Penguin Cafe' Orchestra

Simon Jeffes called his music “imaginary folklore”, but here we've opted for the more canonical, colder label of modern classical. But, the reader might ask, isn't it inconsistent, at least conceptually, to include an album in a list of rock milestones after having defined it as essentially not rock? If categories were cut with a hatchet and the boundaries between genres were less blurred, perhaps it would be, but fortunately musicians, especially the great ones, worry far less about this than those who later comment on and catalogue music, giving rise, as in the case of Penguin Cafe Orchestra, to magical and indefinable sonic universes. So let's accept the modern classical label, as long as we don't expect austere sonatas and empty intellectualism from this record: the world of Penguin Cafe Orchestra is harmonious and enchanted; a world where cultures meet and, between one laugh and the next, swap identities.

The English band's approach is undoubtedly classical, starting with the line-up: a chamber quartet that, besides instruments traditionally found in such an ensemble like cello and violin, played respectively by Helen Liebmann and Gavyin Wright, also welcomes rock elements such as Steve Nye's electric piano (future collaborator of Japan, David Sylvian, Xtc and Frank Zappa) and Simon Jeffes' electric guitar, the group's guiding spirit. Modern, too, is Jeffes and co.'s attitude in taking on the concerns of an era, the mid-Seventies, when many musicians were starting to feel the need to step outside the specificity of Western music and embrace the moods, flavours and scents of "other" musics. In practice, Penguin Cafe Orchestra's starting point is the same as that of so-called world music, namely turning local musical heritage into global cultural heritage; but the results Jeffes achieved differ from those later reached by the likes of Jon Hassell, Eno-Byrne, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, because Penguin Cafe Orchestra's approach is unique in managing to make European art music sound exotic, in timbre and harmony alike, introducing elements of cultural destabilisation that prevent one from simply recognising a piece of music as "mine" (Europe's) or "yours" (the East's, Africa's, the Americas'), turning it instead into "ours" (everyone's, the whole world's).

A process, then, that is far finer and subtler than the admirable one nonetheless carried out by the exponents of world music, and one that begins precisely with “Music From The Penguin Cafe”, released in 1976 on Brian Eno's Obscure label, with Eno also serving here as executive producer.

The album opens with an improbable and wonderful “Penguin Cafe Single”, a piece Jeffes composed during a stay in Japan in 1972: a gypsy dance dressed in Caribbean clothes that implodes into surrealist atmospheres, where a strangled violin seems to echo the incipit of Samuel Barber's famous “Adagio for Strings”, as if it had been rewritten by Salvador Dalì! But the dreamlike journey is only just beginning, and the piece “Zopf”, split into seven short parts, uncovers a Pandora's box full of musical delicacies: from the Hawaiian harmonies of the ukulele to the Hispanic ones of the cuatro (a particular type of guitar widespread in Venezuela and Puerto Rico), from the wonders of the sheng (an ancient Chinese mouth organ) to the electronic alchemy of modulators. The art of the fragment reaches its peak across the sequence of seven tracks, among which stand out “From The Colonies” (spinet and ukulele doing battle over the ska-like scaffolding of the guitar), “Surface Tension” (a mournful, stately sonata for cello, viola and piano) and the bizarre “Milk” (which features vocals by sculptor Emily Young, who would later become the band's cover artist).

Above all, though, “Giles Farnaby's Dream” stands out, turning a seventeenth-century composition by English musician Giles Farnaby into something cosmopolitan: the lofty intonation of the spinet dissolves into the dynamic vernacular of the ukulele, buoyed by the rhythmic vitality of the bass and the sparkling counterpoint of the cello.

The poetic idyll of “The Sound Of Someone You Love Who's Going And It Doesn't Matter” is the musical transposition of a journey whose destination doesn't matter, of a dream whose ending makes no sense to try to grasp. The springtime lightness (the joyful guitar arpeggios and the gentle touches of the electric piano) and the autumnal nostalgia (the aching melodic line of the violin) foreshadow the brief Schoenbergian downpour that breaks out before the calm returns. The metaphysical interplay of strings, piano and guitar reaches its peak in the hushed eloquence of “Hugebaby”, while the sprightly courtesy of “Chartered Flight” bids the listener a warm farewell, pointing them towards future visits to the penguin's cafe. Appointments that Simon Jeffes would carefully arrange, laying out, with the subsequent “Penguin Cafe Orchestra” (1981) and “Broadcasting From Home” (1984), tables laden with delicacies for old and new "customers" of his singular establishment, which would sadly be forced to close its doors in 1997, when a brain tumour prematurely took its proprietor. If it's true, as one of the most common sayings goes, that fortune is blind, then, given the circumstances, death can only be deaf.

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01/11/2009