‘GENTE’ BY SAMBA DA- Indie em Portugues

Bossa nova is the worst thing that ever happened to Brazilian popular music. In that one unique rise to the pinnacle of world music some fifty years ago, Brazilian popular music became frozen in time, at least in the minds of its foreign audience, but not without significant repercussions for the progenitors back home also. THAT was ‘the Brazilian sound’ and that’s what we wanted… over and over and over. Now don’t get me wrong. It’s good, and I like it, but it’s as if French pop music were to be forever defined by Brigitte Bardot cooing ‘je t’aime’ instead of moving on and letting Charlotte Gainsbourg coo ‘five fifty-five’ (Bac Ho’s favorite brand of fags- if I remember correctly from my Hanoi days- in addition to any other meaning it might have for Serge’s daughter).

Meanwhile musically tiny little Cabo Verde has been one-upping the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world with superb work by the ‘barefoot diva’ Cesaria Evora and plenty of help from Lura and others making big waves in the world music genre. That’s even where samba originated in the first place, according to the cognoscenti, though I’d be hesitant to attribute too many origins to a place uninhabited a scarce few decades before a ship got blown off course and wound up in Brazil. Of course samba has always been at its best as a Carnaval dance form, and always will be, regardless of how the music evolves. Even Mozambique has some good things happening musically, while Portugal itself languishes even farther behind, resigned to its own self-imposed fado. Meanwhile back home in Brazil, while cariocas may still be frolicking on the beach and waxing rhapsodic over a well-heeled female form, down in Sao Paolo drug gangs occupy whole sections of the city and flaunt it for public TV, just daring the police to challenge them. When a fight breaks out there, I bet they don’t wait for the band to show up and choreograph the capoeira for them. In short, life is more than just a beach, and you don’t have to walk far into a favela to realize that.

So Brazilian popular music artists have for years been trying to discover and re-discover their national musical voice without much luck. Brazilian pop music had more than just bossa nova in the ‘60’s of course, not the least of which was the legendary Os Mutantes, Brazil’s contribution to psychedelia and arguably a better guide to the country’s quirky sun-and-spiritualism psyche than the more jazz-and-Euro-infused bossa nova. Then there was Caetano… and Tropicalismo. Some of these genres and sub-genres provide more fertile soil for new seeds than bossa nova, which was never much more than a GMO hybrid that got lucky somewhere along the food chain. This is the thread that Samba Da follows and ‘Gente’ is a highly listenable piece of work, full of references to salsa and cumbia in addition to the more obvious Brazilian precursors. The fact that they are from Santa Cruz, CA, US- not Brazil- says everything… and nothing.

The opening song ‘Iguana’ is a quirky number that sounds appropriately something like a cross between Julieta Venegas and Nortec Collective, bright and perky. ‘Balancou’ follows right on its heels like a nice salsa/reggae mix while lyrically extolling the African contributions to Brazilian culture. Song #3 ‘Dende’ goes a couple new directions simultaneously- free-form jazz and a heavier percussion (topped with an almost Native American style flute). ‘Rabo de Arraia’ is a cumbia-like number that wanders a bit much for my tastes, but ‘Sangue Africano’ then defines what this album is all about- AfroBrazilian roots given over to Indie spirit. It works beautifully. ‘Nao Va Embora’ tries hard but fails to excite, while ‘Mare’ does just the opposite, succeeds beautifully without really trying. This is pure Julieta, a la brasileira, fully arrived and fully formed, unselfconscious and unpretentious. This just may be the album’s sleeper hit, complete with that nice flute that weaves in and out throughout the album, teasing our sensibilities, nicely balancing out a sometimes murky percussion. Unfortunately the album is running out of steam at this point. When you include songs about both Mom and Pop on the same album, you’re definitely getting on thematically thin ice. Likewise DJ-style ‘remixes’ are dubious enough conceptually without being included on the same album as the original, all this to get the ten-song minimum to consider it a full-length CD.

Though the album is a bit uneven, this band’s got real potential. Band leader Papiba Godinho runs a pretty tight show and they may have just gotten the ‘Fergie’ they needed with their newest member, vocalist Dandha da Hora (simulated beef-eating for the video not required). There may be scarcely few Brazilians in a mostly-American band playing Brazilian music, true, but still they’re as Brazilian as Dengue Fever is Cambodian or Chicha Libre is Peruvian. That’s what ‘world music’ is all about, breaking sound barriers, not obsessing over authenticity. Nobody worries about whether Seu Jorge or Curumin does a song in English. Bebel does lots of them. Bottom line- some halfway point between salsa and reggae is Brazil at its best, faster than a reggae that almost refuses to wake up, but slower than a salsa that won’t sleep, more spiritual than dance-till-dawn Latino hedonism but less messianic complexity than a sometimes overly pretentious reggae. And Copacabana- or Santa Cruz- doesn’t have to pretend to be Nice or Cannes any more than Brazilian pop has to pretend to be French pop. Winner takes all, and this band’s got a real shot, what with Dandha da Hora now sharing vocals with Papiba Godinho. She’s good, and more than just the new girl from Eponyma. That’s ‘Gente’ by Samba Da. Check it out.