Buffy Sainte-Marie

There are records whose genesis follows paths that lie beyond any musical geography. They are those unique cases in the history of popular music that defy any classification, and that sometimes leave behind them a trail of everlasting brilliance. In this sense, Buffy Sainte-Marie's “Illuminations” is a true comet with a blinding glow. A work whose artistic scope still inspires boundless wonder today, whose intrinsic qualities remain without equal or comparison, and which, more than forty years on, still remain partly misunderstood by much of the critical establishment and audiences at large.

It's the middle of 1969, and Buffy Sainte-Marie, the songwriter and folksinger from a Piapot reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley (Saskatchewan, Canada), adopted at a young age by a family from Maine, is already approaching thirty and has five albums to her name, marked by immense folk-rooted candor but above all by lyrics densely packed with the deep youthful rebellion against an American society still immature and profoundly racist.

These are the years of white hippie uprisings, of the Vietnam War, and of the tremendous social fractures taking shape with the rise of an increasingly warmongering and cynically unrestrained capitalism, the absolute ruler of the new world, whose "values" stood in stark contrast to the centuries-old moral principles rooted in the purely naturalistic outlook of the Native reservations she came from.

A graduate in Oriental philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, the outgoing Beverly Sainte-Marie (her real name) learned to play guitar and write poetry from a very young age, soon giving rise to a series of folk ballads as ancient-sounding as they are strikingly hypnotic (chief among them the title track of the equally seminal album "Little Wheel Spin and Spin"). Her songs are true psychedelic laments that often urge a kind of shamanic abandon virtually alien to the norms of the era, with only Tim Buckley offering any real point of comparison.

But it's only with "Illuminations" that the Canadian singer-songwriter reaches truly stratospheric artistic heights, pairing a genuinely folk-based framework with the use of the Buchla synthesizer to create an experience simply unique of its kind. For the occasion, she is guided step by step by producer Maynard Solomon and the great electronic experimenter Michael Czajkowski, who each in their own way lend the record such singular distinguishing traits as to push the whole production beyond any conceivable boundary. Adding further luster to this brilliant piece of artistic inlay work is Sainte-Marie's own inimitable, one-of-a-kind voice, possessed both of the same precious tonal qualities found in other great songwriters of the era (Joan Baez chief among them, and soon after the little-known Collie Ryan and Linda Perhacs), and of that very particular vocal inclination toward the vibrant lyrical pathos of the finest sopranos.

Opening the proceedings is the specially synthesized vocal tremolo of "God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot", which seems to rise faint and slow from the bottom of a ravine, climbing upward toward the sky and the stars. The words are by the great Leonard Cohen and voice a deep condemnation of the pettiness of human behavior when set against the eternal grandeur of God. It is Native spirituality that serves as the supreme guide, defining the album at every turn and lending it an inscrutable aura of magic and devotion. From the famous cover pose onward, Sainte-Marie takes on the guise of the matron and the open-hearted preacher, confronting personal dramas and the troubles of the society around her with an approach at once divine and esoteric. Next comes the poignant, swift "Mary", a kind of prayer laden with solemn invocation. The Western-tinged "Better to Find Out For Yourself" and "Suffer The Little Children", both country-leaning with a Southern gait, likewise underscore the Canadian folksinger's love for her native land, claimed with pride and utter peyote-fueled devotion.

The use of the Buchla and the filtered vocals on "Vampire" push the album's already unmatched stylistic mark even further, while the following "Adam", penned by the great Richie Havens, with its frayed bass prominently on display, conjures a ritual as pagan as it is close to the all-consuming, libertine spirit of hippie culture. The soft, gentle ballad "The Dream Tree", on the other hand, is the album's only real point of contact with the folk ebb and flow of the Mitchell school.

And yet the record's highest, most evocative moments lie elsewhere, specifically in "The Angel" and "Poppies". The first is a true declaration of love bristling with vocal spirituality, rising ever higher until it reaches and embraces the angels in heaven. The second is about as bizarre and psychedelic as anything ever composed by a folksinger in the whole of the twentieth century: a mere three-minute fresco, dense with hallucinations and cryptic vocal projections of intensely lysergic impact, one that would later serve as a "shining" example for priestesses of the caliber of Diamanda Galàs and Jarboe.

After "Illuminations", pink-hued singer-songwriter music would never be the same again. A unique work, a simply unrepeatable miracle.

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24/04/2016