#034
Exodus, movement of Jah people!
Pt03 Viver no Campo
É após um bem prognosticado arroz de bacalhau ao almoço do primeiro dia de confinamento-sem-café-que-se-possa-vender-ao-postigo que de tão satisfeito fico a pensar nas sestas alentejanas. Da mesma forma como galinha de campo que não quer capoeira também eu acabei por não dormitar na forma para começar a escrever sobre esta terceira e ultima parte do tríptico dedicado ao êxodo.
Há rendas de gramíneas pelos montes…
Papoilas rubras nos trigais maduros…
Água azulada a cintilar nas fontes…
E à volta, Amor… tornemos, nas alfombras
Dos caminhos selvagens e escuros,
Num astro só as nossas duas sombras!…
Florbela Espanca, in “Charneca em Flor”
Escolha de 40 músicas que ilustrem ou nos façam idealizar os grandes espaços alvos do montado a Sul ou que invoquem os pequenos terrenos murados das vinhas no Pico, que versem flores e plantas que brotam da terra como bocas de leão ou maminhas de Vénus, que pintem na imaginação as serras que picam as nuvens que depois vão chover nas planícies regando arvores de fruto polinizadas por pássaros e abelhas.
Vindo de um citadino tudo isto parece contra-senso, mas este tríptico sempre foi um one-way street que vinha desembocar aqui. São viagens das quais os postais ilustrados que ficam dão-nos alento para continuar quando tanto perece. São cantares de gente nobre, artistas do mundo que à morte e ao esquecimento obstinam serem adversos.
Acabo no entanto esta semana com o tema de Green Acres, hilariante série da CBS que me fazia as delicias quando pequenino. Não tinha idade para perceber isso mas na realidade Green Acres era o ideal contraponto a The Beverly Hillbillies, estreada em TV no ano de 1962.
Cansado das complicações da vida em Manhattan, Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert), um rico e bem-sucedido advogado novaiorquino, compra uma fazenda decadente ao vigarista Eustace Haney oferecendo assim um enorme desgosto a Lisa (Eva Gabor), sua sofisticada esposa húngara. Quando o casal se muda para a decrépita quinta tentam se acostumar à bizarra vila de Hooterville enquanto vão construindo um lar com a ajuda do humilde mas um pouco “lento” tarefeiro, Eb (Tom Lester). Ironicamente é a citadina Lisa quem se afeiçoa à vaca Eleanor, à galinha Alice e a Arnold, o pet dos vizinhos, um porco tv addict que parece ser bem mais inteligente que o resto da comunidade.
Green Acres foi transmitido durante 6 anos e foi ao “machado executivo” em 1971 quando a CBS decidiu que devia mudar o estilo de séries que havia popularizado. O autor do tema da série, Vic Mizzy também é conhecido pela música da Familia Addams, a qual lhe deu uma bela nota até ao seu ocaso em 2019. Sardónicamente aparece em You and Your Big Shrunken Head, quinto episódio da quinta temporada de Green Acres no desempenho de vendedor de órgãos. Go figure…
How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside.
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown-
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
Robert Louis Stevenson – The Swing
Como que num baloiço começo com Philippe Cohen Solal, membro fundador do label ¡Ya Basta! e que depois de muitos anos a “tangear” com os Gotan Project resolveu em 2007 ir até perto de Nashville no Tennessee para fazer um delicioso album bluegrass gravado com a crème de la crème dos músicos country alternativo. Sigo logo para Mort Garson, compositor canadiano que singrou sempre pela electrónica mais fantasiosa (foi pioneiro na utilização do sintetizador Moog) aqui representada por Music to Soothe the Savage Snake Plant tirado de Mother Earth’s Plantasia, um album de 1976 e re-editado recentemente pela Sacred Bones. Com muitos dos seus discos a verem novamente a luz do dia é altura de reavaliar a prestação ácido-assiduo deste obscuro compositor.
A temática pastoral ilumina por completo toda esta selecção, seja por via de autores mais ligados à música dita progressiva, à soul alternativa ou no serendipismo de um jazz mais urbano mas que intricado numa recusa à vida nas grandes cidades almejam tónicas por prados mais verdejantes.
