#057

Exotica

Vivia eu em Londres, nos agora quase longínquos anos 90, e a moderna vida nocturna tinha deliciosas incongruências, principalmente à Terça-feira. Em Soho, no Madame Jojo’s, Bruce Clayton Marcus, ou seja Count Indigo e o seu fiel braço direito, o DJ Felshley B. Hawkes (gadelhudo personagem que muito bem poderia ser confundido com um teddy bear retirado do Antigo Testamento mas enroupado num fato 3 peças com uma ligeira boca de sino nas calças) organizavam uma noite delirante subjugada a um estilo que depois veio a ser conhecido como Loungecore, quando andávamos todos ainda divertidos e o kitsch era para os olhos o que o chá-chá-chá era para os pés, incontornável.

Exactamente o mesmo kitsch que esse grande estraga-festas Milan Kundera descreveu como sendo a trombeta arauto do fim da modernidade ao reduzir a ambiguidade e a complexidade inerente à vida ao cliché e ao narcisismo emocional. Richard Kearney no seu livro Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern transcreve o autor “The kitsch man’s need for kitsch – the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection” assim comprovando que há por aí gente que possivelmente nunca na vida bebeu um fumegante cocktail Tiki.

Ora nessa altura andava-se a redescobrir toda uma sonoridade chamada de Exotica, etnografia musical de um terreno imaginário, o exquisite de um mundo verde e luxuriante como que numa astronómica distancia até um planeta longínquo… porque algures nos idos 1950s mots clés como selva, ilha, cântico, vudu, etc eram markers de inacessibilidade, fazendo com que um local como o Hawai parecesse quase tão distante e remoto quanto as quentes e desertificadas planícies do planeta Marte.

O nome mais sonante e para quem se adjectivou a Exotica era o de Martin Denny, que com o seu quarteto, do qual também fazia parte o vibrafonista Arthur Lyman, viu-se depois da guerra com um contracto no Village Hotel em Waikiki tocando suaves arranjos de sucessos da altura à beira da piscina mas usando singulares instrumentos como conchas do mar, gongs provenientes da Indonésia ou de Burma, kotos do Japão e membrafones como o incrível boobam ao mesmo tempo que se iam apropriando dos sons produzidos pelos animais locais, acabando assim por conceber uma mistura de Easy Listening Smooth Jazz com instrumentação “Tiki” da Polinésia. Este original cozinhado musical iria valer a Denny entrada para os tops de vendas quando gravou Quiet Village de Les Baxter em 1958 e estadia de cinco semanas no lugar cimeiro das tabelas de vendas para o seu primeiro album, de nome Exotica, no ano seguinte.

Nos anos 90 todos esses nomes estavam com as suas carecas a descoberto. Korla Pandit ou Les Elgart de um lado do oceano ou Nino Nardini e Piero Umiliani do outro já não eram propriamente personas ignotus e todos os artistas du jour nessa altura pareciam já haver bebido inspiração nos mestres. O finlandês Lassi Lehto, Jimi Tenor para o resto do mundo, de quem escolhi Beach Boy do disco Organism editado em 1999, que se ouvirmos com atenção parece o Jungle Madness de Martin Denny. Ou os Combustible Edison que no LP I, Swinger de 1994 gravaram Guadaloupe que bem podia ter sido feita ao mesmo tempo que Tumba, single de 1956 gravado pelo nova-iorquino András Serly-Brummer. Ou mesmo os britânicos Quiet Village, duo composto por Joel Martin e Matt Edwards (mais tarde Radio Slave), que gravaram em 2008 um único disco de originais, Silent Movie para a editora Studio !K7. Se o nome do projecto é puro tributo aos grão-vizires da Exotica convém salientar que este Broken Promises muito bem podia constar nos mandamentos que eram Primitiva ou Hypnotique.

Já agora, para não mencionar Korla Pandit e depois seguir em frente, deixo aqui um pouco de contexto. É talvez o avô do género musical, já que este afro-americano que com o seu turbante até faz lembrar o professor Rakar mas que em 1948 estreou na estação KTLA de Hollywood o primeiro programa totalmente musical a ser transmitido na televisão e do qual escolhi o TV Show Opening. Adventures in Music, apresentava Korla sentado atrás de seu órgão Hammond, tocando e olhando melancolicamente para a câmera sem nunca proferir uma só palavra. Uns anos mais tarde, por causa de uma disputa contractual, foi despedido do programa e substituído por Liberace que lhe roubou o gimmick dos olhos-nos-olhos com os seus espectadores.

