v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

The Importance of Bitches Brew

 

From NYRB review of George Grella Jr.'s  perceptive reading of Mile's Bitches Brew and putting it into historical context what it means both to Mile's musical legacy and jazz in general:

In 1970, the year of its release, Bitches Brew sold nearly a half million copies, and sent the jazz world into a state of confusion: Was this the end of jazz, or a new beginning? Jazz purists weren’t wrong to suspect that Davis’s new music had something to do with commercial pressures. Clive Davis, the president at Columbia Records, had called him to a meeting about his declining record sales. Miles Davis was a deeply competitive artist, and the idea that he was losing audiences to white rock musicians with inferior skills—and, worse, had to open for them at concerts—inspired him to beat them at their own game. But he did so very much on his own terms. What one hears in Bitches Brew, as Grella argues, is not pandering but searching and striving: “a great work of abstract music inside the sounds, beats, and riffs of commercial music,” “avant-garde with soul and a beat.”

Bitches Brew was a more ungainly work than its predecessor, the shimmering tone poem In a Silent Way, but its sprawl was a measure of Davis’s audacity, his hunger for new forms. It featured an unusual ensemble of thirteen musicians, including three electric keyboardists, two drummers, and two bass players. Perhaps the most distinctive ingredient is Bennie Maupin’s bass clarinet. For much of the album, Maupin plays almost entirely in the lower register of his horn, making guttural noises, short, agitated phrases that add an incantatory undercurrent to the “brew.” Every musician, even Davis himself, contributes at one point or another to that roiling brew, to which the soloists respond and over which they occasionally collide.

Bitches Brew bids farewell to almost every musical convention, including the traditional cues for foreground and background. Most of the tracks are exceptionally long (twenty-six minutes, in the case of the title track), and they are not so much songs as—in Grella’s words—“waves” of improvisation, leaving the “disorienting sensation of…simply stopping without coming to a formal end or resolution of any kind.” Here were the sonorities of the free jazz Davis had claimed to disdain, only set against electric grooves and churning, tribalistic percussion.

Bitches Brew is very much an ensemble work, but the defining sound is Davis’s trumpet, as confident and fiery as ever. We hear him in an extraordinary range of moods: the fierce, growling swagger of “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” a hot blues in the key of F, set to a languorous New Orleans march rhythm; the hypnotic call-and-response of “Bitches Brew,” a cousin of the Andalusian pieces Davis had loved playing since Sketches of Spain; and the plaintive, mysterious lyricism of Wayne Shorter’s “Sanctuary,” with its echoes of “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” a Davis favorite. Blues, balladry, and the “Spanish tinge”: the effect here is a kind of kaleidoscopic self-portrait.

How could so many jazz critics have overlooked Davis’s powerful trumpet playing on Bitches Brew, and its continuities with his previous work? The reason for their bewilderment was, in large part, the brew, the music’s muddy electric bottom, which bore no resemblance to the jazz they knew. Davis had never been a pure bopper, but his music had always made allusion, however oblique, to the grammar of Parker and Gillespie. On Bitches Brew, Davis decisively broke with his roots in bop. As Grella argues, building on the pivotal work of Greg Tate and Paul Tingen, the more revealing points of comparison were no longer to be found in jazz but in the psychedelic guitar of Jimi Hendrix, the warbled vocals of Sly Stone, and the bass lines of James Brown.

Davis, as Grella sees it, was a bluesman even before he was a jazz musician. And in the late 1960s he had begun to worry that he was losing his “blueness,” his connection to popular black music and black audiences; he said he missed “the sound of $1.50 drums and the harmonicas and the two-chord blues.” Hendrix, Sly, and Brown showed him the way back to the blues of his East St. Louis childhood, the real “Rosebud” of his art. As he put it, “I don’t play rock, I play black.”

