this is the thread where I post classic albums from Portugal

I don't think there's many areas of music where someone doesn't know more than I do on ILM, but posters from Portugal are few and far in between, so I figure this is one contribution I can make?

Let's start off with José Mário Branco's Ser Solidário

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBrp6b2th4Q

So as you may know, from 1933 to 1974 Portugal was under a fascist dictatorship. During this era, most of the resistance came from the (illegalized) communist party. Musically the regime-approved stuff tended to be crooners and easy listening stuff, as well as some folklore and of course fado music. Anglo-American influences did start seeping in, particularly amongst younger, wealthier types who could visit London or Paris and pick up LPs of what was hot over there, but the country was isolationist and the 60's didn't hit in anywhere near the same way that they did in most of Western Europe.

The resistance also had its soundtrack: balladeers, in some ways analogous to early Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, but really I think a better point of reference would be someone like Georges Moustaki, it's "folk" but belonging to a European tradition rather than Folkways. Out of that movement, the three biggest names are José Afonso, Sérgio Godinho and my personal favourite, José Mário Branco. Branco had a very wide musical culture, also producing some of the other artists, and you can really tell when you compare his works to those of more basic protest singers.

Fast forward to 1982: the dictatorship fell in 1974, leading to a chaotic period during which many, José Mário Branco obviously included, imagined Portugal would move towards some form of socialism. After some years of instability, with frequent changes in government, economic chaos and terrorism (sponsored by the usual suspects), things settled into a generic Western capitalist democracy. For Branco it was enormously disappointing, and I think you can hear all the exhaustion of years of struggle in this album, the anger at where things ended up and the scars of leftist infighting. It is to me a sort of closing line for a period in Portuguese history. Musically meanwhile it's the most eclectic and ambitious thing he ever did, taking in fado, popular marching music, blues rock, jazz-funk, chanson and a cover of "Maiden Voyage".

The title comes from a short story by Albert Camus, about a painter. After he dies, a canvas is found in his apartment and it is impossible to see whether it says "to be solitary" (solitaire/solitário) or "to be in solidarity" (solidaire/solidário), clearly something that spoke to Branco at the time. This kind of literary reference is quite common in Portuguese music of that time and not viewed as pretentious - writers and musicians hung out, drunk together, belonged to the same culture. For example, this album features two re-recordings of poems Branco had put to music - "Queixa das Almas Jovens Censuradas", by Natália Correia, and "A Morte Nunca Existiu", by António Joaquim Lança.

thanks for this, it promises to be very interesting. I have a good Portuguese friend who is currently based in Ireland, I will share this thread with him!

excellent and generous thread idea! bookmarked -- hopefully I can keep up

love the bit about the titular wordplay

Listening to *Ser Solidario* and holy shit at 'Sopram ventos adversos (Maiden voyage)'! I was not expecting jazz fusion.

Yes, cool thread, thanks

Thanks guys! Think I'll post like an album a week so ppl can digest :)

Listening to *Ser Solidario* and holy shit at 'Sopram ventos adversos (Maiden voyage)'! I was not expecting jazz fusion.

Yes, it's an album full of surprises, even if you know his previous work. Always wanted to drop "Linda Olinda" into some DJ set, as this is not an artist known to appeal to the dancefloor, to say the least.

Great thread indeed -- do keep it coming.

Bookmarked, sounds like a great idea

bookmarked

Threads like this are why ILX rules

Amen!
This Carlos Paredes playlist incl. several from Dialogues, his early 90s alb w Charlie Haden, an ancient fave I can't find entire on a free stream---haven't listened to all of these other tracks yet, but suspect they're good:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PL9GUR5CrLeg3-g1uJ6rSQ2ZrqJbq2RkN7

the only things i really know about portuguese music are the two folkways volumes ("anthology of portuguese music") and josé cid/quarteto 1111. oh, and i guess the portuguese nuggets compilations, haha.

so, not much. thanks so much for the write-up. thought this was an interesting detail:

