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ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
Staging Tradition
A week after the Associação Respeita Januário meeting, I drove to Arcoverde. The BR-232 highway running from Recife to Arcoverde had been recently repaved. Its lanes were doubled, reducing travel time to Caruaru, a city located 120 km from the capital. Billboards along the road advertised musical traditions to tourists. Caruaru, the largest city along the route, is a popular destination for the Saint John’s Day celebration in June known as São João. It is touted as one of the largest, oldest São João celebrations in the Northeast. Every year festival events such as quadrilha line dancing in colonial garb are televised throughout the region. Caruaru also promotes pipe-and-tabor groups called bandas de pífanos and a large craft market at which musicians roam the aisles of vendors. Stalls display rows of miniature clay figures of accordion and flute players and the legendary bandit Lampião, a figure as notorious as Pancho Villa or Jesse James. Satirical miniature doctor/patient scenes are also popular. One scene features a tiny dentist placing his foot on the chest of a patient for better leverage, and another depicts the delivery of a baby. The figures represent an attempt, through caricature, to contain anxieties about health that are pervasive in a zone of harsh economic disparity.
Beyond Caruaru, the landscape became dotted with cacti and caatinga scrub brush. The BR-232 narrowed from two lanes each way to one each way, pockmarked with deep, harrowing potholes. Driving became more treacherous, as drivers boldly threatened oncoming traffic trying to pass each other. Several towns along the road promoted themselves as part of the Route of Forró, an effort to alert visitors to dance halls and small-town festivals. Forró is a genre label that encompasses several rhythmic variations on dance music and most commonly features accordion as its emblematic instrument. In its various subgenres, including ultrapopular forró estilizado and its more rustic counterpart forró pé-de-serra, it has crystallized as a regional genre promoted as the essence of the white and mestiço Catholic cowboy of the northeastern interior backlands. One aspect of the projected image of Arcoverde that sets it apart from the rest of the Route of Forró is the decision by its municipal government around 2000 to promote sounds strongly associated with coastal Afro-Brazilian-ness in the mestiço backlands.
As I drove through the crest of hills dividing the coast and the interior, I thought of a passage I had read about shrinking driving times, modernity, and change in the northeastern sertão. The passage had come from a seminal text on the sertão called Vaqueiros e Cantadores (Cowboys and Troubadours) by folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo. The book was written in December 1937, a few months before the Mission of Folkloric Research recorded in Arcoverde. I looked up the quotation later, so I could remember the excerpts that bridged the era of the Mission of Folkloric Research and that of Sandroni’s recording project.
Câmara Cascudo’s text betrays an ambivalence toward the passage of time, longing for a past way of life. Wonder, awe, and panic accompany the arrival of modernity in Cascudo’s telling: “I lived in the typical sertão, that has now disappeared. Electric lights hadn’t yet appeared. The gramophone dazzled us. Old João de Holanda … got down on his knees in the middle of the road and confessed all of his sins, blubbering, when he glimpsed, at sunset, his first automobile” (Cascudo 2004, 11).1
In contrast to the city and its ever-novel contraptions, Cascudo idealizes the distant past of his childhood in the sertão. In a key phrase he depicts it as unchanging, arguing that its past was whole in its present, unlike our present, in which the past is fractured and slipping from our grasp. Notice the entanglement of home, past, and childhood, pitched in a register of innocence: “The cooking remained loyal to the eighteenth century. Clothing reminded one of a museum retrospective. The strong prayers, the social habits, the traditional festivals, the way people talked, the superstitions, everything was the inescapable Past, complete, in the present” (ibid.).
Cascudo chronicles the drastically shrinking travel times to and from the sertão as vehicles and roads developed. He takes these dizzying changes as emblematic of broader cultural shifts in the area: “The transformation is subtle and daily. The roadways brought the sertão together with the agreste. Canceling out the distance, they mixed the environments. Today electrical lights, cars, radio, cold drinks, cinema, newspapers are everywhere … everything is close, due to the car. … From Natal to Caicó it used to take six days. Now the trip takes five hours” (ibid.).
At the time, when I was driving to Arcoverde, I recalled only his reflections on travel times. The passage that followed, however, complicated Cascudo’s reflection on the acceleration of modern life in the sertão. He claimed that nostalgia was not much of an issue for those who lived in the sertão, arguing that they constantly picked and chose the aspects of modernity that they wanted to participate in and those they wanted to reject: “The sertão modifies itself quickly. It becomes more uniform, it becomes more banal. Naturally, this criticism doesn’t work for those who live there. Modernized life is better than the old way of going by horse buggy and having to stop and rest all the time. Relatives of mine that refused to eat salads made with lettuce (“You think I’m a leaf-eating lizard, do you?”) conduct business in São Paulo, coming and going by plane” (ibid.). Concluding the passage, he opposes modernity to tradition and praises holdouts who scorn these changes. Troubadours, according to Cascudo, are quixotic bearers of tradition whose audiences remain stubbornly loyal: “The cantador recoils in front of the Radiola, the Victrola, cinema, the illustrated magazine. But he conserves his audience. Restricted, limited, poor but steadfast in their admiration. The cantadores sertanejos still live” (ibid.)