The music Davis made from 1969 to 1975 was some of his blackest ever, sometimes directly based on bass lines and riffs he heard in James Brown and Sly Stone.⁴ Yet it was also bristling with jagged, sometimes disturbing dissonances that grew out of his interest in the European avant-garde, particularly Karlheinz Stockhausen. It would prove no less demanding, and no less dazzling in its variety, than his acoustic work.⁵ There were slow, meditative compositions of breathtaking lyrical expansiveness, from In a Silent Way to “He Loved Him Madly,” his eerie requiem for Duke Ellington. There was the hallucinatory syncopation of his 1972 record On the Corner, perhaps the strangest funk album ever made. And, finally, there were the raucous, throbbing mid-1970s concerts, in which Davis had to hook his trumpet up to a wah-wah pedal to even be heard above the din of electric guitars. Like the early minimalism of Philip Glass, it was music you did not so much listen to as inhabit, an environment of sound where you were free to tune in and out.

Part of the enduring fascination of records like Bitches Brew lies not only in what they sound like but in how they were put together. Here Davis grudgingly shared credit with his producer, Teo Macero. A saxophonist and composer who had worked with the musique concrète composer Edgard Varèse, Macero was as important a Davis collaborator during these years as Gil Evans had been in the late 1950s. Macero sat in the control room with Davis at every session while the sidemen performed, often without being told if they were rehearsing or playing an actual take. Their relationship was volatile—the Bitches Brew recordings began just after an explosive row in which Davis demanded that Macero fire his secretary—but Davis thrived on such tension, and his trust in “Teo” was total.

With a razor blade, splicing block, and tape, Macero edited what were unruly jam sessions into suite-like compositions, often using loops—short sections of material—to create ostinato patterns. The two tracks of In a Silent Way are both sandwiched between such loops. Assuming this must have been an error, the jazz critic Martin Williams complained in his review about the “faulty tape splicing.” Others insinuated that Davis had cheated by stretching a half hour of music into forty minutes.

Today these criticisms seem rather quaint. Davis and Macero were, in effect, using the studio as an instrument. And on Bitches Brew, their aim was to create effects similar to those Davis had always sought in his playing: a dramatic expansion and enhancement of our perception of space. As the musician Brian Eno, who was deeply influenced by the electric Miles, has pointed out, the musicians sound as if they are “miles apart…the impression that you have immediately is not that you are in a little place with a group of people playing, but that you’re on a huge plateau.” That impression was powerfully reinforced by the now famous cover art of Abdul Mati Klarwein, which depicted a naked black couple on a beach, facing the sea against a backdrop of blue sky, red flowers, and yellow flames. A storm appears to erupt directly out of the woman’s hair; above the couple an imposing black face appears in profile, dripping with either beads of sweat or tears, as dauntingly inexpressive as the Pyramids.

We seem to be observing an Afro-Futurist rite of spring, and, as Grella observes, there are moments when the brew sounds “uncannily like fragments plucked from The Rite of Spring.”⁶ The master of this ceremony is Davis himself. He is higher than anyone else in the mix, as befits a lead singer, and, as Grella writes, “the physical power of his playing…cannot be overstated.” Even when he is absent, we feel as if we can hear him. He is summoning the ancient spirit of the blues, and at the same time leaping into the future, binding it to the sound of his trumpet, determined, as ever, not to be left behind. He cannot imagine music going forward without him, and neither, for as long as he plays, can we.

 

From my perspective, I have always enjoyed BB but the more impactful recordings of this era from Mile's were booken'd to BB- the transitional Filles des Kilimanjiro (1968), which displays the hypnotic pacing that would soon engulf Davis's music and Live/Evil where the new generation of collaborators (Bartz, Jarrett, McLaughlin, Henderson) really dig in and expand the electronic palate as can be evidence from the session originals from the 70's Cellar Door concerts over a three night period which continue to sound fresh and new today.

Antonioni's La Notte

A perceptive and succinct review from Sense of Cinema by Gwendollyn Aubrey Foster of Antonioni's classic La Notte-saw it for the first time tonight and it is still relevant to our conditions:

I would argue, rather, that women are both the centre of the film and the mirrors upon which Antonioni reflects his dark perceptions and stark conclusions about the human condition. At a launch party for his latest novel, those who celebrate Giovanni’s newest book spend precious little time actually reading, opting instead to party all night, while simultaneously remaining oblivious to their own mortality.