This kind of literary reference is quite common in Portuguese music of that time and not viewed as pretentious - writers and musicians hung out, drunk together, belonged to the same culture.

i had originally planned to follow up on that idea, but i can't tell if what i was trying to say makes sense. but would be curious to hear more about that milieu, and how they viewed US jazz/etc music, and how that affected how those american influences blended with the portuguese traditions (whether leftist/intellectual or folkways)

Yeah I'm worried about making too many blanket statements here, but:

Portugal is ultimately a small country, and back then it must've felt even smaller, so these people would bump into each other regularly, particularly since both groups also generally shared marxist beliefs. It's really quite common for artists to put poetry to music, and there's also examples of collaboration - even as recently as the 90's, singer Vitorino (who will show up on this thread someday I'm sure) made an album with lyrics by famed novelist António Lobo Antunes (Eu Que Me Comovo Por Tudo E Por Nada - roughly, "I, who am moved by any old thing").

Outside of some small groups of rich kids 60's Portugal really didn't have the youth culture/generation gap thing as much, so the idea of pop music as a closed off subculture made less sense I guess. The main influence in those days wasn't yet the US* but rather France (people of a certain age will have learned French, not English, in high school...and both political dissidents and working class people looking for work would move to Paris) and I think this plays into it as well, with figures like Boris Vian or Jacques Prevert penning song lyrics and the focus on lyrics in chanson in general. Then there's the Eastern bloc influence - the Portuguese communist party had direct ties to the Soviet Union. My guess, without having actually heard any of these artists be asked about it, is that they would mostly view Rock & Roll, The Beatles and such as capitalist trivialities. Jazz of course would be exempted from this and viewed as high culture - as it was behind the Iron Curtain.

Ruy Castro in his Bossa Nova book talks about how artists like Elis Regina rejected the whole tropicalista movement as American cultural imperialism**. I'd imagine attitudes in Portugal would have been similar, and tbh the fact that Portugal never had its anthropophagic moment is to our detriment - we have music that is made in anglo-american idioms and music that's outside of or opposed to those influences but we never had ppl like Caetano, Gilberto Gil, etc. throw it all together...I think Ser Solidário is actually the closest we've come to that.

* Relations with the US were strained since post WWII, as the US supported UN motions for Portugal to drop its colonies, leading to protests in Lisbon with people holding "give America back to the natives" signs (insert "worst person you know just made a good point" meme here); obviously this wouldn't have influenced the artists I mention, who were all opposed to the holding of colonies as well, but for society in general it made a difference. Don't want to overstate it though, American cinema was obv huge, as were American TV shows. And politically, the US knew that if the regime was to fall the communists would be poised to take over, and geopolitically the US has prefered fascism over communism since WWII. Plus there was/is that convenient military base in the Azores.

** And from there you can trace the parallell to the US folk scene's anger at Dylan going electric, tho obv the dynamics are different.

This is fascinating. All I really know of Portuguese music is a fantastic fado performance and all of the amazing buskers we saw in Porto.

I listened to the first "volume" (as Tidal has it) of Ser Solidário yesterday. as you said Daniel, it's really impressively compendious genre-wise. I was pretty thrown by the big sonic switch in the first track and then the rest proceeded to zig and zag from there

Daniel, thanks for this, very well written and insightful. I find Portuguese history fascinating and loved my trip there earlier this year.

thank you, drf!

Today's album is Anjo Da Guarda by António Variações.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0c0QfFufTk

So we're firmly in the 80's now. This album is actually from the same year as Ser Solidário, but couldn't be much more different - a new generation, a new context, a new country.