Recording and broadcasting technologies, transportation, and highway infrastructure have intensified the circulation of people, sounds, and money in the arid backlands. The folkloric paradigm that Cascudo helped crystallize has given way to a new period of heritage tourism and commercial pop mutations. Yet certain narratives of folklore have proven durable in the face of new shifts, as tourism emerges that resembles a recording expedition in miniature. The desire to return to the premodern is a recurring and very modern trope, as is the impulse to celebrate the stubborn holdout like the cantador. When I arrived in Arcoverde, sixty-five years after Cascudo wrote Cowboys and Troubadours, I found that Cascudo’s formulation of folklore often served as the script that musicians and audiences used to describe the musical practices performed there.
Arcoverde is nestled in a valley, increasing its rainfall and making it often greener than the semiarid sertão located only a few kilometers farther down the BR-232. As I entered the city, stiltwalkers in street clothes practiced their skills along the side of the highway.
I found a hotel amid downtown storefronts. A nearby ice cream parlor proudly displayed photos of employees posing with Globo television network stars who had recently stayed in Arcoverde while filming a desert-themed prime-time series. A specific kind of cosmopolitan hinterland, Arcoverde is a preferred location for filming footage in a sertão setting, without the actors having to sacrifice too many amenities.
In contrast to how television and film depict the location as a land of tradition and heritage, the home of samba de coco was firmly anchored in a modern, consumerist present. Three-story buildings with ceramic tile façades lined either side of the street. Shoppers were shielded from the blistering sun by overhanging second-story apartments. Young children and teenagers sat in Internet cafes open to the street, their eyes glued to computer screens. Stores displayed DVD players, digital cameras, clothes, shampoo, bicycles, televisions, fabric, and guitars.
The sheer number of stores seemed unlikely. Demand appeared disproportionately large, considering the city’s population. It turned out that this district supplied consumer goods to residents of several nearby small towns and rural areas as well as Arcoverde proper. Compared to nearby cities, Arcoverde felt young, commercial, and modern. The city was located in one of the first regions of Brazil to be colonized five centuries before, yet even the oldest Catholic church was less than one hundred years old. Houses and apartment buildings for the middle and upper classes featured clean lines, flat roofs, and a minimum of ornamentation. Downtown was not overly crowded, but it had a bustle to it that contrasted with the slower pace evident in neighboring Buique or Pedra. The sidewalks were half full of people with places to go, parking spaces were not always easy to find, and stores did a brisk business. Were it not for the long lines of people waiting to receive meager government assistance checks, as a visitor it would be easy to ignore the reality that Arcoverde was located in one of the most socially unequal areas in the world.
I spent most of the afternoon with a few members of the Calixto family outside the bar and cultural space near their cluster of three houses. Assis Calixto, one of the surviving patriarchs of Coco Raízes, was a conscientious host, showing me photo collages hung in their small museum. Sets of matching outfits established the timeline of the group. The first photos, from the mid-1990s, featured an off-white pattern with large, ornate orange and brown blossoms on camp shirts and long, old-fashioned dresses. Later they settled on a lime green and yellow floral print.
Talking to the Calixtos, I began to glimpse the complex network of individuals and institutions, from local to international, that supported this family so revered as bearers of tradition. I asked about a newspaper clipping on the wall about a jazz drummer from Chicago named Andrew Potter, and Assis turned on a boom box to play Potter’s instrumental version of Assis’s song “Balanço da canoa” (The sway of the canoe). It began with a drum solo that riffed on variations of the two rhythmic cells upon which Coco Raízes’s songs are based: the 3+3+2 timeline of samba de coco and a fast-paced duple meter of foguetes de roda. Soon the other musicians joined in: an electrified upright bass carried the melody, while the chords were filled in on an electric piano. As we listened, Assis sang his lead part, and his nieces, Iuma and Iram, sang their response, which mimicked the sound of waves lapping against a canoe. They clapped along and coaxed his three-year-old nephew Luizinho to demonstrate his prowess at dancing coco. Assis pulled a coin from his pocket to sweeten the deal, and the boy hammed it up, stomping remarkably well for one his age.
Meanwhile Iram sat down, irritated by an unproductive meeting about T-shirt designs, muttering something about contracts and verbal commitments that had fallen through. She had the abrupt manner of a businessperson in high demand. Iram was used to interviews, but I was not asking the questions that she usually fielded. This made her impatient. I struggled to come up with a question for her regarding the group’s state sponsorship. I had thought that it would take at least a few weeks to become acquainted before launching into my research questions. My position as a long-term visitor would end up being a bit baffling for the musicians to locate. They were unsure whether to treat me as a tourist, a journalist, or just another local attendee of their parties.
