Thoughts while watching Fernando Trueba’s documentary El Milagro de Candeal on the Candeal neighborhood in Salvador, Bahia, where Carlinhos Brown led a transformation effort. It’s the neighborhood and Afro-Bahian culture viewed through the eyes of a Trueba favorite — Bebo Valdés, the Cuban pianist who won numerous awards for his recent recordings on Trueba’s Spanish record label.
The links between Afro-Cuban music and culture and Afro-Brazilian culture are many. The religious roots are similar — Shango, Oxum, Oxala, Yemanja are all worshipped in both countries, with some variation. Musically, rhythmically, the son and the samba are, for example, quite different, but the way the music is organized is very similar, so there is a lot of jamming together in the film.
John Cage goes Funky
Here (above) either Bebo or Brown comments on the rhythmic clickety-clack and thrum as they cross a bridge in the rural town of Cachoeira.
Carnival and musical groups are seen filling the streets. There are connections here with the “saints”, too — the Afro-Atlantic gods and goddesses. One senses, just watching a street procession, a kind of openness, a generosity, an embrace of the universe.
When I was there shooting my own little documentary I felt this non-judgmental religion and ethos, which is maybe something many have sensed in Buddhism and other eastern philosophies, but here it is funky, sexy…and loud!
Maybe here is a god (or Gods) without God. A prayer to that which is greater than ourselves.
O mia Pae (oh, my father) sings a vocal group in a church built by slaves. But it’s not necessarily the Christian God they are singing to — though he’s welcome to join in as well.
A song to the mystery, to that which is beyond out comprehension, and biologically will ever be thus — I suspect that our brains are not built for understanding everything, evolutionarily it’s not necessary.
And there is acceptance that there are things we will never understand. Many call it God, but I prefer Mystery. It could be called “father”, in the sense that nameless ethereal whirligigs made us, begat us, formed us and the world, but that is a metaphor — it is certainly not necessarily a literal male, a man with a long white beard. Another common metaphor is Mother, and often Africa is invoked as the mother of us all — our evolutionary mother and spiritual mother. That’s where we all came from and that’s where what we are was established.
Musically, here is Africa in Spain, in Brasil, in North America, in Cuba — the roots of RnB, samba, rhumba, son, funk, rock and roll, swing, hip hop, humor, language, cool, digital culture — improvisation and innovation.
Here is Brown’s Mae de Santo (mother of the saints) and mentor, Dona Angelina, as she goes into a trance following Brown testifying to what she and the saints have done for him and the community.
The mysterious may be things we suss the mechanism of, the parts and the mechanics, but which still remain marvelous in their existence.
The awesome power of the sea, of the air, wind, of the earth below us, of ourselves — even of those psychological forces we acknowledge, whose mechanics we sort of think we understand, but whose manifestations are, and remain, like water and air, like a bird or a tiger — somehow still beyond our deep comprehension….and certainly beyond our control. Drugs, therapy and surgery may throw up roadblocks and signposts — but we’re never really in control, like the Gnarls Barkley song says.
Here are Brown, Bebo and Marisa Monte singing together. What does this have to do with the rebirth of a neighborhood? Maybe everything.