The 80's saw Portugal adjust to the yuppie zeitgeist, but to fully understand this, you have to imagine that we got the postwar economic miracle AND 80's hedonism basically at once. Suddenly the masses had access to consumer culture, a higher standard of living, youth culture - and the generation coming of age into this truly became modern teenagers, interested mostly in US and UK pop music. There had been Portuguese Garage Rock and, in the 70's, Prog Rock, but the 80's was when Portuguese Rock music truly went mainstream and became the main idiom young people would express themselves in. At the same time, you have to hold in your head that this was still a super rural country, most of the population working in farming or fishing, most working class people over a certain age having had no access to even primary school education, and a deeply Catholic country.

António Variações encapsulates all this. He was hyper modern, a hairdresser who had lived in NYC and partied at Studio 54, making contemporary Pop music with lyrics about sex, drugs and other hedonisms. And yet he also had a huge fondness for religious rites, worshipped his mother and was obsessed with queen of fado Amália Rodrigues. Another important factor, if you hadn't guessed, is that he was a gay man at a time when this was absolutely beyond the pale in Portugal. Tragically, he was an early victim of the AIDS crisis, and the stigma attached to this meant even his funeral was sparsely attended. In the following decades, though, he has become an almost universally beloved figure: his unfinished songs were recorded by a group of famous Portuguese artists, there was a recent biopic, and for contemporary queer artists in Portugal he is now a foundational figure. I have friends who mostly dislike Portuguese music in general and even they love Variações.

Anjo Da Guarda starts with a cover of "Povo Que Lavas No Rio", one of Amália Rodrigues' signature songs. Here's the original, to see how radical the cover must have sounded at the time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMLUxxjSVMs

...and ends with a tribute to Amália ("all of us have Amália in our voice/and we have in her voice/the voice of all of us"), thus cementing the hero worship.

"O Corpo É Que Paga" was the big hit single, an ode to hedonism that has become an anthem for many generations of drunk students:

When the head's not being smart
When you make a bigger effort than you should
It's the body that pays
Oh let it pay, let it pay
As long as you're having fun

But what I really love about Variações is the underlying melancholy. Many of his songs are about people who've become isolated in their inner lives, indifferent to the world, or yearning for some lost dream. Song titles like "Estou Além" (literally "I'm beyond", but a more apt translation would be "I'm out of reach") or "Sempre Ausente" (always absent). Lord knows the man must have had a tough life, and you can feel it in these songs.

Good stuff, will make my way through from the top

Same. These are amazing posts.

Also, these snippets of translated lyrics rule. I'd love if that became a regular part of your write-ups.

This Variações album is really good. Great thread.

TheNuNuNu, your effort in translating Hosono lyrics was an inspiration for this thread :)

What!! So happy to hear that!

Don't sleep on Matsumoto then, he was king for a few years there, as I've spent the last few months learning. Nobody visits the Happy End thread but...

And I've just noticed I tend to like the '60s and '70s a lot more when the music gets refracted through latecomers to it, like in Japan or Poland, so this stuff you're recommending sounds really interesting. I had no idea Portugal's history was this fraught this recently.

Listening to new music with informed cultural context is so ridiculously satisfying to me. Great stuff Daniel.

cuing this up now!

Amazing thread

http://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lXc5OO7_4Ro-T_aBdnpTrXdkgBmuQUwOc&si=v7Nf8MCPZJxcdWjH

Ok, so we had to get to fado at some point. As comments in this thread confirm, it is the most well known Portuguese music genre internationally. There are some misconceptions attached to it: people for instance assume that it is "traditional Portuguese music", when in reality it is a relatively recent music, coming together during the 19th century. At its inception, it was very explicitly an urban style, and as such confined to the cities - though Portugal had its industrial revolution, it was limited, and the vast majority of the country remained rural. It was also associated with nightlife, sex work, criminality. This remains a part of its DNA, despite many waves of gentrification.

Another misconception is that it was influenced by Arabic music. That is a nice thought, and you can see how people would get there considering there is indeed an Arabic legacy in Portuguese culture from the days of the caliphate, but recent musicologists seem agreed that there is no substance to it. One theory is that this misconception originated because of Amália Rodrigues, whose voice does indeed bear an uncanny resemblance to some Arabic singing styles - but that's her signature style, not fado in general.