Iram’s attitude toward her neighborhood during this encounter stood in stark contrast to the reverent manner in which the neighborhood was treated by fans and in the lyrics of Coco Raízes’s songs. As I tried to ask another question, a woman on the street walked by with anger in her eyes. She glared at Iram and spat out an insult I did not understand. Initially unruffled by the incident, Iram dismissed it with a wave of her hand, adding, “She’s just jealous of us, and our success.” Her annoyance grew, however, leading her to repeat that she could no longer stand living on their street and dreamed of buying a house elsewhere so that she could have some peace of mind. She was sick of it all and insisted that these problems with her neighbors were not minor. After debating at length the question of whether the woman was actually insane or merely an awful person, Iram casually mentioned that she was a distant relative. This bitterness was my first taste of the volatility of the success of the samba de coco dynasties as the traditional genre had become increasingly lucrative.
My experience on the first day also hinted at how enmeshed the careers of samba de coco musicians were with public and private sponsorship. The Calixtos invited me down the hill to their performance at the Social Service of Commerce (SESC), a nonprofit institution managed privately but funded by mandatory public revenue from the commercial sectors of manufacturing, service, and tourism.2 Its programming is open to all, but its highest priority is to promote the social well-being of the employees within these sectors and their families. The SESC in Arcoverde is a large, well-maintained complex with a cafeteria, a library, exercise machines, an indoor theater, a pool, and an outdoor area for concerts. Paintings on the walls featured various folk forms, including samba de coco. I sat outside at a table near the pool for the show. There was no cost for admission, but formally dressed waiters in bow ties circulated through the audience offering platters of hors d’oeuvres.
On stage the musicians and dancers wore matching lime green floral shirts, with the women wearing matching dresses and the men and boys in solid green pants. Ciço Gomes was singing lead, and a pair of young dancers, Fagner Gomes and Daiane Calixto, competed for the attention of the audience. Wearing wooden sandals, they performed a quick, snare drum–like dance step. Unlike, for example, Rio-based contemporary samba, in which dancers move their bodies with ginga, or a fluid, graceful swing, samba de coco dancers stomp their sandals with force to compete with many loud percussion instruments and amplified voices. Ciço commanded the stage, projecting his resonant voice through the fuzzy, overdriven sound of the PA speakers.
Behind Ciço and the dancers stood three Calixto women singing backup: Iram, her younger sister Iuma, and her mother, Dona Lourdes. The older Calixto men—Assis and his brother Damião—joined the vocal responses, filling out the harmonies while adding precise rhythmic noise with triangle and tambourine.3 The quick stutter of the surdo bass drum, played by Ciço’s son François, anchored the shimmering treble. The percussion stayed fixed and tight, other than micro variations in rhythm and timbre caused by the drum, shaker, triangle, tambourine jingles, and wooden sandal stomps suspended in tension with each other. One song’s lyrics aptly compared the layers of rhythm to a quickly moving freight train. Indeed, it sounded like a train was speeding over a rickety old wooden bridge. After the show ended Ciço introduced himself and proceeded to pepper me with witty, rapid-fire questions. He turned out to be an affable man in his late forties who performed exuberantly on- and offstage. Ciço laughed easily, his contagious grin accentuated by his mustache.
Everything described in this passage happened during my first day in Arcoverde. I did not compress events that happened over several days; the events were already compressed for me. In other words, I was being warmly received as a tourist. And tourist destinations must regularly and frequently schedule events so that even the shortest-term guest won’t arrive, wait for something to happen, and then give up and go elsewhere. My whirlwind first day of research revealed the Calixtos to be professional hosts—so professional that the visitor may not even sense that the hospitality enjoyed was, while not insincere, certainly routine.
Origin Stories
Over the weeks the intertwined origin stories of Coco Raízes and Cordel emerged through conversations with musicians and others who had informally assumed the role of producing the groups. Micheliny introduced me to Rose Mary Gomes de Souza, an insider to the rock and roots music scenes in the city. She in turn introduced me to musicians and invited me to the venues where they performed.