Sometimes, in the finest of moments

You find the furniture just doesn’t fit

Something about the carpet

Makes you want to scream

The ashtrays make you ill

The hostess wants you to smile

Don’t sit on the sofa

The plastic makes you sweat

The bathroom’s done in mirror tiles

The toaster wants your blood

Tuxedomoon – Holiday for Plywood

No entanto posso garantir que a coisa já vinha de trás. Estava a década de 80 a começar e em Lisboa podia não haver muita coisa to write a postcard about mas havia, quase no topo da avenida Almirante Reis, um Bora-Bora que logo após da Fonte Luminosa prometia escapismo nos cocktails que faziam. Os sofás aveludados e as cenas primitivas nas paredes, para um rapaz nos seus teens isto era a sensação de estranheza sentida anos mais tarde em Blue Velvet de Lynch, como que se tivesse a observar tudo através de fundos de garrafas, lenticulares distorções da vida numa capital apartada quer de modernidade quer de sentido histórico, onde um qualquer simulacro parecia um escape permitido para evitar a padronização. 

É por isso que me lembrei de Holiday for Plywood com que os Tuxedomoon encerram o ópus Desire de 1981. É também esta ponte que me transporta para Hong Kong Night View dos japoneses Videotapemusic no disco Souvenir que gravaram para a 180g ou que me fez chegar à versão de Panic in Detroit de Bowie gravada pelo paulistano Sessa, co-fundador do grupo Garotas Suecas. Distopias urbanas com sabor insular.

Que se anote o peso de ambos os repetentes internacionais: Haruomi Hosono que fez todo um principio de carreira exactamente a introduzir os sons exóticos de Okinawa na sua discografia. Escolhi Nettaiya do primeiro disco Tropical Dandy de um distante mil-novecentos-e-setenta-e-cinco, ainda longe de fazer com Takahashi e Sakamoto o trio Yellow Magic Orchestra. Que tinham no primeiro disco uma versão de Firecracker, originalmente escrito por… Martin Denny.

O outro contender é Yma Sumac com Goomba Boomba, gravado originalmente no superlativo absoluto que é Mambo! de 1954 mas que aqui usei na versão posterior do disco Recital gravado em 1961. Sumac e a sua voz de rouxinol paradisíaco é epítome de consubstanciação do que é o som da Exotica. Os arranjos das composições de Moises Vivanco, com quem foi casada entre 1942 e 1965, são certeiros como flechas mas mágicos como os arcos que as disparam, plenos de um paisagismo emotivo digno de fotos de locais que gostaríamos um dia ter visitado.

E é aí que quero chegar. Deixo esta semana amostragens de como, um pouco por todo o lado, músicos através dos tempos foram guiando esse devaneio escapista: os portugueses Cool Hipnoise com Lis-Kgn-Hav ou Lululemon com Uricuru (I); o conjunto grego Kostas Bezos and the White Birds com as steel guitars em modo prego a fundo na evocativa Όνειρο στη Χαβάη (A Dream of Hawaii); a cubana Elena Madera com Pu-Chun-Ga; o norueguês Øyvind Torvund com Out of the Jungle ou o britânico Mike Cooper que em 2004 gravou este Kokoke Nalu no disco Rayon Hula – An Homage To Arthur Lyman And Ellery Chun. 