No entanto outro tipo de pirilampo do campo ilumina a escolha destas canções. Na opção de discursos directos (rapazes de Lisboa, vão para o campo trabalhar), indagações enviesadas (how is the air up there?) ou constatações sobranceiras (tudo floresce). Porque o que resta é um desfasamento entre o que queremos e o que precisamos. A damp sort of place where all sorts of birds fly about uncooked. Nunca verdadeiramente atribuída a Oscar Wilde a citação de Joseph Wood Krutch publicada em 1949 no livro “The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetual Calendar for the Country” no entanto posiciona este remark na pessoa de um “London club man” possivelmente não outro que o autor da Importância de ser Prudente. Na incerteza de um futuro sempre a humanidade recorreu a Deus e à Natureza para alívio das perspectivas possíveis e acaba por ser por aí que a M4we desta semana vai fazendo a desfolhada.
Quando entre as mais raparigas
Vaes cantando entre as searas,
Eu choro ao ouvir-te as cantigas
Que cantas nas noutes claras!
Os que andam na descamisa
Gabam a violla tua,
Que, ás vezes, ouço na brisa
Pelos serenos da lua.
António Gomes Leal, in ‘Claridades do Sul’
A caminho do desfecho das escolhas deste tríptico chego a um double bill de recentes compilações: Sumer Is Icumen In; The Pagan Sound of British and Irish Folk 1966-75 publicado pela Grapefruit Records e Living On the Hill; A Danish Underground Trip 1967-1974 coligido com amor pela Esoteric Recordings. O primeiro é um passeio pelo countryside inglês repleto de paganismo druídico tão “na mouche” na segunda parte da década de sessenta. No entanto é do segundo que me aventurei a escolher Living On the Hill. Tema com uns selváticos 15 minutos amestrados pela Rainbow Band, supergrupo dinamarquês de progrock fundado no início de 1970 por Bent Hesselmann e Lars Bisgaard com Peer Frost, Niels Brønsted, Bo Stief e Carsten Smedegaard. O homónimo álbum de estreia foi gravado em julho de 70. Em Dezembro desse mesmo ano, Lars Bisgaard foi substituído por Allan Mortensen e o disco foi regravado com duas novas faixas e relançado em fevereiro de 1971.
Prestes a ser publicado nos mercados dos EUA e UK, a banda foi forçada a mudar de nome em Julho, já que uma banda canadiana tinha os direitos sobre o nome original, e a “segunda versão” do álbum de estreia (e único na carreira da banda) foi novamente relançada sob o novo nome da banda agora chamada de Midnight Sun.
We’ve got to do something to save the children
Soon it will be their turn to try and save the world
Right now they seem to play such a small part of
The things that they soon be right at the heart of
Gil Scott-Heron – Save the Children
Scott-Heron no seu disco The Revolution will not be Televised discursava livremente sobre a condição paradigmática dos jovens afro-americanos que na altura e usando um slogan da época mas altamente apropriado ainda hoje “viviam rápido e morriam jovens”. Porque um jovem um dia fica homem e depressa se põe a pensar em legado, escrever um livro, fazer um filho, plantar uma árvore, blah blah… Plantar em 40 acres com ajuda de uma mula podia ser um ideal abolicionista de outrora, por vezes nem sequer muito bem implementado nessa América land of the free, no entanto a preocupação de deixar uma terra fértil para a nossa descendência vem de tempos longínquos e continua em toda e qualquer demanda por um futuro melhor. Daí que talvez seja melhor sacarem das galochas (prefiram Aigle a Hunter, é como ter de escolher entre Balmor em La Rochefoucauld-en-Angoumois ou Balmoral em Ballater) e comecem a fazer planos para um êxodo rural.
Que este fim de semana veja a determinação de um desígnio ser maior que a inelegibilidade de podermos complanar um projecto de futuro.
#staysafe #musicfortheweekend
##############################
It is after a full serving of cod malandrinho rice at lunch, a good prognosis on the first day of confinement-without-coffee-sold-over-the-counter, that I’m feeling so pleased that I start thinking about naps in Alentejo. Providentially and much like a field chicken who does not need the hennery, I ended up not wasting time and began writing about this third and last part of the triptych dedicated to the exodus.