The Bar do Zaca was frequently the place to meet up and listen to live music. Arcoverde was large enough to have several subgroups of artists, but there were not many places to gather, so they coexisted at the Bar do Zaca. There were the “roots” musicians (música de raíz), including Alberone Padilha, a member of the original lineup of Cordel who now played in a band that combined fiddle-driven forró de rabeca and fife-based banda de pífano tunes. His friend Helton Moura, a close friend of Micheliny and Lirinha, straddled the roots and rock music scenes, playing guitar and singing both mangue beat and 1970s-style northeastern folk rock such as Alceu Valença and Zé Ramalho. Helton was also part of the radical theater crowd, which had squatted in and claimed the defunct train station in town. The group had adopted the technique of aggressive squatting honed by the MST to turn one of the oldest buildings in town into a spare cultural center run by determined activists offering free art, music, and theater classes for the poor. There were hard rockers and heavy metal enthusiasts playing in bands such as Cobaias (Guinea Pigs) and Biocídio (Biocide). In addition to these loosely formed cliques, older bohemian artists and aficionados in their thirties and forties frequented the outdoor bar. Often there was a table-to-table breakdown of these groups: rockers in the back, theater people (and the lone modern dancer) near the small stage, roots musicians drinking cane liquor on the porch behind the stage, and older bohemians at the tables between the rockers and the actors. Almost everyone present had known each other for many years, if not their whole lives. This intimacy both blurred and accentuated the distinctions between cliques. Lines were blurred in the moments when rockers would playfully heckle Helton’s sentimental song choices. Lines were accentuated when old simmering feuds repelled former friends to opposite sides of the yard.
Despite their different passions, the patrons of the Bar do Zaca were united by a common musical enemy: stylized, ultrapopular forró, known as forró estilizado, which features television-inspired aesthetics, glitzy Las Vegas–style dancers, flashy staging, fog machines, and singers with peppy but often pitchy pop vocal delivery. It was the music usually heard on the principal stage during the São João Festival, on commercial radio stations, and blaring from speaker trucks throughout the city. All of these styles—forró estilizado; the more rustic, less flashy forró pé-de-serra; samba de coco; and various styles of rock and roots music—are still performed each year during the São João Festival in Arcoverde.
Forró estilizado was an unwelcome intruder in the home of artist Suedson Neiva and his wife Amélia, who worked for the state-sponsored cultural foundation Fundarpe. Suedson and Amélia closed the shutters and told me about the formation of Coco Raízes. Amélia, a student of the Pernambucan cultural preservationist and playwright Ariano Suassuna, was assigned a post in Arcoverde as an outreach coordinator when statewide policy shifted to a platform of decentralization.4 She also worked for the municipal bureau of culture in Arcoverde. Amélia and Suedson began asking around for any previously active forms of local culture that were ripe to be rescued and supported. They had gotten to know Lula Calixto when he sang samba de coco on the street in their neighborhood. Suedson described Lula as “humble, and full of greatness,” clarifying that “his simplicity was his greatness.” He described how Lula mediated the tense conflicts between group members that were present from the beginning of the revival.
The elderly drummer Biu Neguinho was digging graves for a living when Lula and Amélia went to the cemetery to convince him to dust off his surdo bass drum and play again. Biu protested at first, but finally agreed after some convincing. None of the sexagenarians in the newly formed group had danced coco in more than fifteen years. Fundarpe provided the group with matching outfits and instruments—and, according to Suedson and Dona Amélia, organized the group at first, before stepping aside and allowing the musicians to choose a new manager and self-govern, a fact that the majority of other accounts of the history of the group omitted or downplayed.
At Home, in the Street, and on the Stage
Ciço Gomes still possessed a few of the videotapes that had survived a small fire in the Calixto home; the fire burned T-shirts, newspaper clips, and several audio- and videotapes. We watched the remaining videos, and Ciço talked about how the group had changed and adapted: “It’s very difficult to make the transition between the house, the street and the stage. We are very aware of the difference between these contexts. One has to really make an effort to animate a crowd from the stage. In the beginning, we didn’t even have a PA system, just one microphone with a small amplifier. After this, we played on a small stage during São João. We played there, and everyone said ‘man, this is great!’ and put us on the larger stages.”
One of the most striking shifts in the group’s performance on stage was the decision to drastically reduce the number of dancers, from around twenty-five to two or three at a time. Fagner, the best young male dancer from the Gomes family, and Daiane, the best young female dancer from the Calixto family, ended up specializing in that role. From that point forward the group’s performances were no longer a direct transfer of practices developed in informal, participative contexts. Instead, the circle of dancers broke apart and the musicians faced the audience. Fagner and Daiane served as the group’s representatives. They would demonstrate the steps on stage, then jump down into the crowd to coax audience members to dance: “Fagner and Daiane [were the ones who] began this business of getting down from the stage to dance with everyone, snaking through the crowd and getting the circle dance started. It was they who did this.” Each larger stage where they performed gave them motivation to rehearse their vocal harmonies and tighten the layers of percussion: “After playing on the largest stages during São João in Arcoverde, they called us to play in Recife, so we went there. We had to realize that we weren’t that little group that plays in someone’s house anymore. We had to clean up the small mistakes and concentrate harder on really playing well for the stage.”
