Gilberto Gil

With heartfelt thanks to Thiago Filardi for his support and advice.

It's April 1975 when a double LP, the result of a collaboration between Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben, hits Brazilian record stores. It's called "Ogum Xangô", after two orixás, the semi-divine spirits typical of candomblé: the first is the lord of iron and war, the second – whose body is half white and half black – is the lord of lightning and justice.

Candomblé is a Brazilian religion born from the syncretic fusion of Yoruba mythology (the West African people among those most exploited during the slave trade for the colonization of the Americas), Christianity and indigenous cults. Over time, many orixás have merged with Christian saints, of whom they represent a sort of avatar and/or alter ego: Ogum, for instance, is associated with Saint Sebastian in the Rio de Janeiro area, while Xangô is often overlapped with Saint Jerome.

To better understand the phenomenon, it may help to know that Haitian voodoo and Cuban santería too – far better known in the first world thanks to numerous "pop" references (films, novels, and online, countless memes) – are rooted in Yoruba mythology and its intertwining with local beliefs and Christianity. Although the details vary from region to region, the parallels remain evident: in Cuba, for example, Xangô is called Chango and is syncretized with Saint Barbara, while still retaining a male body.

It's not a title chosen at random: mysticism, symbolism and religion recur not only in numerous points of the album, but more generally throughout the work of many of the most important names in música popular brasileira of that generation. Jorge Ben's records are full of it: take, for example, "A Tábua de Esmeralda" (1974), a concept album dedicated to Hermes Trismegistus, a philosopher who probably never existed, part of the Greco-Egyptian mythology of the Ptolemaic era, or "Solta o pavão" (1975), which contains songs dedicated to Saint George and Saint Thomas (even adapting some of the latter's verses).

Gilberto Gil, for his part, would just a year later join the supergroup Doces Bárbaros, awash with crosses, ritual objects, magic necklaces and bracelets, songs dedicated to the Book of "Genesis", to Saint John, to Xangô once again, and so on and so forth.

The esoteric infatuation wasn't confined to Ben and Gil alone, as mentioned: Caetano Veloso too had referenced an orixá in one of his songs (Iemanjá, mother of the sea and symbol of fertility, in "Sol negro"), while the father of Brazilian soul, Tim Maia, devoted two whole albums to the tenets of cultura racional, a local sect built on a mixture of philosophy and spiritism.

This explains the release of so many albums that, over the course of the Brazilian Seventies, touched on similar themes: a sizeable portion of the country's artistic intelligentsia was, if not entirely under its spell, at least fascinated by it. The public, however, was less so, and didn't always greet such projects with enthusiasm: "Ogum Xangô" itself was a commercial flop at the time, despite the towering fame of its two creators. As sometimes happens with such extreme projects, though, time has done it justice, and today it's considered one of the finest albums by either singer.

Born out of a suggestion from record executive André Midani, who had witnessed an acoustic jam between the two, the album was presumably recorded live in the studio, under the direction of Perinho Albuquerque and Paulinho Tapajós (among the most important producers of the scene, who also worked alongside, among many others, Gal Costa and Maria Bethânia).

This is a highly experimental work, with eight tracks out of nine stretching beyond six minutes, well past the length of a traditional song. The arrangements favor acoustic instruments and minimalism: there's only Ben and Gil's guitars, the percussion of professor Djalma Corrêa (a scholar of the correlations between African and Brazilian music), and occasionally the bass of session player Wagner Dias, the only electric presence.

The first LP opens with the prayer "Meu glorioso São Cristovão", written by Ben: "My glorious Saint Christopher, my glorious martyr. My glorious martyr, bearer of Christ, intercede for us. In the scourge of earthquakes, floods and fires, traveling by land, underground, sea and air, free us from sin, from the sin of perdition. We turn to God, in the safe refuge of eternal happiness. We implore through Jesus Christ, whom you carried on your shoulders. Amen."

The track sets the mold for the whole record: an acoustic jam that flows torrentially through intertwined arpeggios and percussion, with the rhythmic influence of samba and baião surfacing cyclically, while the two voices repeat the lyrics over and over. Jorge Ben leads the melody, at times interrupting it with spoken asides, while Gil follows, echoing his phrases and harmonizing, often climbing to striking high notes. Where needed, onomatopoeia and drawn-out vowels are brought in to fill every available space, whenever the sheer verbal torrent of the lyrics isn't enough.

