url-1

 

The flame of Tropicália didn’t burn long, but it burned brightly, and in just a few short years during the late 60s, the movement sparked a revolution that drastically altered the landscape of Brazilian art and popular culture. While history tends to place the strongest significance on the musical achievements of the Tropicálistas, the movement bridged all mediums– poetry, film, and theater all felt its influence. Tropicália was fraught with political tension as well, embodying the anger, anxieties, and desires of the Brazilian left, which was then struggling under the Brazilian military’s oppressive rule, a junta that lasted from 1964 to 1985. Tom Zé, a major figure within the movement, put it bluntly: “I don’t make art; I make spoken and sung journalism.”

Naturally, this overt radicalism greatly limited the movement’s lifetime: In 1969, two of Tropicália’s most admired personalities, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, were jailed for their dissension. Remarkably, this circumstance prevented neither from releasing albums that year; they simply recorded vocal tracks in their cells and sent the tapes to their associates for embellishment. Upon their release from government custody, however, both artists left the country for England, and by the early 1970s, Tropicália had more or less run its course, giving way to the less extreme but similarly striking sounds of Musica Popular Brasileiro.

Soul Jazz’s new Tropicália: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound compilation takes an extremely focused look at six of the most important and influential Tropicália artists, bringing together material from the movement’s 1968-70 heyday for a superb 20-song anthology of one of the 20th century’s most unique musical moments. Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé, and Jorge Ben are responsible for some of the most bracing records Brazil ever produced– and though omissions are certain to be an issue for cratedigging obsessives, this collection is as flawless a primer as has ever been made available on a single disc.

The compilers made an interesting decision when they opted to bookend the compilation with two different versions of “Bat Macumba”– one by Os Mutantes, the other a collaboration between that band and Gilberto Gil. The two versions do go a long way toward illustrating the extremes of the movement– Gil’s is a sleek, propulsive groove machine topped with a wicked sitar lead, while the Mutantes transform the song into a sloppy psychedelic pile-up of Bahian drumming and spasmodic fuzz guitar– but this also means that Veloso’s literally genre-defining “Tropicália”, from his 1968 self-titled album, winds up at track 13, which doesn’t really feel right.

As the opener of Veloso’s first self-titled album, “Tropicália” was a blast across the bow of complacency in Brazilian popular music, which by then had already been inching toward explosive change for a few years. The song opens with a flutter of scraped violin strings, ringing bells, congas, and spoken narration before congealing into a swelling, stop/start verse, which is balanced by a charging, sing-song chorus. Veloso’s other tracks here were all conceived and recorded behind prison walls: “Irene” is deceptively placid, with acoustic guitar and shaker backed by genius arranger Rogério Duprat’s deftly scored horns and flutes. Of course, the seemingly innocent line “I want to hear Irene laughing” is much darker: Irene was the nickname for criminal and leftist icon TexF3rio Cavalcanti’s machine gun.

Radical politics are replaced by radical production techniques on Os Mutantes’ ingenious “Panis et Circenses”, a wild tape collage littered with horn fanfares that finds the band repeatedly fading in and out, and even slows the end of one verse to an abstract smear. They play it straighter on the outstanding “Quem Tem Medo de Brincar de Amor”, which has a chorus that could vie with any French pop of the period for sheer sophistication, Rita Lee’s breathy croon blending effortlessly with the harmonies of the Baptista brothers. Meanwhile, Gal Costa’s “Tuareg”, drawn from her outrageously strange second self-titled album, mixes Brazilian rhythms with Saharan harmonies and instrumentation, using pentatonic oboe figures and oud licks to anchor the melody. On “Sebastiana”, she switches gears from breathy to bizarre, breaking into a weird throat rattle near the end of the first verse.

A number of moments here simply rock: The opening of Gil’s “Procissao” features an incredible guitar solo over a chord sequence that foreshadows Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” by two years, while Zé’s “Jimmy, Renda Se” rides a killer descending guitar riff and strutting funk beat, sounding like a blueprint for Jorge Ben’s 1970 classic “Ponta de Lanca Africano”.

Solid as Tropicália‘s tracklist is, though, it’s hard not to miss anthems like “Baby”, “Parque Industrial”, “Alegria, Alegria!!!”, and “Pais Tropical”, calling into question whether this compilation would have been better served with the inclusion of an additional disc. But then, that may also have been too ambitious an undertaking for newcomers, and of course, each is available for tracking down in its own right for anyone interested in further exploring this music. And if you do want to seek out an additional introductory disc, you can always pick up the landmark 1968 compilation Tropicália: Ou Panis et Circenses, with which the Soul Jazz set only shares in common two tracks.

There are artists whom one could argue deserve inclusion on this kind of Tropicália overview– Chico Buarque, Maria Bethânia, Lo Borges, and MPB4 come to mind– as does the solo work of Rita Lee and Rogério Duprat, and also Wilson Simonal, whose “pilantragem” (roughly, “piracy”) style and four-volume Alegria, Alegria!!! series laid some important musical groundwork for the movement. Still, Soul Jazz’s decision to hone its focus actually results in an overall sharper, more unified collection than such cobbling together could provide. As such, Tropicália: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound seems the obvious starting point for anyone who’s ever been curious about the movement, but found the array of difficult-to-find and often expensive albums too bewildering to approach.

Via Pitchfork