Government cultural preservation efforts and commerce have worked hand in hand in the story of samba de coco in Arcoverde. By 2004 recordings of the music of Coco Raízes would serve as the soundtrack to the chamber of commerce convention and a fashion show in the publicly funded colonial district of downtown Recife. Government festivals provided the band with a career ladder to climb as it honed its craft, from local Arcoverde festival stages to Recife’s Carnaval.
SAMBA DE COCO PERFORMED AT HOME
One of the earliest videotapes from Ciço Gomes’s collection contained footage of his daughter’s birthday party in 1996, providing an example of an informal performance of samba de coco for family and friends, before the group began performing on stage. On the tape the white noise of the shakers, the metallic clang of the triangle, and the staccato booms of the surdo drum enveloped the dancers as they moved in a circle around a small living room cleared of furniture. The percussionists lined the wall behind the circle, and everyone sang the refrains in response to whoever was singing lead at the time. Everyone present was dressed in everyday attire: T-shirts, shorts, trousers, dresses. The mood in the room was of orderly, family-friendly, alcohol-free celebration. The lead singer was alternately Lula Calixto, who was singing in a pinched tone, straining to project over the percussion and the din of voices at the party as he danced in the circle, or Ciço, who stood either in the middle of the circle or outside it. Ciço was constantly making eye contact, singing lines directly to partygoers, lifting people’s spirits, and encouraging participation. The force of everyone singing together was more important than the precision of the harmonies, which were roughly parallel thirds. The musicians traded improvised verses, many of which referred to the fact that they were being filmed.
Most of the dancers’ steps included a slight shuffle/slide that emulated the swish of the shaker, a touch that was easier to sustain in everyday leather- and rubber-soled shoes than it would be later in wooden sandals, which require an emphatic, precise stomp. There was much more variation in how the dancers accented the basic steps than at later performances on stage. When a song began its rapid-fire embolada section, the dancers stopped singing and focused on the quicker-stepped trupé dance. While later crowds, such as those in Recife, would take their cues from the dancers on stage, with everyone striving to execute the RlrLrlrl pattern, in this roda some dancers preferred rLrlrLrl, or even Rl.lR1.1, flowing with or against the grain of the shaker and triangle parts.5
The room was small for the thirty or so people who were dancing in it, and the proximity of bodies circulating counterclockwise resembled circles found in candomblé terreiros (houses of Afro-Brazilian religion), the initiates packed one after the next, all moving in the same direction around the axis point in the center of the room. In this videotape members of all three families, Lopes, Calixto, and Gomes, were seen celebrating with friends and neighbors—a scene one would not have seen a few years earlier, when the families danced separately, and did not see a few years later, when a family feud had broken out between the Lopeses and Calixtos.
The 1996 video was one of the earliest remaining recordings of the samba de coco revival in Arcoverde. The footage had been taken soon after Fundarpe had worked with Lula Calixto to gather the three families of musicians and convince them to resume playing, singing, and dancing samba de coco. Prior to this moment certain members of the families had played together before—Lopes and Gomes, for example—but others had not. The revival of samba de coco in Arcoverde in the mid-1990s involved the negotiation of musical style. Lula Calixto’s notion of the genre included a love for midtempo cocos, while Ciço Gomes and Biu Neguinho, who had a long history of playing with the Lopes family, would storm through songs at blazing speeds. Biu’s previous experience leading a Rio-style samba school influenced his distinctive sticking patterns.
Through their sponsorship, Fundarpe and the SESC cast samba de coco as heritage, fitting them within a register of restorative nostalgia. This led to the downplaying of stylistic gaps between samba de coco families in order to unite and consecrate the genre as representative of the city. Far from being an easy narrative of progress from the home and the street to the stage, this video merely documents the beginning of the latest chapter in the history of samba de coco. After patriarch Ivo Lopes’s death in 1987, the musicians stopped playing for the most part, but if one dug deeper into the past, Ivo, Ciço, and Biu were no strangers to public performance. In the 1970s they had mounted shows during the São João Festival with municipal support as well as the sponsorship of beer companies. Ivo had written cocos that during that time were popular radio hits, interpreted by forró stars such as Genival Lacerda. But the private dimension of the genre, played informally at birthday parties and other family gatherings, continued to be a key site for the music, and in 1996 this recording of the performers without their stage dress provided footage that could be seen as evidence that the genre lived off the stage as well as on it.
FOLKLORE AS A HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT
The video footage of Dora’s birthday party was recorded as part of Micheliny Verunschk’s research into samba de coco in Arcoverde. During this time Lirinha and the guitarist Clayton Barros accompanied Micheliny as she spoke to musicians who were once a part of the family-centered and semiprivate coco salons that had been happening in Arcoverde at least as far back as the 1930s. Lula Calixto taught them about the music and its history and joined them in their efforts to gather more information about how it had been practiced.