As in most of his films, Antonioni’s wealthy protagonists in La notte live in a hell of their own making. So thoroughly alienated are they from one another (and from the environment) that they experience the rain from the sky (in the pool sequence) as a sublime rapture from above, giggling like schoolchildren, briefly lifted out of their stupor for a moment’s play with the actual elements.

The tragedy of Antonioni’s characters is not simply a matter of bored bourgeois ennui; these people are disconnected from the feminine, from the earth, and from life itself. Perhaps no critic got it more wrong than Pauline Kael in her infamous essay “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties: La Notte, Last Year at Marienbad, La Dolce Vita,” in which Kael attacked the film, demanding less ambiguity:

La notte is supposed to be a study in the failure of communication, but what new perceptions of this problem do we get by watching people on the screen who can’t communicate if we are never given any insight into what they could have to say if they could talk to each other? (2)

On the contrary, Antonioni gives us nothing but insight into the various relationships, and thus I find her dismissal baffling. More recently, critic Christopher Sharrett takes a far more perceptive feminist eco-critical approach to key Antonioni films such as Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964) and L’eclisse (1961), noting of L’eclisse that “the failure of people to connect is rooted less in vague existential dread than in concrete social realities”. (3) For me, it is those specific social realities that are most vividly explored and exposed in La notte.

Laband's South Africa

 

From The Formant on Felix Laband's significant electronic album, Deaf Safari:

Deaf Safari is Laband’s fourth full-length studio album and his first in a decade, the last being 2005’s Dark Days Exit. Essentially an excercise in collage, Deaf Safari weaves together a capacious array of sampled recordings with original composition and arrangement influenced primarily by South African Kwaito house and American Roots music from the early 20th century. With regard to the latter, Laband cites Alan Lomax’s field recordings of Negro prison and chain gang work songs and the early recordings of Leadbelly as significant influences.

For Laband, one of the most important developments on Deaf Safari is the use of the spoken word. The album comprises a myriad of sampled recordings taken from the media landscape that has been the soundtrack to his and our life over the last decade, and arranged to tell a very difficult, but (at least to South African ears) instantly familiar and deeply felt story. We hear, for example, religious sermons of the type common to African Evangelist churches, a movement whose ethos and practises fall somewhere between tribal spiritualism and Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity; a phonetic unpacking – spoken in Afrikaans – of the different clicks in Khoisan languages; animal calls at dusk; a press conference held by President Jacob Zuma’s legal counsel, describing his back-and-forth appeal process as a “ding-dong thing”; Julius Malema calling himself “the leader of THE revolution”; lines from feature films and documetaries like: Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, The Night of the Hunter, Enki Bilal’s Immortal (Ad Vitam), Jeff Lieberman’s Blue Sunshine, Argento’s Suspiria and Bertha Egnos’ famous Ipi Tombi.

While some of the referential content might get lost on the foreign listener, it is not a prerequisite for enjoying the music. The album is, after all, also simply gorgeous, filled with heart and charm and artistry. Musically, its appeal is wholly universal.

On Deaf Safari, Laband reaches in deep for the heart of the South African experience, and squeezes. The emission, by turns joyous and melancholic, steeped in feeling and social commentary, is a thing of wonder: a truly outstanding, perfectly polished, emotionally enthralling album about what it feels like to be a part of this country, this time, this world, entirely free of posturing. Laband hasn’t come to preach, he has no position to expound, he hasn’t come to solve anything – he’s simply telling a story, our story. He came here to sing, and for us to sing with him; and beautiful it is, and honest, and good.

Thomas Hirschhorn on Destroyed Human Bodies

Touching Reality, Thomas Hirschhorn from Anouli Patchouli on Vimeo.

