M o j o

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

&

T h e D a r k M i d a s C o m b o

[duration 32:00] all rights reserved

#

The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

+

"We are facing an atypical event. Unusual as it happened because musically the O.M. Work has always been plural, broad, diverse, interdisciplinary, rhizomatic, borderless, universal. Anyway, an event fascinating and very curious. I presume that is the Melgacian record more accessible (considering it's an errand) but with all the captivating elements that we know well.

I do a precis:

Knowing that this would be the hundredth album - at least among those posted here (there are others, just visit his profile on SoundCloud) -, the nucleus belonging to Nausícaaa Ensemble connected to 'black music' made a proposal to O.M. - while a merited celebration.

Would he compose a disc entirely dedicated to icons captives of this modality?

Black music is a term encompassing music produced or inspired by black people, including Sub-Saharan African music traditions and African popular music as well as the music genres of African American music which arose in times of slavery (including black indians) that characterized the lives of black Americans prior to the American Civil War. These genres include jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll, and more recently rap and hip hop. Music was used a way to express wants and needs that were ignored due to harsh racial and political climates. Jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll, rap, hip hop but the focus in this case, ladies and gentlemen, is the f-u-n-k.

Funk is a music genre that originated in the mid- to late 1960s when African American musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of soul music, jazz, and rhythm and blues (R&B). Funk deemphasizes melody and harmony and brings a strong rhythmic groove of electric bass and drums to the foreground. Funk songs are often based on an extended vamp on a single chord, distinguishing them from R&B and soul songs, which are built on chord progressions. Funk uses the same extended chords found in bebop jazz, such as minor chords with added sevenths and elevenths, or dominant seventh chords with altered ninths.

Instantly I would be led to conjecture: and in the conception of Melgaço?

Immediately Otacílio called such members-proposers (arm in arm with himself to making this project) as follows:
'The Dark Midas Combo'.

Midas is the name of at least three participants of the royal house of Phrygia. The most famous King Midas is popularly remembered in Greek mythology for his ability to turn everything he touched with his hand into gold. This came to be called the Golden touch, or the Midas touch. It's probably also a pun and a tribute to the Dark Magus: Miles Davis. One detail that confirms my intuition and the O.M. chess player's mind: MI(les)DA(vi)S. [He, although consecrated as jazz musician, vibrantly played funk - either ipsis litteris or as part of his 'sauce' - since its fusion phase until the last disc 'Doo-Bop'.]

The conditions suggested by the 'Magus Melgaço':
1 - In all, six compositions; sound Pieces concise;
2 - Each based on a rhythmic cell (to be explored at will);
3 - No singing or melody;
4 - Various elements of previous Melgacian works would be available just like a metalanguage;
5 - Freedom to bring out incidentally (of course, under the personal perspective of the composer and multi-instrumentalist) some particularly relevant references such as stanzas of 'Le Cimetière Marin' (Paul Valéry) or the famous double bass phrase of 'The Creator Has a Master Plan' (Pharoah Sanders);
&, in his words:
6 - 'Considering the difficulty of elect a very small number of inductees, therefore behold here the honorees':
Sebastião Rodrigues Maia {+ Banda Black Rio} [About Tim: focusing here the 1970's and its phase really pioneering 'black' in Brazil];
Miles Dewey Davis III;
Gilbert Scott-Heron;
James Joseph Brown;
Sylvester Stewart (Sly Stone) {+ The Family};
George Clinton {+ Parliament and Funkadelic}.

So 'Mojo' it was given birth. An admirable'n'definitive example of how pulsating viscerality and experimental boldness can walk hand in hand brilliantly. [And an extraordinary addendum, comes into the world with the age of a hundred years!]

Fertile alert: certainly, even permeating popular sound niches, what we will hear is not mere entertainment. Coming from Melgaço, never would. The sophisticated interventions that occur create tensions, dissonances, unexpected acoustic hyperambiences, unusual intersections of timbres, vertiginous dynamics, dotted harmonies, semiotic use of the voice as another instrument, ... , perceptual challenges. An undeniable proof of this: the first seconds of the album. When, open-faced, the drums gives 'the air of Grace', flutes instantly emerge as a swarm of bees! Outstanding! If the funky beats are more immediately assimilable, there's the counterpoint of being stuffed by a visionary aesthetic conduct. This is the epicenter of a hybrid parturition like that. Context that does not prevent us from feeling the temptation to (as Salvador Dali would say) swing our skeletons!

Between this and that, I will commit, Mesdames et Messieurs, the audacity to make an invitation: Let's dance! Put on your black shoes and dance the funk!

a p p e n d i x

When face to face with the funk, we're more kinetic. Our bodies are asked to move, to dance. Dance is, in a sense, the music flowing in each. Even if through silence. As are six tracks in 'Mojo', I culminate my thoughts through six quotes about it. They all tack this astonishing work, choreographing masterfully its celebratory reason to exist.

