VIBRAÇÕES

Sometimes, yes, just occassionally, in my personal experience, is it possible that a piece of art can really move me. Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar, like a gig, a concert, a play, a theatrical event, a movie, a documentary, a book, a piece of music or maybe even a new videogame, which has taken hold of you for a while. As a red herring, so inaccessible, completely non-reciprical and unsustainable as an industry, irrevocably unecological, a film might buzz you for a few conversations until you realise those who haven’t seen it may and when they do they probably won’t remember it was you who raved about it. If it is a book, you’ve probably discovered you’re better just buying it for them or lending them the same copy of it and then talking with them all about it and books really are forever and really are value for money.

If it was a live event, like a music concert, then you lived it together there and then. Maybe you do that every weekend with the best techno dj’s? I love books and music as treasured possessions, although I wouldn’t kill for them. However, I would kill to defend friends and family. I guess I’m like most humans in that it is within me, an atavistic self but you should know, I cannot imagine life without books and music and reading doesn’t adrenalin rush me, whereas good live musicianship does! It is accessible and reciprical, interactive and almost as easy as storytelling. What’s more, as a human artform it is one of our most established, traditional and most definitely, dynamic and South Americans know so!

However, there are so many musical forms that roam around the world and there are so many phases and evolutions in so many genres that each young person’s dreamtribe may always be re-emerging with followers of the latest innovative group of talented musicians, producers, aficionados and all the entailing entourage of promotional methodologies. What was innovative when Stevie Wonder or David Bowie made their flagstaff discs? It was merely ‘pop’, if you can grasp my disparaging intonation at the word, ‘pop’, and the resulting merely negotiable social gatherings. Was it to invite a friend or a few to their first hearing of the lp, a ‘long’ player, an album of songs, that might last for an hour or a few, if they were recording to give value for your money, to give a party to play the disc to your friends. A shite, short party, really, so therefore a dj, music for hours smoothly mixed. I can really picture them with ‘Ziggy Stardust’, . . . when reggae was budding it’s first album under the guise of The Wailers, ‘Burnin’. Although ‘blues’ parties had been ruling the musical airwaves for decades before, with dj’s playing reggae, ska and anything else you care to throw on the decks!

Of course, nowadays the music industry is never so simple and while many of us, who appreciate good musicianship with intelligence, are realizing that THE live concert is the real test of any album, or compilation of songs that are adorned with track listings and numerology, the sequencing of pieces of music, the disc cover, etc. So, if getting there to your local venue involves connecting up on the worldwide web to screen a concert via the internet, a fluidstream, in the comfort of your chosen place with all the people who you’d most like to have an intimate and private viewing of a concert with, you’re still dependent on the production, cameramanship, sound control, broadcast and of course the fans who are really there, really making the concert what it is in that hall or stadium, in that city. It is always still better to really be there at the concert, doing the gig, making it the event it could be.

That unforgettable, unsurmountable, best ever public show of what makes music so untouchable, so unrepeatable, so, . . . . je ne sais quoi! Some of you may be thinking, well, buying the disc of THE live concert or of the best moments of a live tour, so you can then repeat the experience is just the ticket, . . . mmm, well, almost, as we say, you just have to be there.

On one of the few occassions during this millenium that moved me and a few thousand more in a venue that holds greater significance than most can imagine was just a few months ago and still rings clear and true in my memory, like the dawning of a new millenium of the stars and moon in a blue sky before the planet earth girates to hide the sun below the western horizons. You know what I’m digging at,don’t you? Late afternoon, early evening and there’s the moon, majestically defying daylight, and if you stop and look closely enough, you can observe twinkling starlight with a blue backdrop, like the antipodean national flags, or the Brazilian flag. Yes, South America, also shares those international symbols of the night invading the day, and one of our more famous football clubs, Cruzeiro, also play in a daysky blue with white star southern cross, holding the fray. There are actually, tangentially a surprisingly large proportion of national flags with stars but returning to the evening of emotional stirrings that were brought about by a group of musicians, who can knock the cotton white socks of any sporting event you can imagine, ensembled as VIBRAÇÕES.

They’ve been writing, recording and holding forth at concert events for most of this millenium and besides getting the retro roots label so many can claim, like all live musicians, these guys take you forwards if you can grasp what they are projecting. Lyrical nouse, poetic justice, historical prose, futuristic enlightenments, whatever collocations are strung together, whoever delves deep to string up their best musical journalistic techniques, a beginning should be encompassed with an open mind. Together with some love of Jamaica, reggae and the religion that has flourished, rastafari, we’ll guide and support your love of this group. Some knowledge of the history of the land where they are writing their songs and an advanced knowledge of Portuguese may also be kind of handy in getting your head round Luis de Assis’ incomparable lyrics.

Still not convinced? Remember, ‘Get Up, Stand Up’? Learn those lyrics and sing them for a while. Then try remembering ‘Buffalo Soldier’, that was the song that got me reggae engaged, aged 10 in rural Scotland when I also became a reggae soldier of world peace. When you can understand those lyrics, then you’ll be able to get close enough to understand something of the roots of reggae. Then get the feeling of ‘Positive Vibrations’, which may have been the song that inspired Vibrações nomenclature(it certainly inspired ASWAD, London’s most famed regguerros). There’s a generation of innovation and musical engineering since then, and now we are experiencing a rebirth of all sorts of roots music, but reggae is the only one sprouting new growth in every continent. The very first world music is really all around the globe and flourishing everywhere. We write and sing in any language you can name, and some of us don’t mind not knowing the words we´re singing. In South America, there are hundreds of bands devoted to reggae and thousands more musicians who are playing this world music, not to mention those dj’s spinning the remixes of reggae songs and dub tracks, and we sing it in English, South American & Jamaican English, or in all its emergences, there are any number of versions of English, but mostly in Spanish and Portuguese, here in South America. I’ve witnessed and we, who are there, all appreciated, a Brazilian Japanese singer, who had translated ‘Who the Cap Fits’, singing in enchanting Japanese, backed by Brazilian musicians, making more than a subtle point of the fact that music traverses all frontiers.
Come to think of it, it is astounding how such a small island of so few people has made such an astounding contribution to the cultural contingencies of this really ever so grand a planet.

Jamaica is just amazing and Usain Bolt is the fastest ever human to have graced it. Jamaicaland, . . . recalling so many reggae events through these decades, the eighties, nineties and these two decades of this millennia, just goes to show, that when you get the chance, attend a concert, get your buckwild, rasclad arse down to the venue, and enjoy yourself; let loose for a while, free yourself for good. I would travel the world to catch a gig with VIBRAÇÕES! Why don’t you? For the time being, you might just find your energy is well invested getting more familiar with the diaspora of South American music and dance that has been encapsulating the world over for just about as long as you may be able to imagine. And remember, music really does traverse all frontiers, but it’s the lyrics and melodies that make something more than a feeling.