Brazil New Wave

Book-6084 18/09/08 16:35 Page 38 38 Brasil new wave On the evening of May 12th 1959, film-fans gathered at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes discovered a strange film directed by Marcel Camus in Rio de Janeiro. The film had a cast of black actors unknown to the general public, and there had been no time to provide subtitles that would have enlightened the meaning of the Brazilian words. Not that it mattered. If the words escaped all understanding, the love of Orpheus and Eurydice told a universal story to which the rhythms of the carnival and the undulating landscape of Guanabara Bay gave a halo of unexpected charm. The next day, a headline in the French daily L’Aurore proclaimed, “The sambas of the Black Orpheus have electrified the festival!” (1), and the paper gave the Franco-Brazilian outsider a definite lead in the final running, over François Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents coups. The vote at the Film Festival confirmed the odds, and the jury, presided by French playwright Marcel Achard, awarded the Palme d’or to Orfeu Negro, just when the Philips record-company was releasing the first EP of the film’s original soundtrack. Thanks to which France discovered the melodies of Tom Jobim, the guitar and compositions of Luiz Bonfá, and the poetry of Vinícius de Moraes. The record contained two titles that became milestones in the history of Brazilian popular music: “A Felicidade”, by Jobim and Moraes, and “Manhã de Carnaval”, which was composed by Bonfá with lyrics written by the journalist and poet Antônio Maria. Sung by Agostinho dos Santos and Elizeth Cardoso, the “screen voices” of Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn – who played Orpheus and Eurydice in the film, respectively –, both songs were immediate hits. Almost at once, in June, Philips released another version of the EP which now bore the names of the lyricists – the first had named only the composers, which caused a furore in the Brazilian press – together with a 10” LP that featured the film’s principal music. In parallel, scores of musicians launched themselves into the adventure of Orfeu Negro, which was first shown in French cinemas on June 12th 1959. A host of French singers recorded “La Chanson d’Orphée” and “Adieu tristesse”, adapted (without paying much attention to the original) by André Salvet and François Llenas. In 1959 alone, 89 different versions were registered at the Phonothèque Nationale library, confirming the impact of the film and its “haunting rhythms” (2) on the public. The film’s success was even greater in The United States: its first appearance in theatres in December 1959 didn’t go unnoticed and the film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1960. The film’s soundtrack, which was released by Epic in June 1960, was picked up by many jazzmen in North America. For several of them, Orfeu Negro was like discovering a New World in sound. “When I left that theatre”, said Herbie Mann, “my feelings about Brazil, its music, and music in general had been forever transformed (…) the movie seared Brazil forever in my being”. (3) Dizzy Gillespie shared his opinion: “My first exposure to samba was in the soundtrack of the film Black Orpheus, and when they first started getting into it, I thought, ‘Those are some brothers down there?’ Arriving in Brazil, I found out that there were, and that our music had a common bond”. (4) Despite some weaknesses in form and an insistence on exotic references that aroused criticism – notably from Jean-Luc Godard or Glauber Rocha (5) – as soon as the film was released, Orfeu Negro represented the point of departure for Brazilian music’s expansion across the world. The original soundtrack announced bossa nova, and its first echoes reached The United States in the course of 1961. After the success of the Jazz Samba album recorded by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, a New York audience discovered the compositions of Jobim in their original versions at a Carnegie Hall concert in November 1962 called Bossa Nova: New Brazilian Jazz. Although decried by newspapers in Brazil, the event initiated a fruitful series of collaborations between jazzmen and Brazilian musicians. Getz took advantage of the presence of João Gilberto and Tom Jobim to record the LP Getz/Gilberto during March 1963, a record on which Astrud Gilberto sang “Girl from Ipanema”. A few years later it was Frank Sinatra’s turn to record a bossa album – Francis