Seeing this, everything is divine and holy.
The blues and weariness are gone,
the world isn’t the world: it’s a garden,
an open sky: infinite space.
Touch me all over, Love, hold me tight!
What do you see around you? There’s no one!
The earth? – a dimming star.
Florbela Espanca, in “Charneca em Flor”
I chose from 40 songs that illustrate or make us idealize the large plains of the southern montado or that invoke tiny walled vineyards in Pico, music featuring flowers and plants that sprout from the earth, lion’s mouths and Venus tits, painting our imagination with mountains that sting clouds that will then rain on the plains, watering fruit trees pollinated by birds and bees.
As I’m a city boy this all seems counterintuitive, but this triptych has always been a one-way street that would eventually end up here. These are journeys from which the illustrated postcards that remain give us encouragement to continue when so much perishes. They are songs by noble people, artists from around the world who, in death and oblivion, seem obstinate not to give up.
However, I end this week with the theme of Green Acres, a hilarious CBS series that delighted me when I was a kid. I was not old enough to realize this but in reality Green Acres was the ideal counterpoint to The Beverly Hillbillies, premiered on TV in 1962.
Tired of the complications of life in Manhattan, Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert), a wealthy and successful New York lawyer, buys a decadent farm from swindler Eustace Haney thus offering a huge heartbreak to Lisa (Eva Gabor), his sophisticated Hungarian wife. When the couple moves to the decrepit farmhouse, they try to get used to the bizarre village of Hooterville while building a home with the help of the humble but “a little slow” help, Eb (Tom Lester). Ironically it is mega-urbanite Lisa who befriends Eleanor the cow, Alice the chicken and Arnold, the neighbor’s pet, a tv addict pig who seems to be much more intelligent than the rest of the community.
Green Acres was broadcast for 6 years and went to the “executive ax” in 1971 when CBS decided it should change the style of the series it had popularized. The author of the series theme, Vic Mizzy is also known for the music of the Addams Family, which gave him a lot of dough until his sunset in 2019. Scathingly he appears in You and Your Big Shrunken Head, fifth episode of the fifth season of Green Acres acting as an organ seller. Go figure …
How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside.
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown-
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
Robert Louis Stevenson – The Swing
I start swinging with Philippe Cohen Solal, founding member of the ¡Ya Basta! label that, after many years of “tangoing” with the Gotan Project, decided in 2007 to go near Nashville, Tennessee to make a delicious bluegrass album recorded with the crème de la crème of alt-country music. I segue to Mort Garson, a Canadian composer who was at the forefront of some fantastical electronic music (he was a pioneer in the use of the Moog synthesizer) represented here by Music to Soothe the Savage Snake Plant taken from Mother Earth’s Plantasia, a 1976 album recently re-published by the Sacred Bones inprint. With many of his records seeing the light of day is again time to reevaluate the acid-assiduous performance of this obscure composer.
A pastoral theme completely illuminates this entire selection, whether through authors more connected to a so-called progressive music, alternative soul or in the serendipity of a more urban jazz but which in it’s intricate refusal of life in large cities aim for solace in greener meadows.
However, another type of firefly illuminates the choice of these songs. In the option of direct discourse (boys from Lisboa go to the countryside to work), skewed questions (how is the air up there?) or outstanding and overrated musings (everything flourishes) because what remains is a gap between what we want and what we need.
A damp sort of place where all sorts of birds fly about uncooked. Never truly attributed to Oscar Wilde the quote by Joseph Wood Krutch published in 1949 in the book “The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetual Calendar for the Country” places however this remark in the person of a “London club man” possibly none other than the author of The Importance of being Earnest. In the uncertainty of a future, mankind has always turned to God and Nature for relief from possible perspectives and it ends up being there that this week’s M4we will drop it’s leaves.
When among the most young girls
y’go singing amidst the crops,
I cry as I hear the ditties
You sing in the clear dark!
Those who strip the shirt of the acorn
Brag your viola,
That sometimes I hear in the breeze
felt under the serene moon.