The science fair, held at the high school where Lirinha studied, offered students a folklore option, reflecting nineteenth- and early twentieth-century classifications of the study of folklore as a science. At the science fair Lirinha and Clayton performed samba de coco and reisado repertoire, as well as poetry recitation with guitar accompaniment, on a stage in the cafeteria. The performance was received well enough to garner the attention of the director of the SESC Arcoverde. The SESCs of the state of Pernambuco had been on the lookout for promising, regionally relevant cultural programming that could be sent on tour, and Lirinha and Clayton were invited to produce and rehearse a theatrical folklore revue.
CORDEL’S FIRST PERFORMANCE
A videotape of Cordel’s first performance at the SESC begins with the cast walking on stage, illuminated only by open flame kerosene lanterns. Lirinha declares, “Bless Master Chudu,” paying tribute to a popular troubadour and poet from a nearby municipality. Before the rest of the show comes on, he recites “O Cordel Estradeiro,” asking this dead poet for permission to “become authentic,” to “become a messenger of the force of your thunder.” Upon Lirinha’s uttering the word verdadeiro (true or authentic), Clayton Barros played a pleasant, innocuous accompaniment in a major key that underscored this tribute to local elders. But calling for permission from the previous generation of popular poets indicated that, as fledgling performers, their own authenticity in performing this repertoire was in question. This posture of apprenticeship would change drastically as Cordel transformed.
Lirinha defined the performance as a cordel estradeiro. The word cordel refers to small chapbooks of rhymed poetry or a recited story in general. Estradeiro has two meanings. It refers to someone who is almost never at home because he or she is constantly traveling, or to a mule or horse who has a solid, trustworthy gait. By naming their performance a cordel estradeiro, Lirinha framed it as tradition made to travel: road-ready folklore. It was a manifesto for the band Cordel, declaring in words and delivery that its artistic gait was trustworthy and solid. After Lirinha asked for permission to represent the tradition of popular poetry and promised to become a messenger for the words of these poets of the sertão, he proclaimed, “I, too, am a bandit / And my roadworthy Cordel / Is a powerful rattlesnake.” The consonant, reassuring circle-of-fifths chord progression played underneath the claim “I, too am a bandit” frames the moment as the passing of the torch of tradition. At this point the words and music work together to suggest that Cordel’s uncertainty is merely the nervousness of novices making their debut. During this early phase, growing up in the area was sufficient to qualify them as culture bearers. This question would become more complicated as they moved away from Arcoverde.
Despite their jitters about performing tradition, at this point Cordel viewed the relationship between interpreter and source material marked as traditional as relatively transparent and free of antagonism. Late in the set one song in particular clearly located Cordel’s work within a discourse of loss and recovery:
Cordel participates in the past
On a string, the seed is hanging
Left suddenly
It has the soul of my reisado
The magic of the enchanted fire
And the cultural roots of your people
… The finest coveted riches
In the forests of ashes that were green
In the finest coveted riches
In the forest of ashes that is Arcoverde
O cordel participa do passado
Num cordão pendurado a semente
Deixado de repente
Tem a alma do meu reisado
A magia do fogo encantado
E a raiz cultural da sua gente
… Na mais fina riqueza cobiçada
Nas florestas de cinzas que eram verdes
Na mais fina riqueza cobiçada
Na floresta de cinzas que é Arcoverde
The audience was told that they had just heard and seen bits and pieces of their cultural heritage—their roots. Cultural forms, such as samba de coco and reisado, were treated as natural resources. Through an arboreal metaphor of cultural roots—a common comparison within folklore that Cordel would later eschew—the imperative of cultural preservation was reinforced. In the song cultural roots are described as coveted riches almost lost in the scorched earth of modernity, “the forests of ashes that were green.” In the last line Arcoverde specifically is pinpointed. The burning of the forest becomes equated with the perceived loss of cultural memory in the city. But these local riches still remain, the song states, and by performing them, together the performers and the audience have helped preserve them.
During the performance these various “cultural riches” were represented—principally poetry and music from what Cordel selected as the local European, African, and indigenous contributions to their cultural identities. At this point Cordel’s performance was compatible in many ways with Ariano Suassuna’s regionalist Movimento Armorial, which sought to connect with the “magical spirit” of literatura de cordel and sertão musical styles.
During the show the mood varied from one piece to the next; a satirical poem about a hick bumbling in the city followed a solemn, mystical poem about an indigenous prophecy. Roughly a quarter of the performance consisted of comedic storytelling. This contrasted with later performances of the group, within which it adopted a prophetic, apocalyptic tone for the entire show. Costume changes also signaled the panoramic presentation of the region’s forgotten treasures that group members had learned from local culture bearers. During the last third of the performance the group further reinforced the posture of homage by donning colorful folk Catholic reisado outfits and performing a medley of more than ten songs from the repertoires of local reisado and samba de coco groups. During a slower, hymnlike reisado song, the members of Cordel dramatized the Catholic context of this performance by kneeling and putting their hands together in a gesture of prayer. At the end of the performance the mostly middle-aged and elderly patrons of the institution seated in the SESC theater clapped politely, in stark contrast to the screaming, cheering, singing, and moshing of the young fans that Cordel would later mesmerize at outdoor festivals.