Albert Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim (1967). Even if songs from Orfeu Negro weren’t on those recordings, the film was still very much in people’s memories: in 1969 Sinatra recorded “A Day in the Life of a Fool”, a Carl Sigman adaptation of “Manhã de Carnaval”, shortly before the tune Black Orpheus went into the Real Book, the collection of musicscores, essentially standards, that spawned the best-selling jazz “books” of all time. As a foretaste of bossa nova, Orfeu Negro drew a new music-triangle between France, Brazil and the west coast of America. The film’s story began in 1942 in Guanabara Bay; while the Carnaval was in full swing in the capital, Vinícius de Moraes was spending a few days at the house of a painter-friend in Niteroi, where he was pondering his recent travels with American writer Waldo Frank. During a trip to one of the morros, Frank had pointed out a resemblance between Black people in a samba-school and characters in Greek tragedy, a commonplace in travel-books. The comparison made such an impression on the poet that it haunted his reading; one night, when he couldn’t sleep, he was reading the libretto for Gluck’s opera Orphée et Eurydice when he heard the distant sounds of a party coming from the morro do Cavalão: “All of a sudden, the two ideas came together in my mind; life on the morro, with its black heroes playing guitar, and its schools of samba, seemed so much like the life of a Greek musician and the legend of his dead love that I began to dream of an Orfeu negro (…) Hell would be the carnival in Rio. Orfeu would be looking for Eurydice among the frantic rhythms of the sambaschools, the dancing passistas, the fancy-dress masks, Blacks fleeing poverty in luxuriant costumes they’d bought with money saved over a whole year.” (6) The next morning, Moraes wrote the first Act of a musical play whose story united the main themes of his own work: the alliance between Book-6084 18/09/08 16:35 Page 39 39 music and poetry, the indelible imprint of women, morbid obsession, and faith in love above all else. The project, however, remained in a drawer for many years while the poet took up a diplomatic career. His first posting, in Los Angeles, gave him the opportunity to mix with North-American filmmakers – notably Orson Welles, who’d been shooting in Brazil shortly beforehand – to visit the jazz clubs, and also to complete his play, whose title had been suggested to him by poet João Cabral de Melo Neto: Orfeu da Conceição. After a brief return-visit to Rio, Moraes was despatched to Paris, where the poet became Embassy Secretary from 1953 to 1957. Paris, the “Ville Lumière”, saw the film Orfeu Negro take its first steps. Introduced to the artistic circles in the French capital, Moraes became friends with Mary Meerson, who was Henri Langlois’ companion and his assistant at the French Cinémathèque, and she introduced him to film-producer Sacha Gordine. The latter was looking for a Brazilian subject and came up with the idea of a film-version of the black Orpheus after Moraes related the story to him one evening in 1955 in a restaurant on the Champs-Elysées. Two weeks later, the Brazilian went to the producer’s villa in Auteuil and read him a first draft of the screenplay. Two weeks later, black actor Haroldo Costa read him a second draft at a feijoada organized at Vinícius de Moraes’ residence, and Gordine was convinced. Despite some difficulties – factors of distance, the racism prevalent in certain quarters of Brazil’s elite, and the condescending ignorance shown towards Brazil by western audiences –, “production” began in September 1955. (7) To find backers, Gordine and Moraes left Paris and went to Rio, where they campaigned for the film and talked with local industrial figures. However, potential financiers were reticent fearing that the favelas and the image of Blacks would do disservice to Brazilian interests abroad, a view shared by most of the diplomatic corps. “They thought that we were making a film about the wrong subjects, that there was nothing to show in a favela, that we should be doing a film that had charm. I remember that with this Orfeu affair we met with some pretty strong reactions, like… Why don’t you film the Copacabana Palace? Why don’t you film the nice, pretty places we have here…” (8) The play, however, which was meant for a national audience, met with a favourable reaction. “I went to Brazil with Sacha Gordine to find money”, explained Moraes later. “On that occasion, thanks to all the publicity given to the