Jorge Ben - A Tábua De Esmeralda

I'm excited today to delve into some areas I haven't yet written about on this blog.  Jorge Ben is one of the most popular and enduring Brazilian artists of the past 50 years, so featuring one of his best albums is a good way to start discussing Brazilian popular music of the 60's and 70's.

1974's A Tábua De Esmeralda is widely viewed as a high-water mark for both Ben and the MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) genre as a whole.  While MPB is a rather broad term that's used to describe almost any popular usic coming out of Brazil in the 60's and 70's, its lack of specificity is often reflected in the blinding eclecticism of the artists it's used to describe.  Jorge Ben is a perfect example--his songs' rhythms and distinctive nylon-string guitar style gives the music away as samba, but there's so much more to it than that!  The album-starting "Os alquimistas estão chegando os alquimistas" (which is about alchemists, of all things) fits the samba mold with Ben's upbeat strumming, a bouncy beat, hand percussion and a small chorus backing up the Ben's smooth but expressive vocals.  And yet, the track opens with some Portuguese mumbling and the track is adorned with sweeping strings and flutes, which build like a storm in the background toward the track's end.  Similarly, the second track, "O homem da gravata florida" is deceptively straightforward in its simplicity, but Ben's vocals are increasingly reverbed and delayed to the point that things get a little...well, trippy.  This mood reaches a peak on one of my favorite cuts, "Errare humanum est," which opens with an innocent "la la" chorus melody but progresses into a moody, layered atmosphere where pumping cellos duel with the drummer's pounding toms and Ben's plaintive vocals effortlessly dance between his reedy mid register and smooth falsetto and cascade into an infinity of cavernous echoes.  How he manages to achieve a mood that's simultaneously joyful, dark, mellow and energetic is beyond me.

While the production flourishes do add a psychedelic flavor to the songs, this is a long way from the sometimes-manic style to be found in late-60's Tropicália, a much more political and edgy subset of MPB spearheaded by artists like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil--there's no sanity-threatening sonic collages or bursts of noise.  Instead, Ben's songs--brimming with melody--and his personality as a performer carry the show.  While in some ways the strings and echo make the album, it's easy to imagine these songs standing on their own in a live setting with a smaller, mostly acoustic ensemble.  While I freely admit that Portuguese is impenetrable to my ears, this album is close to the top of my list of foreign language records where it doesn't matter if you don't understand the words--of course, it helps that a lot of the refrains are wordless.  I can only imagine how knowing the words would enhance this already sumptuous listening experience.  Of course, there is one song sung in English--"Brother"--which sort of breaks the spell with its Jesus message, but it's one of the catchiest cuts on the album, so it's hard to begrudge it for its mundane religious message alone.

Of the Jorge Ben albums I own, this one regularly dukes it out for top spot with his also-brilliant Africa Brasil from 1976.  Unfortunately this album (along with much of the tragically poorly-curated Tropicalia and MPB legacy) is out of print, but it's available used and in high quality MP3 for a reasonable price here.