And in the evening

(When the sky is on fire)

Heaven and earth become my great open cathedral

Where all men are brothers

Where all things are bound by law

And crowned with love

Poor, alone and happy

I make a fire on the beach

And as darkness covers the face of the deep

Lie down in the wild grass

And dream the dream that the dreamers dream

I am the wind, the sea, the evening star

I am everyone, anyone, no one

Tinha de encerrar apontando para quem mais admiro em todo este universo, Eden Ahbez. Figura estranha e founding father da cena mística californiana, Ahbez vestia-se num estilo proto-salvador nas suas vestes brancas, sandálias, cabelo comprido e barba, umas quantas décadas antes de existir uma consciência hippie. Pode ficar para a história por ter escrito o maravilhoso Nature Boy imortalizado por Nat King Cole e por tantos outros ao ponto de se tornar um standard jazz. Mas a história tem vindo a conseguir reavaliar o legado de Eden Ahbez que, apesar de ter escrito centenas de canções, só nos deixou um disco gravado, Eden’s Island (The Music Of An Enchanted Isle) editado originalmente em 1960 e que é disco que amiúde vê agulha cá em casa.

Talvez por causa do docupic As the Wind: The Enchanted Life of Eden Ahbez, realizado por Brian Chidester e John Winer, e que já anda por aí a mostrar teasers começo com Dharmaland, faixa que dá titulo ao album editado recentemente pelos Ìxtahuele contendo material original nunca gravado por Ahbez. Pelo meio, aí pela vigésima escolha, inseri a versão mambo que Marti Barris fez em 1958 de Ahbe Casabe, composição original também de Ahbez.

Mas acabo a escolha desta semana voltando à minha cópia de Eden’s Island datada de 2018, em edição numerada (nº 223 de 500) da Fantôme Phonographique, pequena label com um gosto editorial sem mácula. Escolhi Full Moon porque está lá tudo. O coaxar das rãs, a spoken voice, plácida, quase triste ou resignada. Ou será que é isso que Ahbez nos mostrou sobre o estilo musical que esta semana exploro? A música de Eden Ahbez é pacífica, é nitidamente influenciada pelo Pacífico, palco que se torna uma constante nas maioria das sonoridades da Exotica. O oceano como força viva. Que nos faz reconsiderar a nossa própria escala. Que difere o perdido do achado, nesse jogo eterno que prova que só encontra rumo aquele que se perde.

Que sirva este fim de semana para viajarmos até longe, tão longe quanto a nossa imaginação permita.

#staysafe #musicfortheweekend

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Was I living in London, in the now so distant 1990s, and all modern night life had delicious inconsistencies, especially on Tuesdays. In Soho, at Madame Jojo’s, Bruce Clayton Marcus, better known as Count Indigo, and his faithful right-hand man DJ Felshley B. Hawkes (cheerful character who could very well be mistaken for a teddy bear taken out from the Old Testament while dressed in a slightly bell-bottomed trousered three piece suit) organized a delirious night subjugated to a style that later came to be known as Loungecore, when we were all still having fun and kitsch was a catch, to the eyes what cha-cha-cha was to our feet, impossible to circumvent. 

Exactly the same kitsch that great party spoiler Milan Kundera described as the trumpet harbinger of the end of modernity by reducing the ambiguity and complexity inherent in life to cliché and emotional narcissism. Richard Kearney in his book Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern transcribes the author “The kitsch man’s need for kitsch – the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection” thus proving that there are people out there who possibly never in their life had one steaming Tiki cocktail.

At that time, a whole sound called Exotica was being rediscovered, a musical ethnography of an imaginary land, the exquisiteness of a green and lush world as if astronomically distant like some far-away planet… because somewhere in the 50s mots clés such as jungle, island , chanting, voodoo, etc. were markers of inaccessibility, making a place like Hawaii seem almost as distant and remote as the hot, deserted surface of planet Mars.

The most resonant name and for whom Exotica was called was that of Martin Denny, who with his quartet, of which vibraphonist Arthur Lyman was also part, found himself after the war with a contract at the Village Hotel in Waikiki playing by the pool soft arrangements of current hits but using unique instruments such as sea shells, gongs from Indonesia or Burma, kotos from Japan and membraphones such as the incredible boobam while appropriating the sounds produced by local animals, thus conceiving a blend of Easy Listening Smooth Jazz with Polynesian “Tiki” instrumentation. This original musical stew would earn Denny top-selling kudos when he recorded Les Baxter’s Quiet Village in 1958 and stayed at the top of the charts for his first album, Exotica, the following year for five full weeks.