film, a friend came to see me saying, Your play’s going to be staged? I’ll put money into it. It was thanks to the film that the play was produced.” (9) The year 1956 was a turning-point in the accomplishment of both projects. In Rio, Moraes got down to the task of staging Orfeu da Conceição: he turned to actors from the Black Experimental Theatre – a troupe created by Abdias do Nascimento –, and enrolled stage-director Leo Jusi and architect Oscar Niemeyer. The matter of the music remained: first sambista Ataulfo Alves came to mind, and then pianist Vadico (10) an old associate of Noel Rosa and Carmen Miranda. Then Moraes told critic Lúcio Rangel of his dilemma, and the latter introduced him to Tom Jobim, a young composer and night-club pianist who had just finished recording the LP Sinfonia da Alvorada with Billy Blanco. The entente between the two was immediate: after a brief meeting at the Villarino, a city bar, the pair closeted themselves away in the pianist’s apartment and in just two weeks they composed the songs for Orfeu da Conceição. After two months of rehearsals at the High Life, a disused club in the Glória area, observed through the lens of photographer José Medeiros, a rising star with the magazine O Cruzeiro, and under the sharp eye of artist Carlos Scliar, the premiere took place at Rio’s Municipal Theatre on September 25th 1956. The spectators were unanimous. (11) Orfeu da Conceição was an event in the culture of Fifties’ Brazil, and it also represented a turning point in the history of popular music, even though it only remained on the Municipal bill for six days (in October 1956, it moved to the Republic, where it ran for less than a month). Apart from the fact that it marked the meeting between Jobim and Moraes, the choked emotion of Orpheus was performed on the guitar by Luiz Bonfá, whose style responded to the modernity in the compositions. The performance was still a long way from bossa nova’s batida, of which João Gilberto made himself the advocate on the release of Elizeth Cardoso’s LP Canção de Amor Demais in 1958. But the play’s music did have several ingredients that hailed the emergence of a new music-genre: the use of chromatic harmonies and dissonance, the articulation between music and poetry, and the role given to the guitar in the instrumental ensemble. Back in Paris, Gordine was pursuing his side of the Orfeu Negro story. He entrusted the screenplay to Jacques Viot for its adaptation into French and went looking for a director. The film would be made by Marcel Camus, to whom Viot presented the project at a chance meeting on the Champs-Élysées. The filmmaker had just returned from Indochina where he’d been shooting Mort en fraude [“Fugitive in Saigon”], and he was very enthusiastic about the script, which echoed his own Orphic beliefs, as he explained later in the literary journal Les Lettres françaises: “At the age of twenty I was initiated into Orphism by a spiritual master. Legends are to be defended (…) For Orpheus, the universe means vibration above all else. Chemical reactions are born of the collision between vibrations. Hitting a stone makes inner vibrations audible. And vibrations differentiate themselves in their rhythms.” (12) To use his own words, he was “predestined” to make Orfeu Negro. Material problems were accumulating, however. After a first visit to Rio in 1957, the crew had to wait until the start of the carnival of 1958 in order to film the first scenes – 3 000 meters of film, only a few scenes and sound-takes of which were retained by Camus during the editing – and then wait until September before they could work with the actors. To while away the time, Camus studied the customs and traditions of the Cariocas, scoured the morros in search of an ideal panorama across Guanabara Bay, went to see demonstrations by samba schools, and took part in Macumba ceremonies. His first steps into the popular universe of Rio were guided by some select masters: Djalma Costa opened the doors to the Acadêmicos do Salgueiro school, while Cartola revealed the charms of Mangueira to him in person. The sambista was going through a difficult period then: after playing a part in the samba de morro’s emergence onto the Brazilian music scene at the dawn of the Thirties, he’d fallen into oblivion after the war and, to survive, he’d taken jobs washing cars or working as a janitor. When he met Camus in 1958, Angenor de Oliveira Book-6084 18/09/08 16:35 Page 40 40 hadn’t yet become the “divine Cartola” praised to the skies by