Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse. Daniel B. Sharp
in performing this repertoire was in question. This posture of apprenticeship would change drastically as Cordel transformed.
Lirinha defined the performance as a cordel estradeiro. The word cordel refers to small chapbooks of rhymed poetry or a recited story in general. Estradeiro has two meanings. It refers to someone who is almost never at home because he or she is constantly traveling, or to a mule or horse who has a solid, trustworthy gait. By naming their performance a cordel estradeiro, Lirinha framed it as tradition made to travel: road-ready folklore. It was a manifesto for the band Cordel, declaring in words and delivery that its artistic gait was trustworthy and solid. After Lirinha asked for permission to represent the tradition of popular poetry and promised to become a messenger for the words of these poets of the sertão, he proclaimed, “I, too, am a bandit / And my roadworthy Cordel / Is a powerful rattlesnake.” The consonant, reassuring circle-of-fifths chord progression played underneath the claim “I, too am a bandit” frames the moment as the passing of the torch of tradition. At this point the words and music work together to suggest that Cordel’s uncertainty is merely the nervousness of novices making their debut. During this early phase, growing up in the area was sufficient to qualify them as culture bearers. This question would become more complicated as they moved away from Arcoverde.
Despite their jitters about performing tradition, at this point Cordel viewed the relationship between interpreter and source material marked as traditional as relatively transparent and free of antagonism. Late in the set one song in particular clearly located Cordel’s work within a discourse of loss and recovery:
Cordel participates in the past
On a string, the seed is hanging
Left suddenly
It has the soul of my reisado
The magic of the enchanted fire
And the cultural roots of your people
… The finest coveted riches
In the forests of ashes that were green
In the finest coveted riches
In the forest of ashes that is Arcoverde
O cordel participa do passado
Num cordão pendurado a semente
Deixado de repente
Tem a alma do meu reisado
A magia do fogo encantado
E a raiz cultural da sua gente
… Na mais fina riqueza cobiçada
Nas florestas de cinzas que eram verdes
Na mais fina riqueza cobiçada
Na floresta de cinzas que é Arcoverde
The audience was told that they had just heard and seen bits and pieces of their cultural heritage—their roots. Cultural forms, such as samba de coco and reisado, were treated as natural resources. Through an arboreal metaphor of cultural roots—a common comparison within folklore that Cordel would later eschew—the imperative of cultural preservation was reinforced. In the song cultural roots are described as coveted riches almost lost in the scorched earth of modernity, “the forests of ashes that were green.” In the last line Arcoverde specifically is pinpointed. The burning of the forest becomes equated with the perceived loss of cultural memory in the city. But these local riches still remain, the song states, and by performing them, together the performers and the audience have helped preserve them.
During the performance these various “cultural riches” were represented—principally poetry and music from what Cordel selected as the local European, African, and indigenous contributions to their cultural identities. At this point Cordel’s performance was compatible in many ways with Ariano Suassuna’s regionalist Movimento Armorial, which sought to connect with the “magical spirit” of literatura de cordel and sertão musical styles.
During the show the mood varied from one piece to the next; a satirical poem about a hick bumbling in the city followed a solemn, mystical poem about an indigenous prophecy. Roughly a quarter of the performance consisted of comedic storytelling. This contrasted with later performances of the group, within which it adopted a prophetic, apocalyptic tone for the entire show. Costume changes also signaled the panoramic presentation of the region’s forgotten treasures that group members had learned from local culture bearers. During the last third of the performance the group further reinforced the posture of homage by donning colorful folk Catholic reisado outfits and performing a medley of more than ten songs from the repertoires of local reisado and samba de coco groups. During a slower, hymnlike reisado song, the members of Cordel dramatized the Catholic context of this performance by kneeling and putting their hands together in a gesture of prayer. At the end of the performance the mostly middle-aged and elderly patrons of the institution seated in the SESC theater clapped politely, in stark contrast to the screaming, cheering, singing, and moshing of the young fans that Cordel would later mesmerize at outdoor festivals.
From the Theater to the Festival
Soon after Cordel’s first performance, the group caught the attention of two prominent culture brokers in Pernambuco’s state capital, Recife: Antonio Gutierrez, known as Gutie, and Juvenal de Holanda Vasconcelos, known as Naná Vasconcelos. Gutie produces Rec-Beat, a large festival within Recife’s Carnaval celebration, featuring a combination of Brazilian and foreign acts performing international pop styles, local acts performing regional traditional styles, and groups inspired by mangue beat, which combined both categories. Naná Vasconcelos is a percussionist who is internationally known for his participation in avant-garde, proto–“world music” recordings on the ECM record label during the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as his collaboration on Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints record. He has repeatedly played the role of “the traditional” or even “the primitive” in pieces that juxtapose folklore and experimentalist contemporary art music, such as one scored for percussion, nonverbal vocalizations, and string quartet. His celebrations of the elemental presaged the themes of New Age music in the 1980s and 1990s; his work represents an optimistic strain of modernist primitivism circulating in the avant-pop/jazz world.
Cordel was taken under Gutie’s wing, and Naná produced the group’s first record. When it moved to Recife, only the singer Lirinha and the guitarist Clayton Barros, the two principal songwriters, remained from the original lineup; two percussionists, Nego Enrique and Rafa Almeida, who grew up playing in candomblé terreiros in the poverty-stricken Morro da Conceição neighborhood of Recife, joined the band, as well as Emerson Calado, a drummer from Arcoverde’s hard rock scene. No longer marketed as a folkloric theater troupe, the group was now playing at festival stages along with other groups lumped under the umbrella category mangue beat. As early as 2001, in press interviews Lirinha expressed growing discomfort with the idea of cultural rescue, as well as with Cordel’s music being branded as regional. Lirinha began to refer to their earlier posture as gatherers of folklore as an “epoch of homage” that had since passed: “We don’t want to work with the revival, rescue [resgate] or rereading of traditional sounds. I don’t know even if we will end up finding what we’re looking for, which is to make music that is ever more closely derived from individual emotions. This principle breaks the idea of a sound limited to a certain region or, then, with the language of a certain region. An accent, we know, is what is inevitable.”
Naná Vasconcelos urged Emerson Calado to explore nontraditional techniques on instruments with conventional roles in marginal-turned-traditional music. Naná was famous for exploring unorthodox ways to play the one-stringed musical bow the berimbau, and Emerson followed his lead by transferring his loud, heavy sensibility developed in hard rock and metal bands to surdo, alfaia, and zabumba drums. Although it is difficult to parse how much of their new sound was due to the new lineup, how much of it was Gutie’s production guidance, and how much of it was the influence of Naná’s