António Gomes Leal, in ‘Claridades do Sul’
On the way to this triptych’s conclusion I got to a double bill of recent compilations: Sumer Is Icumen In; The Pagan Sound of British and Irish Folk 1966-75 published by Grapefruit Records and Living On the Hill; A Danish Underground Trip 1967-1974 collected with love by Esoteric Recordings. The first is like a tour through the English countryside, full of druidic paganism so “in tune” with the second half of the sixties. However it is from the later that I ventured to choose Living On the Hill. A track clocking a wild 15 minutes tamed by the Rainbow Band, Danish progrock supergroup founded in the early 1970s by Bent Hesselmann and Lars Bisgaard with Peer Frost, Niels Brønsted, Bo Stief and Carsten Smedegaard. The homonymous debut album was recorded in July 1970. In December of that same year, Lars Bisgaard was replaced by Allan Mortensen and the disc was re-recorded with two new tracks and re-released in February 1971. About to be published in the US and UK markets, the band was forced to change their name in July, as a Canadian band had the rights to the original name, and the “second version” of their debut album (and single in their career) was re-released under a new band monicker, now called Midnight Sun.
We’ve got to do something to save the children
Soon it will be their turn to try and save the world
Right now they seem to play such a small part of
The things that they soon be right at the heart of
Gil Scott-Heron – Save the Children
Scott-Heron on his album The Revolution will not be Televised spoke freely about the paradigmatic condition of young African Americans who at the time and using a slogan from that era but highly appropriate even today “lived fast and died young”. Because a young man one day becomes a man and quickly starts thinking about legacy, writing a book, making a child, seeding a tree, blah blah… Planting on 40 acres with the help of a mule could be an abolitionist ideal of yore, sometimes not even too well implemented in an America land of the free however concerns of bestowing a fertile land on our descendants comes from distant times and continues in any demand for a better future. So it might be better to get out your wellies (prefer Aigle to Hunter, it’s like having to choose between Balmor in La Rochefoucauld-en-Angoumois and Balmoral in Ballater) and start making plans for a rural exodus.
May this weekend see the determination of a design to be greater than the ineligibility of being able to project a fortunate destiny.
#staysafe #musicfortheweekend
Solal – The Academy of Trust feat. Jim Lauderdale
Mort Garson – Music to Soothe the Savage Snake Plant
The Wonder Who? – Watch the Flowers Grow
Rogério Charraz – Campo Lavrado (com Dany Silva)
The Associates – Even Dogs in the Wild
Canned Heat – Going Up the Country
Vanessa Daou – Near The Black Forest
Donny Hathaway – Valdez in the Country (Edit by Mr. K)
Salomé – Soy Muy Poca Cosa
Rare Earth – King of a Rainy Country
Paulo Pedro Gonçalves – Rapazes de Lisboa
Tender Leaf – Countryside Beauty
k.d. Lang – The Mind of Love
George Benson – Nature Boy
Sunshine Boys Quartet – Goodbye World, Goodbye
Scott Joplin – Act 1. The Corn-Huskers
The Residents – Birds in the Trees
A Moda Mãe – Fui t’a ver tavas lavando
Tom Waits – Green Grass
Carly Simon – Tranquillo (Melt my Heart)
David Byrne & St. Vincent – The Forest Awakes
The Cure – A Forest
Alexandros Nathanail – Tristonho Cavaleiro feat. Helder Moutinho
Danny Barnes – Sleep feat. Dave Matthews
Bibio – All the Flowers (WXAXRXP Session)
Bobbi Humphrey – Jasper Country Man
Sam Mangwana – Marabenta (Vamos para o Campo)
The Bangles – How Is the Air Up There
The Roadrunners – A House in the Country
Os Pontos Negros – Tudo Floresce
Le Couleur – Silenzio
Young Jessie – Be Bop Country Boy
Trini Lopez – Lemon Tree
The Green Kingdom – A Painting of Mountains in the Clouds
Dee C’rell – Catching Stars as They Fall (Hibotep Vocal Mix)
Rainbow Band – Living On the Hill
Choir Unnamed – Sumer Is a-Cumin In
Young Gun Silver Fox – Who Need Words
Gil Scott-Heron – Save the Children
Eddie Albert & Eva Gabor – Green Acres Theme