Brazilian critics: even if he’d renewed his artistic activities, his situation was still precarious and his name remained unknown to the public – final recognition was only achieved in 1963, with the opening of the Zicartola samba club. So he threw himself into the Orfeu Negro adventure with enthusiasm, together with his new companion Zica. He put his perfect knowledge of the sambista milieu to service with Camus; he introduced him to instrumentalists like Oswaldinho da Cuíca and Camus gave him a small role in the film: “In Orfeu, Zica and I played the witnesses at Orpheus’ marriage to this girl. Besides being an actor, I worked in wardrobe too. I took care of the costumes while Zica did the cooking [for the crew]”. (13) Besides its passing interest, this little-known episode in the life of the composer confirms the care that Camus took when casting his actors. The director went back to certain members of the Orfeu da Conceição troupe such as Léa Garcia, who plays Serafina, Eurydice’s ‘Night Queen’ cousin, but his preference was for non-professional actors, in keeping with the formula he’d already tested when shooting Mort en fraude. For Camus, not only did Orpheus and Eurydice have to possess the innocence of novices; a singular beauty should also set them apart. To discover his Orpheus, Camus inspected whole regiments of firemen, parachutists, municipal guardsmen and marines. Above all, he led an original campaign in the Brazilian press: he published Identikit drawings of Orpheus and Eurydice in the daily O Globo, and appealed to those who might recognize themselves in these ideal likenesses, with the request that they should present themselves to the Alliance française of Rio de Janeiro. Orpheus had to be a “black boy, age around 27, between 5’9” and 5’11””; for Eurydice, a “young black girl, age around 20, sweet, musician, dancer, long hair”, said the advertisement. (14) As for candidates who wanted to audition, they had to just state their height and age, plus potential “artistic gifts”, while those who didn’t live in the capital could send photographs, “unaltered and preferably taken by an amateur photographer.” The competition immediately interested Globo readers; the likenesses were reprinted by all the major Brazilian dailies, and budding young actors crowded in front of the Alliance française. None of the candidates, however, interested Camus. Finally, Brazilian exoticism helped Camus find his Orpheus on a football-pitch in the shape of Breno Mello, who played centre-forward for the Fluminense team. As for Eurydice, the role was given to the American dancer Marpessa Dawn, the film’s only non-Brazilian actress. By June, Gordine had managed to secure the necessary funds and the filming took place between September and December 1958, with the location-shooting in Rio de Janeiro – Camus had a favela built from scratch at the top of the Morro da Babilônia – while the interiors were shot on sets inside the Vera Cruz studios in São Paulo. The music was recorded during this period under the watchful eye of Camus. Jobim was music-director, and Moraes suggested that he should also write the songs for the film. After a great deal of correspondence between the two, they composed “A Felicidade, “O Nosso Amor” and “Frevo de Orfeu” between Rio and Montevideo, where the poet had just been appointed Embassy Secretary. Camus wasn’t spared in the letters they exchanged: Jobim sharply criticized the changes in the melody and lyrics demanded by the director. Camus, especially, had no qualms over providing them with some competition: after hiring Jobim and Moraes, he asked Bonfá and Maria to write Orpheus’ song “Manhã de Carnaval”. Recordings began in the second week of August and continued until the end of the autumn, and they involved more than one generation of musicians. Apart from Jobim and Bonfá, the new bossa generation was represented by guitarist Roberto Menescal, while the samba-canção tradition was incarnated by Elizeth Cardoso and Agostinho dos Santos. Overall, the soundtrack is impressive in its diversity. Far from taking a stance in the quarrel opposing Ancients and Moderns, Camus provides the Orfeu Negro spectator with a complete panorama of Brazilian popular music in the Fifties, combining Afro rhythms handed down from the colonial period with the innovatory proposals of Jobim and Bonfá. Traditional music is represented in the series of pontos de macumba recorded in terreiros around Rio, and it is marked by the strong resonance of Umbanda – the