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