"Nega" is a Gil blues sung in English, originally released on the 1971 album made during the London exile imposed on him and Veloso by the military regime of the time. The revisiting presented here is so radical that the song is barely recognizable: not only does it last twice as long, but its form has come apart, the blues component diluted, while the original lyrics, dedicated to an exotic, mysterious woman the narrator is in love with, are extended with new lines or by repeating words as if in a kind of ascesis: shortly after the six-minute mark, Gil repeats "Nega" at least twenty-five times in a row (the count is approximate, since at some point it dissolves into an unintelligible tongue-twister), while Ben asks, again speaking: "My tropical woman, is it you, Nega?".

The jubilant "Jurubéba" takes its title from a medicinal plant found throughout Brazil, from which a liqueur is also made. It seems the authors consumed considerable quantities of it during the album's sessions, as well demonstrated by the energy of the guitars and the delirium of abstract vocalizations fired off in bursts, clipped words, shouts, howls, and drunken-sounding proclamations on the curative properties of the drink. Words and music are by Gil, but Ben seems to embrace them with great passion, delivering some of the raspiest vocalizing he's ever recorded.

"Quem mandou (Pé na estrada)" is a Ben composition originally released by Wilson Simonal in 1973 (after all, the famous "País tropical" had also been given to Simonal, before Ben decided to record it himself). Simonal's version is a lively pop tune for bass and electric band, while Gil and Ben turn it into a more subdued piece that drifts into a slow-motion ending, only after once again stretching out both its structure and lyrics.

The second LP opens with two revisitations from the 1972 album "Ben": "Taj Mahal" and "Morre o burro, fica o homem". The first is one of the artist's anthems, and here it's given lyrics for the first time: in the original, the artist said nothing but "Taj Mahal, karma, Krishna", along with the famous refrain "Tê tê, têtêretê" (later overused, in the form of shoddy remixes, in New Year's music the world over).

In this new version, which lasts nearly three times as long, Ben takes care to explain the origin of the Indian mausoleum that gives the song its title: "It was the most beautiful love story I had ever heard, the love of Prince Shah Jahan for Princess Mumtaz Mahal." Running close to a quarter of an hour, it's perhaps the track on the record that best illustrates the meaning of repetitive trance: watch out, though, for CD reissues, some of which cut a couple of minutes from it.

The final side contains two Gil originals: "Essa é pra tocar no rádio" and "Filhos de Gandhi". The latter has become a classic over time, thanks to the shortened versions the author has performed live throughout his career. But this is the definitive version to pass down, in its imposing thirteen minutes, the ultimate cultural blend: "Omolu, Ogum, Oxum, Oxumaré, all the people sent down to see the sons of Gandhi. Iansã, Iemanjá, call Xangô and also Oxóssi, send them down to see the sons of Gandhi. Merchant, horseman of Baghdad, oh son of Obá, send them down to see the sons of Gandhi. Lord of Bonfim, do me a favor, call the people, send them down to see the sons of Gandhi. Oh my God in heaven, in the land of carnival, call the people."

The song refers to the Filhos de Gandhi, a Bahia carnival bloco with thousands of members, all strictly devoted to candomblé. They take their name in honor of a figure who is nonetheless foreign to their own religion, Mahatma Gandhi, whose nonviolent doctrine they follow. Besides invoking numerous orixás, the lyrics refer to the Lord of Bonfim, a trans-religious, dark-skinned saint and patron of carnival dances, before concluding by circling back to the Christian God. The horseman of Baghdad, on the other hand, is harder to identify: one might guess he's the protagonist of one of the countless variants of the Jewish parable on the inescapability of death, but there's no official explanation for it.

After a slow, inexorable buildup, the track erupts into a choral apotheosis, with Gil delivering an angelic vocalization and Ben echoing him with a sort of muttered drone, after which everything gradually fades out into a swamp of arpeggios and bucolic noises. At the tail end comes an amusing minute-and-a-half fragment, "Sarro", a kind of free-form folk/funk.

"Ogum Xangô" can today be regarded as one of the manifestos of a difficult era in Brazil's life. It came out as the regime was slowly loosening its grip, while still maintaining a certain severity: exiled musicians had been allowed to return, but at the price of steering clear of protest songs. And yet, building an entire record around the culture of Brazil's most marginalized communities (Yoruba mythology was hardly popular among Rio de Janeiro's white bourgeoisie and bossa nova devotees) can be read as a disguised form of dissent. It's a fact that the South American regimes of the Sixties and Seventies, almost all backed by American intelligence services, viewed indigenous cultures and local folklore with deep suspicion, often regarding them as propaganda weapons of the resistance.

Even the jams that make up the album, among the most sophisticated examples of what we'd now call avant-folk, ultimately symbolize a cry for freedom against the rigid rules of pop music.

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08/12/2019