syncretism combining African and Catholic beliefs with elements of Spiritism. Most of these pontos have never been available before, and one stands out particularly: the appeal to Ogum Beira Mar, the god of iron and war frequently associated with the figure of Saint George and Saint Anthony doing battle with a dragon. Accompanied by hand-slapping, atabaques drumming and agogô bells, songs in Portuguese and cries uttered by entranced participants, these recordings constitute first-rate ethnological accounts whose aesthetic strength is in exact opposition to the prejudices that were rife in Brazilian society during those years. Carnival-music is very much in evidence thanks to the batucadas performed by baterias from the most prestigious escolas de samba of the period. Apart from Unidos da Capela, whose name appears on the master tapes of the film’s original soundtrack, Mangueira, Portela and Acadêmicos do Salgueiro also participated in the recordings even though it is impossible today to identify each group’s contributions, as Camus drew on all these musicians and dancers in creating the Babilônia samba school led by Orpheus in the film. Recorded in a studio, these percussionensembles depict the diversity that existed in the rhythms of the Carioca carnival: not only samba, of course, as illustrated by Jobim’s “O Nosso Amor”, which he composed to accompany the Babilônia parade and which is picked up on the accordion by Chiquinho do Acordeom, but also the frevo parasol-dance from Recife and a marchinha, a little, quick-tempo march that this boxed-set presents. The first, composed by Jobim and entitled “Frevo de Orfeu”, reproduces the sound-ambiance of the carnival bandas, and is marked by the flute of Odette Ernest Dias, a former soloist with the ORTF chamber orchestra in France who had settled in Brazil. The work was a commission, and it was recorded for the film in the Odeon studios in Rio de Janeiro; it was the composer’s sole foray into this musical genre. The two other frevos, “Lágrimas de Folião” and “Baba de Moça”, which open the second disc together with a marchinha, had been recorded during the 1958 carnival at the same time as the first of Orfeu Negro’s scenes were filmed. These three pieces, excerpts from a carnival off, invite the listener to dive into the atmosphere of popular Book-6084 18/09/08 16:35 Page 41 41 festivities; they are poles apart from the brilliant enredos of the samba schools performed to the sounds of trumpets and street-orchestras, and they demonstrate both the enthusiasm that existed for the provincial genres of the Nordeste – as did the baião, which was discovered in the years after the war – and the attractions which the binary, syncopated rhythms of the marchinhas continue to hold for dancers. Romantic songs, inspired by the samba-canção and crossed with Mexican boleros, provide the film’s final touches. “Manhã de Carnaval”, sung by Orpheus in the film, is performed in the recording by Agostinho dos Santos and Elizeth Cardoso, accompanied on the guitar by Roberto Menescal and Luiz Bonfá. The theme is particularly well-served by the dramatic power of the singer, with just a hint of insecurity behind her voice. Bonfá picks it up again in “Leçon de guitare”, where he depicts a child gradually mastering the instrument; according to Thereza Jobim, the virtuoso guitarist had thought the simplicity of the way it had to be played – imposed by Camus – to be a seemingly impossible task. “A Felicidade” is sung by Agostinho dos Santos, whom Camus chose over João Gilberto after he’d judged his voice to be too white to incarnate the black Orpheus. Gilberto’s shadow hovers over all the film’s music, however, and it’s said he participated in the film as a guitarist. The maestro’s influence is clearly noticeable in the master-version, where the young Menescal attempts to reproduce – in a way that is still rather schematic – the bossa nova’s rhythm-grouping. The second version, never released on record now, remains an enigma to Menescal himself; whenever he’s asked, he always says, “It could be me… or João!” Apart from the performance itself, there are differences in the lyrics and the order of the verses in the two versions, and they have fuelled the long-standing debate over the meaning of this song. Camus had insisted that Moraes include a passage expressing the ephemeral beauty of the carnival, the illusion of festivity masking the misery in the favelas where Orpheus dies after discovering Eurydice’s mortal remains. But the music doesn’t