And yeah, you can't really talk fado without talking Amália. No one else even comes close in terms of iconic stature: you could liken her position to that of Edith Piaf in France, a beloved national symbol, the diva to end all divas and, because of this, also a big gay icon. Politically she was embraced by the regime, and younger generations at one point thought of her as an Artist of the Regime, though it was always known that she used her leverage to sing lyrics by leftist poets that, if it has been others attempting to do so, could have fallen prey to censorship. More recently though evidence has come to light that she also frequently helped the underground resistance, leading to some "antifa amália" memes on Portuguese twitter. Apparently this connection was kept secret but known by the communist party bigwigs, who when there were some post-revolution riots attacking the rich houses of the regime, made sure hers was passed over.

I remember I was in middle school when she died and it was a HUGE event. Since then many other giants of Portuguese culture have passed - writers like Saramago and Cesarinny, musicians like Carlos Paredes and José Mário Branco, directors like Manoel de Oliveira, politicians like Álvaro Cunhal and Mário Soares - and it strikes me that kids growing up today will regard all these people as ancient history. Not a fan of this aging and mortality lark!

Anyway, Com Que Voz, from 1971, is generally regarded as her masterpiece. As she often did, she was working with songwriter and aranger Alain Oulman, who also took charge of picking the poems that would be turned into songs (some of the most quintessentially Portuguese recordings ever made were thus partially the creation of the son of a French-Jewish family; you always run into these kinds of situations when you dig deep enough into mythical national spirit stories). Controversially at the time, these included a poem by Luís de Camões (1524-1580), Portugal's national poet, which some saw as heresy. His is the title track, and it fits Amália like a glove:

With what voice
Shall I sing my sad fate?

(The actual word used is "fado" - though now associated only to the musical genre, traditionally this was also a word for fate/destiny).

But it also included work from many contemporary poets, most of them on the left. Perhaps the most blatant example here is "Trova do Vento Que Passa", a poem by Manuel Alegre, a future socialist MP and at the time a dissident exiled in France. His poem had already been put to music by protest singer Adriano Correia de Oliveira:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McRqaiBmIT4

Within that context, it was widely understood to be a political song against the regime and specifically against the colonial wars that were then raging against different revolutionary factions in African countries. It was a huge risk for Amália to record it. First verse:

I ask the passing winds
Of news of my home country
And the winds silence the disgrace
The winds tell me nothing

Interestingly Alegre wrote new lyrics for her, so after that the Adriano and Amália versions differ. I don't know for sure that this is because it would have been too risky for Amália to sing the original conclusion, but I wouldn't bet against it:

But even at the saddest hour
In times of solitude
There is always someone who resists
There is always someone who says "no"

Another interesting name is Alexandre O'Neill, the grand master of Portuguese surrealism. Oulman picked two poems of his, one of which lead to "Formiga Bossa Nova" (which might not strike you instantly as a bossa, but it ain't regular fado either), the other the none-more-iconic "Gaivota" (Seagull) :

If a seagull were to come
And bring me the sky of Lisbon
Through the path she would fly
In this sky where sight
Is a flightless wing
That withers and falls into the sea

Kinda amazing that heady imagery like this was picked up and included into a super popular song!

Musically you get a lot of the classic melancholy fados that Amália specialized in, accompanied by reminders that fado is also party music ("Maria Lisboa", "Havemos De Ir A Viana"). "Formiga Bossa Nova" is an example of the electicism that has been mostly forgotten in the artist's ouevre - it should be noted she recorded many songs in Italian and French, tackled the Great American Songbook, and recorded a jazz record with Don Byas.

Link up top is a playlist of the album, couldn't find a single youtube with all the music.

Fascinating reading, Daniel. Listening-wise I'm still only up to Side B of the Branco (loved Side A, especially the quieter/folk songs/segments) but I'll be catching up.

Man I can’t wait to dig into this.