Death has the tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.—Donald Rumsfeld

I will try to clarify, in eight points, why it is important—today—to look at images of destroyed human bodies like those I have used and integrated in different works such as Superficial Engagement (2006), The Incommensurable Banner (2008), Ur-Collage  (2008), Crystal of Resistance  (2011), and Touching Reality (2012).

1.Provenance

The images of destroyed human bodies are made by non-photographers. Most of them were taken by witnesses, passersby, soldiers, security or police officers, or rescuers and first-aid helpers. The provenance of the images is unclear and often unverifiable; there is a lack in our understanding of what the “source” is here. This unclear provenance and this unverifiability reflect today’s unclearness. This is what I am interested in. Often the provenance is not guaranteed—but what, in our world today can claim a guarantee, and how can “under guarantee” still make sense? These images are available on the Internet mostly to be downloaded; they have the status of witnessing and were put online by their authors for multiple and various reasons. Furthermore, the origin of these images is not signaled; sometimes it is confused, with an unclear, perhaps even manipulated or stolen address, as is true of many things on the Internet and social communication networks today. We confront this every day. The undefined provenance is one of the reasons why it is important to look at such images.

2.Redundancy

The images of destroyed human bodies are important in their redundancy. What is redundant is precisely that such an incommensurable amount of images of destroyed human bodies exists today. Redundancy is not repetition, the repetition of the same, because it is always another human body that is destroyed and appears as such redundantly. But it’s not about images—it’s about human bodies, about the human, of which the image is only a testimony. The images are redundant pictures because it is redundant, as such, that human beings are destroyed. Redundancy is important here. I want to take it as something important, and I want to see this redundancy as a form. We do not want to accept the redundancy of such images because we don’t want to accept the redundancy of cruelty toward the human being. This is why it is important to look at images of destroyed human bodies in their very redundancy.

3.Invisibility

Today, in the newspapers, magazines, and TV news, we very seldom see images of destroyed bodies because they are very rarely shown. These pictures are nonvisible and invisible: the presupposition is that they will hurt the viewer’s sensitivity or only satisfy voyeurism, and the pretext is to protect us from this threat. But the invisibility is not innocent. The invisibility is the strategy of supporting, or at least not discouraging, the war effort. It’s about making war acceptable and its effects commensurable, as was formulated, for example, by Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense (2001–2006): “Death has the tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.” But is there really another view to have of war than a depressing one? To look at images of destroyed human bodies is a way to engage against war and against its justification and propaganda. Since 9/11 this phenomena of invisibility has been reinforced in the West. Not to accept this invisibility as a given fact or as a “protection” is why it is important to look at such images.

4.“Iconism”

The tendency to “iconism” still exists, even today. “Iconism” is the habit of “selecting,” “choosing,” or “finding” the image that “stands out,” the image that is “the important one,” the image that “says more,” the image that “counts more” than the others. In other words, the tendency to iconism is the tendency to “highlight”; it’s the old, classical procedure of favoring and imposing, in an authoritarian way, a hierarchy. This is not a declaration of importance about something or somebody, but a declaration of importance directed at others. The goal is to establish a common importance, a common weight, a common measure. But iconism and highlighting also have the effect of avoiding the existence of differences, of the non-iconic and of the non-highlighted. In the field of war and conflict images, this leads to choosing the “acceptable” for others. It’s the “acceptable” image that stands for another image, for all other images, for something else, and perhaps even for a non-image. This image or icon has to be, of course, the correct, the good, the right, the allowed, the chosen—the consensual image. This is the manipulation. One example is the image, much discussed (even by art historians), of the “Situation Room” in Washington during the killing of Bin Laden by the Navy Seals in 2011. I refuse to accept this image as an icon; I refuse its iconism, and I refuse the fact that this image—and all other “icons”—stands for something other than itself. To fight iconism is the reason why looking at images of destroyed bodies is important.

More

Cole and Photography

From Known and Strange Things Teju Cole writes:

Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. At a dinner party earlier this year, I was in conversation with someone who asked me to define photography. I suggested that it is about retention: not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between light and the tangible world but also the possibility of saving that image. A shadow thrown onto a wall is not photography. But if the wall is photosensitive and the shadow remains after the body has moved on, that is photography. Human creativity, since the beginning of art, has found ways to double the visible world. What photography did was to give the world a way to double its own appearance: the photograph results directly from what is, from the light that travels from a body through an aperture onto a surface.