die with the heroes: following the path traced by Orpheus, one child snatches up a guitar while two others break into the song “Samba de Orfeu”. Returning to the principle underlying “Leçon de guitare”, Bonfá marks the evolution of the melody from the uncertainty of the beginner to the chord-progressions that announce day-break. During the final synchronization of the film in São Paulo in the spring of 1959, Camus took a long time in choosing the composition that would accompany this ultimate scene, hesitating between this piece by Bonfá and a theme commissioned from Jobim. Entitled “Levanta poeira”, in reference to popular nursery songs, the latter piece was recorded on the guitar by Jobim with his wife Thereza and actress Lourdes de Oliveira singing. (15) It was hastily recorded, however, and Camus didn’t keep it, preferring the melody-line and light, carefree feeling created by Bonfá; today it constitutes one of the final previouslyunreleased pieces by the founding father of bossa nova. It is included in the second disc of this set in its uncut state, and it allows the listener to follow the composition’s progression from its outline on the guitar to the song of the children, with a percussion-accompaniment provided by a box of matches. This is a first-hand account, not only of the work of the composer, but also of the “cottage-industry” conditions in which the music of the film was produced only a few months before its consecration in Cannes revealed the “haunting rhythms of Brazil” to the whole world. ANAÏS FLÉCHET Ph.D., (doctoral thesis in History under publication: La musique brésilienne en France au XXe siècle.) Brazil and South Atlantic Studies Centre, University of Paris IV-Sorbonne. Author of Villa-Lobos à Paris: un écho musical du Brésil (L’Harmattan, 2004). (1) L’Aurore, 13/05/1959. (2) “Les rythmes obsédants d’Orfeu Negro”, Sonorama, June 1959. (3) In the booklet accompanying the Trio da Paz disc Black Orpheus, Kokopelli Record 1299, 1994. (4) Dizzy Gillespie, To be or not to bop…, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1979: pp. 428-431. Here Gillespie confuses several Brazilian episodes. The trumpeter indeed went to Brazil for the first time in 1956, some three years before the film was released in The United States. Black Orpheus carried such strong memories for Gillespie that in retrospect he made it the starting-point for his Brazilian experiences, with the result that the original soundtrack became a mandatory reference in the history of musical relations between Brazil and The United States. (5) Jean-Luc Godard denounced the “total inauthenticity” of the film in Les Cahiers du cinéma in July 1959, shortly before the Brazilian filmmaker’s article “Orfeu. Metafísica de favela” appeared in the Jornal do Brasil dated Oct. 24, 1959 (under the pseudonym Clauder Rocha.) (6) “Au sujet d’Orfeu Negro”, Montevideo, 14/06/1960, an unpublished text held in the Vinícius de Moraes archive, Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, Rio de Janeiro (VMpi173). (7) Ibid. (8) In an interview with Tom Jobim at the Museu da Imagem e do Som, in the presence of Vinícius de Moraes, Rio de Janeiro, 22/08/1967. Moraes added that the film hadn’t been presented in Cannes’ Brazilian selection for the same reason, and that the Brazilian Ambassador in France had fiercely opposed it. The denial issued by the Brazilian legation on the evening the film was screened doesn’t shed any light on the matter, as this abrupt diplomatic reversal could largely be attributed to the success of Orfeu Negro with the Cannes public. (9) Ibid. (10) “Au sujet d’Orfeu Negro”, Montevideo, 14/06/1960, op. cit., (VMpi173-277). (11) Cancioneiro Vinícius de Moraes. Orfeu, Rio de Janeiro, Jobim Music, 2003. (12) Marcel Camus, “Orfeu Negro. Un cœur où bat le sang noir”, in Les Lettres françaises, N°774 dated May 21-27, 1959. (13) Sérgio Cabral, As Escolas de Samba do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Lumiar Editora, 1996. In fact, Orpheus and Mira appear with Cartola and Zica in the registry-office just before their marriage is annulled. The sambista and his wife are not witnesses at the wedding, just a couple in a chance meeting. This is one of the oldest pictures of the musician we have at our disposal today. (14) “Orfeu da Conceição será filmado este ano”, O Globo, 28/02/07. (15) The third voice remains unknown. According to Thereza Jobim, the singer was someone in the studio who was enrolled for the occasion in the urgency of the final recordings.