Huey Morgan’s Latin Music Adventure: Brazil

Like any TV documentary, there are the limiting factors of the availability of colour footage for the historical stuff and the availability of willing talking heads for the present and recent past. Ok we know that it’s not going to be an exhaustive detailed introduction, but does Huey’s Brazil excursion represent the main points?

Huey Morgan’s personality is ideal and his lack of Portuguese didn’t seem to be an issue, he’s just one of those people who can form a connection with anyone. One thing that he really got across is the sense that Brazil has near universal participation in the making of music. Anyone should be able to pick up a matchbox or tap the side of their glass of stupidamente gelado beer and join in.

He talked a good story about tradition, but I think the show had a rather north American preoccupation with novelty and the underlying feeling that anything old can’t be relevant. So no mention was made of Pixinguinha, a contemporary of Louis Armstrong, and the composer of ‘Carinhoso’ the song that was presented at the opening of the Rio olympics as the nation’s favourite. There was no mention of Noel Rosa, kind of contemporary with Benny Goodman or Billy Strayhorn, and most bafflingly of all, no mention of Angenor de Oliveira. If you mention that name to Brazilians I guess they might just look blank, but if you use his nickname Cartola (Top Hat) everyone would recognise him. Brazilians remember songwriters the way the Northern Irish remember 17th century politics. You can tell this from google. You google ’Stormy Weather’ and you’ll find yourself reading about Lena Horne. Only after digging do you find a mention of Harold Arlen; google Carinhoso and you pretty quickly find out about Pinxinguinha.

Huey talks to some people in the Mangueira samba school which I think of as the Manchester United of samba schools. As I recall I noticed little bits of 3 of Cartola’s songs played in the background while Huey told us about their history going back to the 1920s, their colours of pink and green yet never once mentioned Cartola’s part in their founding and the choice of colours. They even showed a kid in a green top hat and still no mention. 

It has to be said that Noel Rosa and Cartola weren’t exactly lookers and spent their lives in grainy black and white. 

Bossa Nova was presented as a bourgeois irrelevance. Tom, sorry Antonio Carlos Jobim to you, was shown only in the company of Frank Sinatra. Frank clearly appreciating, but totally not getting Bossa Nova. Tom was playing guitar, an instrument he learned late because, well it was what the gringos expect a latin to play -he was much more comfortable playing piano or flute. I don’t recall any mention of Joao Gilberto or Vinicius de Moraes, which is just plain wrong. And although the Frank Sinatra bit did show the international contribution of Bossa Nova, it didn’t really show its most significant influence, but I don’t think there’s any colour footage of Stan Getz, so that’s out of the window. The only bossa novista that got any coverage was Joyce Moreno. This promoted the idea that all other female brazilian artists were lightweight insipid and decorative like Astrud Gilberto. You wouldn’t have said that about Elis Regina who was similarly invisible.

Tropicalia was well covered mostly because Gilberto Gil is so affable and approachable.And while he and Caetano Veloso were important in the resistance to the government of the 60s, they weren’t the only ones; there wasn’t any mention of Chico Buarque’s powerful songs Apesar de Voce or Vai Pasar.

In the end, the coverage of the bateria of the samba schools and the Salvador blocos was good, but I felt there was a concentration on the light rather than the light and shade of Brazilian musical culture. And I never heard the word ‘saudade’ mentioned once.