But when the photograph outlives the body 00 when people die, scenes change, trees grow or are chopped down — it becomes a memorial. And when the thing photographed is a work of art or architecture that has been destroyed, this effect is amplified even further. A painting, sculpture, or temple, as a record of both human skill and emotion, is already a site of memory; when its only remaining trace is a photograph, that photograph becomes a memorial to a memory. Such a photograph is shadowed by its vanished ancestor.

Borges on Borges

Borges writes:

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Matthea Harvey

WORD PARK

Proper nouns are legible in any light and like to stay near their cages. They're the saunterers and the preeners, the peacocks who walk up to you and unfurl their fan of feathers hello. To see a shy one, position yourself between two trees; eventually it’ll get whisked into a sentence and will have to come out from the shadows. We stock the park with packs of verbs and ands, so the odds are in your favor. Lessons in tracking are given every hour on the hour. You’ll learn to go unnoticed behind a lamppost so you can get a glimpse of a squabble—COAT's flapping shadow tussling with WEARING because it wants to be the verb. The comma is the timid creature (ankle-height, cringing) you'll spot when you pause to look at the map, the dash is the sprinter in a thin coat of rain. Take a left for indirect object, for conjunctions, straight ahead. Officially, the exotics are extinct, but you’ve heard about watchers in the cities training their binoculars on ledges half-hidden by air conditioners, scanning the gutters for pairs of bright eyes. They know the ruses unsanctioned words use. They roll in the dirt to hide their vivid feathers. According to the tabloids, CHOCOLATING made it half way across the country, hopping from schoolyard to schoolyard in a convincing coat of mud, and last week VERYING was spotted hiding in the wake of a ferry. One watcher got a picture before the authorities harpooned it. In the photograph the water is bluer than blue.

Matthea Harvey's site

Buarque = Brasil

From The Guardian from 2014:

AS Brazilians take stock of their football team’s lacklustre progress through the World Cup, they might want to think instead about someone with unimpeachable credentials as a national hero. Francisco Buarque de Hollanda was born in Rio de Janeiro on this day in 1944. In his country he is simply known as “Chico”: Chico Buarque, a musician who has entranced and charmed his compatriots for the best part of 50 years.

It is difficult to compare Mr Buarque to an equivalent figure elsewhere—some have suggested Bob Dylan—because he defies categorisation. In his early 20s he was a composer. Every Brazilian knows his sweet ballad “A banda” (1966), about a band marching down a small-town street and a girl who thinks it’s playing for her. Through the rest of the 1960s, he wrote and recorded his own songs, many of them based on a Brazilian invention, bossa nova. By the end of the decade, Mr Buarque was as much a household name in Brazil as the Beatles were in Britain. But then things got difficult. In 1968 he put on an incendiary, sexually explicit play, “Roda viva” (“Rat Race”), which annoyed the military regime, and he decided to get out of the country. He stayed away for 18 months.

Back in Brazil in the 1970s, Mr Buarque found his songs being endlessly censored. He was plagued by stage fright and doubts about his composing, but he kept going, and in 1984 he released one of his greatest songs, “Vai passar” (“On its way”), a riotous samba celebrating change. It was in the same year that the generals ceded power to a democratic government after 20 years, and Mr Buarque's song caught the national mood perfectly: “Come and watch, close up, the city singing/The evolution of freedom/Until the day dawns.” By the end of the 1980s, he was one of the most celebrated men in Latin America.

And then he changed career and started writing. Now at the start of his eighth decade, he has four novels to his name. Each one, in its highly entertaining way, is a portrait of the vibrancy of Latin American urban life: of enormous, almost unreal cities, that pulse with unpredictable violence, greed and pleasure-seeking. His last, “Leite derramado” (published in English as “Spilt Milk”), narrated by a dying centenarian, is in some ways an autobiography of 20th-century Brazil. Mr Buarque is now working on a fifth novel.