In the 90’s all these names had their bald heads uncovered. Korla Pandit and Les Elgart on one side of the ocean or Nino Nardini and Piero Umiliani on the other weren’t personas ignotus as some many artists du jour at that time seemed to have drawn inspiration from the masters. The Finn Lassi Lehto, Jimi Tenor for the rest of the world, from whom I chose Beach Boy from the album Organism released in 1999, which, if listened carefully, sounds like Martin Denny’s Jungle Madness. Or Combustible Edison, who in 1994’s LP I, Swinger recorded Guadaloupe, which could very well have been made at the same time as Tumba, a 1956 single recorded by New Yorker András Serly-Brummer. Or even Quiet Village, a British duo composed of Joel Martin and Matt Edwards (later Radio Slave), who recorded in 2008 an original single LP, Silent Movie for Studio !K7. If the name of the project is pure tribute to high sorcerers of Exotica, it should be noted that this Broken Promises could very well be a commandment on the scriptures that were Primitiva or Hypnotique.

By the way, not to mention Korla Pandit and then move on, I leave a little context here. He’s perhaps the grandfather of the musical genre, an African-American who, with his turban even resembles our own Professor Rakar, but who in 1948 premiered on Hollywood’s KTLA station the first fully musical program to be broadcast on television and from which I chose the TV Show Opening. Adventures in Music featured Korla sitting behind his Hammond organ, playing and looking glumly into the camera without ever uttering a word. A few years later, due to a contractual dispute, he was fired from the show and replaced by Liberace who stole his eye-to-eye with the viewer gimmick.

Sometimes, in the finest of moments

You find the furniture just doesn’t fit

Something about the carpet

Makes you want to scream

The ashtrays make you ill

The hostess wants you to smile

Don’t sit on the sofa

The plastic makes you sweat

The bathroom’s done in mirror tiles

The toaster wants your blood

Tuxedomoon – Holiday for Plywood

However, I can guarantee that this thing had already started much before. The 80s were dawning and in Lisbon there might not be much to write a postcard about, but there was, just after Fonte Luminosa almost at the top of Avenida Almirante Reis, a bar  that promised escapism in the cocktails they made. The velvety sofas, the primitive scenes on the walls, for a boy in his teens Bora-Bora was the feeling of strangeness felt years later in Lynch’s Blue Velvet, as if I was watching everything through bottle bottoms, lenticular distortions of life in a capital separated from historical sense as well as modernity, where any simulacrum seemed like a permitted route to avoid standardization.

That’s what made me grab a Holiday for Plywood with which Tuxedomoon ended their 1981 opus called Desire. It is also this bridge that transports me to Hong Kong Night View by Japanese Videotapemusic on their Souvenir recorded for the 180g label or that made me reach to Bowie’s Panic in Detroit version by Sessa, co-founder of the group Garotas Suecas. Urban dystopias with an insular flavor.

Let us keep note about both heavy weight international frequent flyers: Haruomi Hosono who made a whole beginning of his career precisely by introducing the exotic sounds of Okinawa into his discography. I chose Nettaiya from his initial Tropical Dandy dated from a distant nineteen hundred and seventy-five, still far from making with Takahashi and Sakamoto the trio Yellow Magic Orchestra. That had on their first record a version of Firecracker, originally written by… Martin Denny.

The other contender is Yma Sumac with Goomba Boomba, originally recorded in the absolute superlative that is Mambo! from 1954 but which I used here in the later version contained in Recital recorded in 1961. Sumac and its paradisiacal nightingale voice is the epitome of the consubstantiation of what the Exotica sound is. The arrangements of the compositions by Moises Vivanco, to whom she was married between 1942 and 1965, are accurate as arrows but magical like the bows that shoot them, full of emotional landscaping worthy of photos of places we would have liked to visit.

And that’s where I’m coming from. This week I leave samples of how, somewhat everywhere, musicians through the ages have guided this escapist reverie: the Portuguese Cool Hipnoise with Lis-Kgn-Hav or Lululemon with Uricuru (I); the Greek ensemble Kostas Bezos and the White Birds with all steel guitars in racing mode in an evocative Όνειρο στη Χαβάη (A Dream of Hawaii); Cuban Elena Madera with Pu-Chun-Ga; the Norwegian Øyvind Torvund with Out of the Jungle or Brit Mike Cooper, who in 2004 recorded this Kokoke Nalu on the album Rayon Hula – An Homage To Arthur Lyman And Ellery Chun.