From the Theater to the Festival
Soon after Cordel’s first performance, the group caught the attention of two prominent culture brokers in Pernambuco’s state capital, Recife: Antonio Gutierrez, known as Gutie, and Juvenal de Holanda Vasconcelos, known as Naná Vasconcelos. Gutie produces Rec-Beat, a large festival within Recife’s Carnaval celebration, featuring a combination of Brazilian and foreign acts performing international pop styles, local acts performing regional traditional styles, and groups inspired by mangue beat, which combined both categories. Naná Vasconcelos is a percussionist who is internationally known for his participation in avant-garde, proto–“world music” recordings on the ECM record label during the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as his collaboration on Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints record. He has repeatedly played the role of “the traditional” or even “the primitive” in pieces that juxtapose folklore and experimentalist contemporary art music, such as one scored for percussion, nonverbal vocalizations, and string quartet. His celebrations of the elemental presaged the themes of New Age music in the 1980s and 1990s; his work represents an optimistic strain of modernist primitivism circulating in the avant-pop/jazz world.
Cordel was taken under Gutie’s wing, and Naná produced the group’s first record. When it moved to Recife, only the singer Lirinha and the guitarist Clayton Barros, the two principal songwriters, remained from the original lineup; two percussionists, Nego Enrique and Rafa Almeida, who grew up playing in candomblé terreiros in the poverty-stricken Morro da Conceição neighborhood of Recife, joined the band, as well as Emerson Calado, a drummer from Arcoverde’s hard rock scene. No longer marketed as a folkloric theater troupe, the group was now playing at festival stages along with other groups lumped under the umbrella category mangue beat. As early as 2001, in press interviews Lirinha expressed growing discomfort with the idea of cultural rescue, as well as with Cordel’s music being branded as regional. Lirinha began to refer to their earlier posture as gatherers of folklore as an “epoch of homage” that had since passed: “We don’t want to work with the revival, rescue [resgate] or rereading of traditional sounds. I don’t know even if we will end up finding what we’re looking for, which is to make music that is ever more closely derived from individual emotions. This principle breaks the idea of a sound limited to a certain region or, then, with the language of a certain region. An accent, we know, is what is inevitable.”
Naná Vasconcelos urged Emerson Calado to explore nontraditional techniques on instruments with conventional roles in marginal-turned-traditional music. Naná was famous for exploring unorthodox ways to play the one-stringed musical bow the berimbau, and Emerson followed his lead by transferring his loud, heavy sensibility developed in hard rock and metal bands to surdo, alfaia, and zabumba drums. Although it is difficult to parse how much of their new sound was due to the new lineup, how much of it was Gutie’s production guidance, and how much of it was the influence of Naná’s aesthetics, all these factors are present in Cordel’s move away from the ascetic aesthetics of folklore. Cordel now had an elaborate lighting system at its disposal and a sound engineer to trigger samples and add sound effects. All the instruments were miked, and the mix emphasized thunderous bass, visceral percussion, and Lirinha’s apocalyptic incantations.
While the first performance in Arcoverde began with a call for dead poets to authenticate the work of the group, its first CD and performances on the subsequent tour began with the more nebulous, disorienting track “A chegada do Zé do Né na lagoa de dentro” (The arrival of Zé do Né to the inner lagoon). The track started with sound in the left channel and floated to the right as the reverse attack of an acoustic guitar’s decay played backward built to an abrupt crescendo. Immediately after this first guitar stab, a vocal melismatic melody appeared as the guitar continued to orbit from ear to ear. Clayton’s guitar playing recorded backward sustained a low drone while he picked quicker notes on the upper strings, which when reversed sounded like prickly stabs. The prolonged attack of the droning low notes gave the song an expansive sense of space, invoking the Doppler effect and sounding like a recording made in slow motion. The detail of the lilting aboio (an a capella cowherder’s song) that the singer Zé do Né recorded with the crackly aesthetic of early ethnographic field recording, was contrasted with the swirling guitar recorded backward.6 Once the looped vocal sample repeated itself verbatim, however, its electronic manipulation was foregrounded, and it too was denaturalized and unmoored in this swirling orbit.
