - but just the same in many instances as good as it Getz.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Shorn -- But Not Shot

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