And in the evening

(When the sky is on fire)

Heaven and earth become my great open cathedral

Where all men are brothers

Where all things are bound by law

And crowned with love

Poor, alone and happy

I make a fire on the beach

And as darkness covers the face of the deep

Lie down in the wild grass

And dream the dream that the dreamers dream

I am the wind, the sea, the evening star

I am everyone, anyone, no one

I had to close by pointing to who I most admire in this entire universe, Eden Ahbez. Strange figure and founding father of the California mystical scene, Ahbez used to dress in a proto-savior style with his white robes, sandals, long hair and beard, a few decades before there was a hippie conscience. He may go down in history for having written the wonderful Nature Boy immortalized by Nat King Cole and so many others that it became a jazz standard. But history has been able to reevaluate the legacy of Eden Ahbez who, despite having written hundreds of songs, only left us one recorded vinyl, Eden’s Island (The Music Of An Enchanted Isle), originally published in 1960 and which is often wax that feels the needle back at home.

Perhaps because of the docupic As the Wind: The Enchanted Life of Eden Ahbe, directed by Brian Chidester and John Winer, which is already out there showing teasers I start with Dharmaland, title track of the album recently put out by Ìxtahuele containing original material never recorded by Ahbez. In between, for the twentieth choice, I inserted the mambo version that Marti Barris made in 1958 of Ahbe Casabe, an original composition also by Ahbez.

But I close this week’s selection by returning to my copy of Eden’s Island dated from 2018, in a numbered edition (No. 223 of 500) by Fantôme Phonographique, a small label with an unblemished editorial taste. I chose Full Moon because everything is there. Frogs croaking, the spoken voice, placid, almost sad or resigned. Or is that what Ahbez showed us about the music style I’m exploring this week? Eden Ahbez’s music is peaceful, pacific, it is distinctly influenced by the Pacific, a stage that becomes a constant in most of Exotica’s sounds. The ocean as a living force. Which makes us reconsider our own scale in the scheme of things. That differs the lost from the found, in this eternal game that proves that only the one who gets adrift finds a way.

May this weekend serve for us to travel far, as far as our imagination allows.

#staysafe #musicfortheweekend

Ìxtahuele – Manna feat. Kadhja Bonet

Quiet Village – Broken Promises

Combustible Edison – Guadaloupe

Leonardo Marques – Sol que me Enfeita

Roy Tierney – Lonely One

Anna Valentino – On a Tropical Island

Cool Hipnoise – Lis-Kgn-Hav

Baha’i Victory Chorus – Nightingale of Paradise

Jimi Tenor – Beach Boy

Ornella Vanoni –  Coccodrillo

Tom Reyes with The Moonglows – China Doll

Videotapemusic – Hong Kong Night View

Bill & Jean Bradway – Paradise Isle

Elena Madera – Pu-Chun-Ga

Kostas Bezos and the White Birds – Όνειρο στη Χαβάη (A Dream of Hawaii)

Øyvind Torvund – Out of the Jungle

Haruomi Hosono – Nettaiya

Korla Pandit – TV Show Opening

Piero Umiliani – La Ragazza dalla Pelle di Luna

Marti Barris – Ahbe Casabe

The Sound of Ed White – Coral Reef

Robert Drasnin – Chant of the Moon

Sessa – Panic in Detroit

Tak Shindo – Bali Ha’i

Artie Barsamin & Orchestra – Nene Aman

Yma Sumac – Goomba Boomba

Nino Nardini – Bali Girl

Saint Etienne – Broad River

Fuga Ronto – Daydreams

Les Elgart and His Orchestra – Voo Doo Drums

The Clarence Daniels Orchestra feat. Sandy Miller – And Then I’ll Stay

Mike Cooper – Kokoke Nalu

The Arthur Lyman Group – Yellow Bird

Epstein feat. Willow Robinson – Lay Down

Carl Stevens – Call of the Jungle

Lululemon – Uricuru (I)

The Baton of Andre Brummer – Tumba

Tuxedomoon – Holiday for Plywood

Martin Denny – Jungle Madness

Eden Ahbez – Full Moon