By the time Cordel’s tours were being produced by Gutie and their disc was recorded by Naná, the band had gone from downplaying the intertextual gaps between its performances and those of related performers to emphasizing gaps in order to present the group as iconoclastic innovators. The band’s shift away from a posture of homage was vividly indexed by the changes in the performance of “O Cordel Estradeiro,” with which they began their first SESC show. The song, which declares their performance to be “road-ready folklore,” indexes the band’s emerging questions about the use of marginal-turned-traditional source materials. The song, in which Lirinha calls to his departed elders in the world of poetry and popular culture for authentication, now explores the negative potential of homage, understood as an appropriation rather than a tribute. Although Lirinha recites more or less identical words, the difference becomes clear the moment he utters the word verdadeiro (authentic). During the band’s earlier performances the guitar came in to reassure the audience with a pleasant, stable chord progression. On the record, however, an ominous, dissonant line appears at this point, using the lowest register of an accordion run through distortion and other effects.7 What appeared earlier to be the inspirational passing of the torch of tradition now sounds like a Frankenstein-like jolting of life into the dead. With the recitation of the image of Lirinha’s land as a rugged place where “the rattlesnake naps in the mouth of the bandit,” the aboio sample of “Zé do Né” reappears, this time played backward.
With this contrasting musical accompaniment, the tone of the poem shifts from Lirinha reverently asking for his elder’s blessing to asserting his power with bluster. Cordel’s new power is declared with a show of technical prowess by playing the sampled traditional voice backward—like a magic show, in which a magician, with a puff of smoke, suspends someone upside down in midair. Just as the magician performing such a trick would control the inverted body, Cordel asserts control over the traditional material.
After this act of self-authentication Lirinha’s own words are once again blurred with moments of ventriloquism. Now when he recites another poet’s verse, the mood shifts abruptly as a sunny circle of fifths chord progression emerges. In the CD liner notes these poets are cited without quotation marks, and during performance it isn’t clear where Lirinha’s words end and the other poets’ verses begin. When the last verse ended during Cordel’s debut performance, the song ended. But on the CD, the moment that the words are complete the dark accordion part returns, along with the inverted aboio vocal sample. Musically and lyrically, the band acknowledges in this track that its approach could be heard as either homage to be celebrated or appropriation to be scorned.
This marked change in its posture of homage happened during the period when many of the traditional performers cited in Cordel’s lyrics and music were approaching the band with intellectual property rights claims. The half hour of samba de coco and reisado songs from their Arcoverde phase had been whittled down to one four-minute medley, chosen because it consisted of songs in Arcoverde’s samba de coco and reisado repertoires that were played by other groups throughout the region, making them impervious to lawsuits claiming ownership of the song’s intellectual property rights. The excessive footnotes in the CD booklet, citing details as minute as the fact that the rhythm of a made-up word was inspired by a samba de coco dancer’s steps, serve two purposes: (1) to prevent lawsuits in Arcoverde’s volatile environment by acknowledging the band’s sources and (2) to prove the band’s uniqueness in the musical marketplace by linking it to the interior region in a way no coastal Recife band can claim.
In addition to the shrinking of the folkloric medleys, the structure of the performances shifted during Cordel’s second phase, when the band members were living in Recife. While Cordel was starting out in Arcoverde the mood on stage would vary from one skitlike segment to the next. Following a poem about an indigenous prophecy, Lirinha would tell a funny story about a bumbling rural man trying to navigate the urban environment. Humorous poems followed solemn moments. After moving away from Arcoverde, however, the mood of a few moments in the first performance, in which Lirinha portrayed the charismatic power of the prophets and the bandits, became standard throughout the entire show. Humor was almost completely absent, and the majority of the words were spoken as an incantation, or “a heavy church mass” as the band described it in its lyrics. An aura of ecstatic religion was invoked through the use of candomblé drumming patterns in 12/8 time, folk Catholic pilgrim’s songs, and the impassioned vocal cadence of a millenarian fire and brimstone preacher.
The last scene of the band’s music video for “Chover (ou invocação para um dia liquido)” (Rain [Invocation for a liquid day]), which enjoyed MTV Brasil airplay, was filmed under the cross of the Alto do Cruzeiro. The clip featured Cordel and the Calixto family dancing coco and playing music together. This image of harmony and celebration belied the instability of their relationship at that time, as each group was finding a way through distinct but tethered predicaments surrounding their emerging commodification. The musicians in Coco Raízes were working to realize their dreams of appearing on television and performing all over Brazil. As they worked toward these goals, they were aware that they were performing music with premodern roots within a place-based project. In the words of their stage manager, Carlinhos, Coco Raízes had to remain careful not to “get off track” by revealing their ambitions and risk being seen as just another pop band. The members of Coco Raízes maintained their floral print, old-fashioned outfits for performing and reluctantly heeded their manager’s warning not to abandon Arcoverde as their home base. Meanwhile, Cordel faced a transition from folklore revue to mutationist pop band and, in percussionist Emerson Calado’s words, eased away from reproducing the work of others, toward producing original work of its own. Authorship copyright conflicts only accelerated the movement of both groups away from drawing inspiration from songs considered part of the public domain.