He seems never to have been distracted by fame and has always kept his privacy firmly guarded. To write, he often escapes to an apartment on the Île-St-Louis in Paris. His determination to be published as a serious, and as it happens prize-winning, novelist rather than be constantly badgered as a pop hero has taken him into an elegant early old age: as virtually every woman in Brazil admits, he remains boyishly good-looking.

Throughout all this runs another passion: football. Before he discovered music, Mr Buarque yearned to be a footballer. His early years as a pop composer coincided with Brazil’s domination of the World Cup, which they won in 1958, 1962 and 1970. He has created and played with his own team, Politheama. In 1989 he released perhaps the most sophisticated, yet catchiest, song ever on the sport: “O futebol” (“Hitting the net/With a dream of a goal/If only/I were Pelé the King,” it starts).

Though not that well-known outside his own continent, Mr Buarque is a rare combination: composer, playwright, novelist and footballer. On his 70th birthday he will almost certainly shun publicity and agonise with millions of Brazilians about how their team needs to avoid losing against Cameroon next Monday. If it all goes wrong, they will at least have one football-mad legend to fall back on. Parabéns, Chico.

Buarque's vision

 

 

Chico Buarque's great song:

Apesar de você (In spite of you)

Tomorrow will be another day…

Today, you’re the one who calls the shots.
Whatever you say, it’s been spoken
And there’s no arguing.
Today, my people walk around
Talking sideways and looking toward the ground.
You who invented this situation
By inventing all darkness,
You who invented sin
Forgot to invent forgiveness.

In spite of you
Tomorrow will be another day.

I ask you, where will you hide
From the great euphoria when it comes?
How will you forbid it
When the rooster insists on crowing?
New water will be flowing
And our people will be loving one another, nonstop.

When that moment arrives
I’m going to charge you

For all this suffering of mine,

And with interest to boot, I swear.
All this repressed love,
All these contained screams,
All this samba in the dark.

You who invented sadness,
Now do us the favor of “disinventing” it.
You’re going to pay double
For every tear that I’ve shed

In this anguish of mine.

In spite of you
Tomorrow will be another day
I can hardly wait to see
The garden in full bloom,
The one you didn’t want to see blooming.

You’re going to be tormented,
Seeing the day break
Without asking your permission
And I’m going to have my big laugh at you
Because that day is bound to come
Sooner than you think.

In spite of you
Tomorrow will be another day

You will be forced to see the morning reborn
And pouring out poetry.

How will you explain it to yourself
Seeing that the sky has suddenly cleared,
And there’s no more punishment?

How are you going to stifle the chorus of our voices
Singing right in front of you,
In spite of you?

In spite of you
Tomorrow is going to be another day
And you’re going to be out of luck.

Buarque Reality

From American Reader on Chico Buarque, Brazil's voice:

The Brazilian musician Chico Buarque often gets called “the Bob Dylan of Brazil.” The characterization refers to his poetic lyrics, to the way his songs serve as national allegories, and to his status as a figure of political dissent in the 1960s and 1970s. According to this criteria, Brazil actually had several Bob Dylans: Mr. Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, others. These artists came of age under the country’s military dictatorship, which began with a military coup in 1964 and lasted until 1985. Once the face of popular resistance to dictators who jailed, censored and banished their opponents, Mr. Buarque today presides over Brazilian culture as an elder statesman, revered not only for having placed himself on the right side of history but for having influenced subsequent generations of popular musicians in the process.

