Brazil nuts

Os Mutantes and the Nordeste

by Douglas Wolk

Between 1968 and 1970 a Brazilian trio called Os Mutantes (i.e., the Mutants) released a series of intriguing albums filled with innovatively arranged, oddly catchy pop songs in Portuguese that had the bite of acid rock, the protean grace of the psychedelic Beatles, and the rhythmic feel of Brazilian pop. For more than a decade the group -- singer Rita Lee, guitarist Sergio Dias Baptista, and keyboardist/bassist Arnaldo Baptista -- were more or less forgotten. But in the last few years tapes and import CDs of their music have been circulating in the pop underground, and now there are signs of a broader Mutantes renaissance: their first three albums were recently reissued in the US by the indie label Omplatten, Beck titled his Mutations in tribute to them, and David Byrne's Luaka Bop imprint will release a best-of set titled Everything Is Possible in early June.

By today's standards, the reissued Mutantes albums seem about as objectionable as a freshly baked cherry pie. But in the late '60s they were revolutionary and controversial. The band were part of the "tropicalia" movement that dragged Brazilian pop howling into modernity, along with the likes of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Jorge Ben, all of whom wrote songs for them. Tropicalia's catholic embrace of sneering electric guitars, traditional Macumba rhythms, orchestrations inspired by French pop, jazz improvisation, Spanish guitar, easy-listening harmonies, and experimental electronics violently divided the Brazilian audience. In fact, the Mutantes' first major public appearance, at a festival of "Música Popular Brasileira" in 1967, turned into a riot, reminding us that any art so shocking that people are willing to fight over it is probably pretty good.

The Mutantes poked back at the musical conservatives. Their third album, A Divina Comédia ou Ando Meio Desligado ("A Divine Comedy, or I Walk Disconnected" -- they were smoking a lot of pot in those days), includes a version of the Brazilian standard "Chao de Estrelas" ("Starry Ground") that starts out as a weepy burlesque of overdramatic singing and turns into a bizarre mishmash of sound effects and deliberate bathos. The album is the most sarcastic and straightforward-sounding of the three reissues, and consequently not the best place to start.

Conventional wisdom has it that the first disc -- Os Mutantes -- is the one, and it's certainly the most striking at the outset. It opens with "Panis et Circenses" ("Bread and Circuses"), an exquisite hybrid of "Penny Lane" trumpet, musique concrète, and hymnal singing; it goes on to include Caetano Veloso's gentle, surreal bossa nova "Baby" and the Afro-Brazilian acid rock of "Bat Macumba." But I'm partial to the weirder second album, with its even simpler title of Mutantes. It shakes off the their residual Beatles-isms, violently dislocates parts of the mix, and finds the band as unfailingly tuneful as ever, even though they're clearly stoned out of their heads (Lee bursts into giggles at the beginning of "Mágica," and four minutes later the brothers start playing the riff from "Satisfaction"). Mutantes might have shocked some fans, but that was the fun part.

Everything is shocking in its turn, though. The Mutantes' predecessors in attitude were the musicians of Nordeste, a style of the first half of the century that came from Brazil's Northeastern states. Lee and the Baptistas occasionally paid tribute to the earlier generation directly -- see, for instance, "Adeus Maria Fulo" ("Goodbye Maria Fulo") on their first album and "Dois Mil e Um" ("Two Thousand and One") on their second, though the latter gets interrupted by some trippy sound-collage interludes. Two volumes collecting the Musique du Nordeste recorded between 1916 and 1946 have just appeared on the French label Buda Musique.

The Nordeste musicians -- Luiz Gonzaga, João Pernambuco, Irmãos Valença, and many others -- had a hybridizing job of their own, bringing together the sounds of rural Brazil and the three-minute pop that the urban audiences of Rio de Janeiro expected. The singing and melodies draw on the sounds that were coming out of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood; the plucked strings (bandolinist Luperce Miranda was practically playing bluegrass in 1928), accordions, and off-center rhythms are straight out of the Brazilian folk tradition. Musique du Nordeste includes some entrancing incarnations of Nordeste: rapid-fire patter songs called emboladas, fully orchestrated oom-pah-pah stomps like Jararaca's "Dona Nhá Nhá," and all kinds of other forms that were daring experiments at the time. These were the mutants of that generation, and they made it possible for their offspring to keep evolving.