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Rating: The street where "love tastes like cinnamon and everything is inspiration".
The June festival, with the saint's statue brought to the open sea and the old men on the beach playing the guitar. And Zamacueca...
It is to Zamacueca that Chabuca turns...
Chabuca..."the girl who saw the light near the sun of the Incas and became the proud and lofty sister of the condor". "Zamacueca, Zamacueca, the night has lost me", says an old blues of hers.
But Chabuca is just one of the protagonists of this story. There are also Lucila and Susana, among others, and there's a poet, one of those who don’t waste words.
The beginning/beginning is in New York and the magician, the one who sets things in motion, is an eccentric gentleman in love with rhythm: his name is David Byrne.
That David Byrne? Yes, that David Byrne. At the moment, he is captivated by Latin music and, among other things, is taking Spanish lessons.
His teacher, an Argentine filmmaker, one day shows him a small film.
And in that small film, you see a garden and, stern and sweet, an ancient face. The clothes are soft and flowing and the feet, the feet are bare.
Then comes the song...and it’s one of those songs where there's a before and an after...it's called "Maria Lando" and it's sung by a certain Susana Baca.
Think of an almost jazz or almost Creole ballad, of a soft and enveloping rhythm, of the brightest melancholy, of the subtlest and sweetest hypnosis.
Heartbreaking and desperate, it begins with a strange emphasis that suddenly turns into anger. With a voice that, suspended between rhythm and guitars, between folk authority and the sweet languor of the South, sends shivers down your spine.
Then there are those words of fire. The song tells the passage of a day: the dawn (la madrugada) the noon (el mediodia) the arrival of night (la noche) and it does so with a sort of false poetry.
Because "para Maria no hay madrugada, para Maria no hay mediodia, para Maria ninguna luna alza su copa roja sobre las aguas".
"Maria no tiene tiempo de alzar los ojos", "Maria solo trabaja"
And there’s no need for any translation, I believe.
But, besides all this, the song brings to light an unheard sound, that of Black Peru, a bizarre stylistic mixture of the different African ethnicities that arrived in Peru at the beginning of slavery. A sound that then "bastardized" by undergoing the influence of local music and that of the Spanish conquerors.
The eccentric gentleman is so captivated by it that he immediately gets in touch with Baca, discovering in her an extraordinary woman, actually extraordinary is an understatement...
What can be said of someone who spent seven years tracking down old musicians in the most remote places, eventually publishing, in addition to records, a 150-page volume on a neglected culture even in her own country.
No one was indeed broadcasting those songs and just leaving the neighborhood would mean that Black Peru would leave no trace.
"Maria Lando" however is a song by Chabuca, one of the more than three hundred she wrote, and the words are by the communist poet Cesar Calvo.
And Chabuca is the great mother of Peruvian song. A white goddess who fell in love with the sounds of Black Peru, writing songs like the beautiful "Una larga noche"...
"Una larga noche", woven with the same precious thread as "Maria Lando", tells the long night of the soul, the morning star that crashes against a closed window. The voice, fragrant and laden with shadows, reaches unheard depths.
And it brings to mind Paolo Conte's words about the milonga: "its African origin, its zebra elegance, its being a frontier, a green frontier..."
Here, "Maria Lando" and "Una larga noche" can be found in this "The soul of Black Peru", an anthology curated for Luaka Bop by David Byrne, similar to others on Brazilian music.
However, as a testimony to the shock/enlightenment from that small film, Byrne records his very personal version of "Maria Lando", track fourteen of the album...
After all, "Maria Lando" is one of the most beautiful songs of all time.
The record offers other pearls, sometimes of the same elegance, sometimes hotter and more fiery, among the latter, it’s impossible not to mention the black pride of "Senor yo no soy aqui" by Manuel Donayre, "Samba malato" and "Toro mata" by Lucila Campos, "Encendiate candela" by Roberto Rivas.
They would deserve more than just a simple mention, but I have rambled on a bit too much...
Trallallà
PS... even if you can't stand South American music, give at least "Maria Lando" and "Una larga noche" a listen.
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