In the past twenty years, Mr. Buarque has moved away from producing and performing music. Just as Bob Dylan now moonlights as a painter, Mr. Buarque has transferred his prodigious creative energy to writing novels. Because his music and lyrics are canonized in academia, he is the kind of novelist whose books tend to be read, like his songs, as explorations of national identity. The impression I had when reading Mr. Buarque’s latest novel, Spilt Milk, was that he has affected a transition from the Brazilian Bob Dylan to the Brazilian José Saramago or Orhan Pamuk or Gabriel García Márquez. These authors write books where a protagonist’s limp is a metaphor for a country’s crippled left, or a protagonist’s name is a pun about ethnic rivalry. They write national allegories that win the Nobel Prize. Read in such a fashion, Spilt Milk might be a book about race relations in Brazil. Formally, it’s also about Mr. Buarque’s own history, a reapplication of a linguistic strategy developed under a time of censorship and now applied to the novel.   

In periods exiled abroad in the early 1970s, the Bob Dylans of Brazil pined for home, lonely and freezing in European capitals. “Please write me a letter,” sang Caetano Veloso to his sister from London. “I wish to know things are getting better.” Once they returned home, the musicians ceased their mournful lamentations. It was an era when Brazilian newspapers would run recipes for banana cake or verses of Camões’s The Lusiads on the front page to denote the absence of their censored copy. The Bob Dylans of Brazil produced music according to the same playful logic, with similarly surreal results. The Brazilians joined their global peers in mixing acoustic and electric, in making a sort of Beach Boys-to-Beatles transition to disillusionment, and in decorating their album covers with paisley and flowers. Some musicians, like Tom Zé, pushed their music to the point of Dadaist experimentation. What distinguishes Brazilian popular music from this time is its wordplay: the singers punned, they alliterated, they elided acceptable words until they recalled the unacceptable. They played with consonants as if they were tactile things to be picked up and stacked. You don’t need to speak the language to feel it: “Te quero te quero querendo quero bem,” sang Tom Zé in “Dor e Dor.” “Diz que deu, diz que Deus, diz que Deus dará,” sang Mr. Buarque in “Partido Alto”. 

Their songs used parody, intertexuality, irony, metaphor—strategies of literature—to make their points. Lyrics presented a challenge and a puzzle to listeners. When Mr. Gil and Mr. Buarque sang the word “cálice” (chalice) their audience heard cala-se (the imperative “shut up” and a protest against censorship). Mr. Buarque’s “Construção” a song about a construction worker who falls to his death, follows a strict poetic structure of thirteen-syllable lines. Each line ends with what linguists call a proparoxytone, or a word that stresses the antepenultimate syllable. By shifting the words that modify the end of each line, Mr. Buarque’s lyrics spin vertically like the reels of a slot machine. The collective linguistic strategy became known as linguagem da fresta, the language of the fault line, of the gap, of the saying of things that could not at the time be said. 

Mr. Veloso’s voice was somehow too dulcet to properly condemn a military regime. Mr. Buarque, who was twenty at the time of the coup in 1964, was the most overtly political of his peers, though not as pretty of a singer. He sang more in the mumbling way of old-school bossa nova, taking the traditional forms of popular music and adding a layer of class consciousness and urban malaise to the Carnegie Hall legacy of tan girls and beaches and the Corcovado. Unlike the others, he never looked like a hippie. Caeteano Veloso and Gilberto Gil found him conservative. He wore button-down shirts and kept his cherubic brown curls short. He looked like what he was—a handsome upper middle-class architecture school dropout from Rio de Janeiro born into a family of public intellectuals (his father, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, was a widely read historian). Mr. Buarque saved his experimentation for his music, singing in the role of an ostracized transvestite prostitute, a depressed housewife, or an exploited day laborer. He also wrote plays. The first, Roda Viva, completed in 1968, earned him jail time. Another, Opera do Malandro, a musical first performed in 1978, was also censored. 

As the dictatorship waned, the themes of Mr. Buarque’s music shifted. From double entendre criticism of the people in power he moved towards stories that documented the lives of people in Brazil’s rapidly growing cities. He wrote of petty criminals, blue-collar workers and 9-to-5 drudges. He wrote of Carnaval, which in Brazilian storytelling has traditionally served as a dramatic backdrop in the manner of a storm in a Shakespeare play: a time of heightened emotion and suspended rules. Then he transitioned to novels. Without the music to carry it, however, linguagem da fresta loses a little of the magic.

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