'If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.' - George Bernard Shaw

'The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.' - Alan Watts

'The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.' - Muhammad Ali

'Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.' - Annie Leibovitz

'The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.' - Charles Baudelaire

'I would only believe in a god who could dance.' - Friedrich Nietzsche

Come on! You live as long as you dance. How about at least live to be a hundred?" (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

Post Scriptum - I make mention of MOJO in another review, and it seems a key detail. Reading is recommended, if you please: melgacootacilio.bandcamp.com/album/c-h-i-r-p-otac-lio-melga-o-duration-01-31-01

"'White people couldn't do black music back in the day because they weren't funky or bad enough. They weren't from the ghettoes, but hip-hop and R&B changed all of that because white kids want to be down with it. They wanted to learn it so they studied the culture. It's kind of a cool thing because we shouldn't be so separate.' (Narada Michael Walden)

In North-American culture, historically there's this separation. Unfortunately until the present day it happens. One of the examples most widely reported is the violence of white police in relation to the black population. In Brazil, another side of the problem. As this sectarianism is not as well discerned, there's a lot of prejudice implemented but more implicitly. I believe that neither one nor other case is justifiable/acceptable because the separation/racism still occurs - in one way or another. And so the intolerance, inequality, disrespect, injustice and all mosaics of confrontation.

Otacílio Melgaço was never - in any sense - a 'separatist'/'segregationist'. 'Culture is a factor of unity and multiple/constructive admiration' - according to him. Identities are preserved while artistic interchanges should be welcome. Thus, we can evolve without our innate references being crushed. Thus, we know how to transcend ourselves without scrapping our immanence. This is one of the most exquisite lessons that the phonographic album 'Mojo' spreads.

Mojo, in the African-American folk belief called hoodoo, is an amulet consisting of a flannel bag containing one or more magical items. It is a 'prayer in a bag', or a spell that can be carried with or on the host's body. Alternative American names for the mojo bag include hand, mojo hand, conjure hand, lucky hand, conjure bag, trick bag, root bag, toby, jomo, and gris-gris bag. The word originally means a charm but now its more commonly said meaning sex appeal or talent. Covering all the connotations, nothing more appropriate in support of this exuberant solemnization. Here on Bandcamp, the Melgacian discographic work # 100!

Here and now,
Black beats are mixed with prisms of contemporary music and ceases to exist boundaries set by color (either white or red or yellow or black);
Arrays of popular culture (funk and several of its subcategories) are blended with cutting-edge paraphernalia and the result is excitingly conciliatory, incredibly mesmerizing;
A Brazilian artist launches his impressions of cosmopolitanism and, through his Midas touch, erects an inclusive and universal and auriferous multi-language;
in short, The commemorative hundredth posted album 'Mojo' is an ode to a united humankind - adding idiosyncrasies, banishing any apartheid, urging all to nurture us with a high art and with the gift of conciliation.

Congratulations to Mr. Melgaço and every dark Midas that exist (or should) in each of us." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

&

I - Tim Maia (1942 – 1998), born Sebastião Rodrigues Maia in Rio de Janeiro city, was a Brazilian musician known for his iconoclastic, ironic, outspoken, and humorous musical style. Maia contributed to Brazilian music within a wide variety of musical genres, including soul, funk, bossa nova, disco, romantic ballads, pop, rock, jazz, baião and MPB;

II - In 1959, Maia went to study in the United States, where he lived for four years. He joined a vocal harmony ensemble, The Ideals, and wrote the lyrics to "New Love", which was recorded as a demo with guest percussion by a young Milton Banana. (Maia also recorded the song as a soloist in 1973). The group's career was derailed in 1963 when Maia was arrested for possession of marijuana and deported back to Brazil;

III - In the 1970s, Maia started to record albums and perform shows promoting his synthesis of American soul and Brazilian music with elements of samba and baião. The movement gradually took the working-class suburbs of the north side of Rio de Janeiro, exploding in 1976 with the black movement;

IV - Banda Black Rio is a Brazilian musical group from Rio de Janeiro that was formed in 1976. It has a repertoire based on funk but also including samba, jazz and Brazilian rhythms. Compared to other soul-funk groups, such as Kool and the Gang and Earth, Wind and Fire, Banda Black Rio developed a particular style of instrumental soul music fusing together elements from a number of genres.

WEA had just been established in Brazil, and they wanted to create a band which could be the pioneer of this movement; so they contacted Oberdan Magalhães, a renowned saxophonist, that accepted the challenge together with the Trumpet player Barrosinho, Keyboard and Arranjments Cristovao Bastos, Guitars and Arranjments Claudio Stevenson, Bass Jamil Joanes, Trombone Lucio Silva and formed Banda Black Rio. Mixing R&B, Jazz and Samba Elements, Banda Black Rio was one of the first to undertake the fusion of Essential Brazilian Music with International Black Music. They were brought together in 1976. Banda Black Rio was often associated to Soul-Funk Bands like (as already quoted), Kool And The Gang, Earth Wind And Fire, Herbie Hancock, etc.

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source...

\|/

Between two parentheses...
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète... Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic...Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism...are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies...
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)
- P.S.P.