*Archaic Inventions 1 year anniversary post!*
To me this
self-titled record of Venezuelan singer Gloria Martín is the absolute Holy
Grail of all Venezuelan records. Actually Martín wasn’t born in Venezuela, but
in Madrid and moved to Venezuela with her parents when she was nine years old.
So she basically became Venezuelan. She studied philosophy and letters at the
Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), she graduated in Arts and got a Ph.D. in cultural history. At the same time she started a career as a singer and in Venezuela she’s
mainly remembered for her Nueva Canción music.
Nueva Canción was a typicial left-wing orientated musical style from Latin
America (and Spain) addressing social problems in the society, usually songs on acoustic
guitar highly influenced by the revolution in Cuba. Moreover it was a genre
which tried to define the own identity of Latin American countries without
being defined by colonialism, neo-colonialism or American influences. In
Venezuela the Nueva Canción protest music was very much connected to student
movements in Caracas of the sixties and seventies. Other representatives in
Venezuela were people like Alí Primera, Soledad Bravo and Xulio Formoso. Gloria
Martín also wrote a book about Nueva Canción in Venezuela in 1998 entitled “El perfume de una época (la Nueva Canción en
Venezuela)” which I’d love to have to be able to tell more about this
movement. Here you can at least find a very interesting article in Spanish
about Gloria Martín and her role in the Nueva Canción Venezolana.
But this
record is not one of Gloria Martín’s acoustic singer-songwriter protest albums.
It’s more of an artistic showcase and does reflect the social environment, but
doesn’t involve too much politics. This was an orchestrated musical masterpiece
and so many years later it surprisingly shows that everything rightly got
together at the moment when that recording was made. Sometimes cultural history
gets captured in a recording that reflects the essence of a certain moment:
true artistic pearls that are the perfect product of their time in every sense.
Paz
The
compositions of the orchestra led by Venezuelan arranger Jesús Chucho Sanoja cover all the best
musical styles from the early seventies and at the same time create the most
amazing conditions for the beautiful voice of Gloria Martín. She was 26 years
old at the time she recorded this album full of poetical beauty. Also she wrote
all the lyrics herself. The album contains orchestral arrangements, jazz, bossa
nova, collage, sound-effects, folk, early seventies rock influences and everything
in between. It’s a highly sophisticated record that merges all the nostalgic
beauty of Venezuela in the very early seventies (when people were still Damas y
Caballeros) with student revolt, impressionistic decadence, sensuality, poetry
and intellectualism. Considering all
these dimensions, you have to be a really refined soul to be able to comply and
apply these things as a youthful person going through university and at the
same time being an artist. Conceptually, the album has a lot in common with certain
progressive orchestrated music made for singers with studio effects and studio revisions
like Serge Gainsbourg’s and Jean-Claude Vannier’s Histoire de melody Nelson (even length-wise!), but then in a Latin American context.
The main highlight of the album is the B-Side which starts after songs like “El hombre aquel” dedicated to Ché Guevara, the song
“At the other side of the sea” sung in touching broken English and a bossa nova
song sung in Portuguese. It kicks off with an ode to the Universidad Central de
Venezuela called “Ciudad Universitaria”. The title reflects Gloria Martín’s
passionate relation to her university and its social importance for her city
Caracas. The lyrics are as important right now as if they were back then. They
describe the paradoxical feeling of attachment
to Caracas with its beauty and danger, because of words like “Ay mi ciudad, quién ha puesto detrás cada
flor un policía?” which is accompanied by studio effects creating police
alarms to intensify the lyrics. Apparently that song used to be censored during
the seventies, because students adopted it as a form of social critique. The
song itself is full of energy and shows some of the most groovy rare groove
jazz ever to come out of Venezuela. The next song “Mi dulce amigo” is a song that
should have been on some Jazzanova groove-jazz compilation of old killer tracks and is an absolute
masterpiece. Next is an impressionistic decadent song called “Que facil es”
which expresses what goes on in the dreamy mind of a young woman and her gentle
diffuse thoughts when she’s under a spell of someone. These three songs make up
that part of the album which elevates it into something of unique quality and
emotion. “Si puedes” is accompanied by Venezuelan Santana-like psych band La Fe Perdida that also released some
singles through Philips in the early seventies: like this one and this one. A
core element which is to be found throughout the whole album is the melancholy
which makes it strong, it doesn’t glorify the interior nor exterior life and
it’s truthful, it might also be because of her deep voice; Grace Slick like. The lyrics of each song are to be found on the inner part of the sleeve. Gloria
Martín once described her song writing as:
“Para hacer una canción lo
que se necesita es decir algo, tener sensibilidad ante una cosa determinada y
también experiencias instantáneas o de toda la vida”. “No considero mis
canciones como un éxito, sino como un conjunto de las cosas que yo siento y deseo
que lleguen al corazón de la gente”.
The cover of the album looks amazing. Somehow, although not much is to be
seen, one can immediately detect Venezuela in that cover. There is a graphic design
idea with the rotation of the rectangle and the colours, the design on the
tablet on the background and of course Gloria herself with the most amazing
groovy seventies haircut and peace-sign necklace. Those elements feel really
Venezuelan if you have some insight in the arts during mid-twentieth century
Venezuela and mainly Caracas. The inner part of the sleeve shows Gloria in the
studio and you get an idea of the left-wing intellectual groovy girl that she
was.
It might look as if I glorify this album too much, but I am really
touched by this piece of art and see another hidden dimension why to share this.
Even more so since I visited Venezuela and could see the fossils of artistic
beauty in Caracas covered in the damage of the modern condition and the
neglecting of the past in the modern society. National conflicts have created a
situation where people mainly want to consolidate what they benefit from the
most in their particular social context and history sometimes gets manipulated
to let certain political views benefit from it. Reflection on marginal artistic
expressions from the past with value for cultural heritage are a lot of times
viewed as a divergence from progressive developments of a modern society based
on the physical evidence of wealth. A kind of regime of wealth-symbolism
rules and values connected to material profit and the consolidation of social
class are part of the primary dimension of how people on a short term deal with
the current social struggle. I get that arts as such are of course wholly
secondary when social problems raise through the roof, so basic needs for a
society should be consolidated first. Still I think that precisely a struggle
so critical in combination with modern indifference can cause losses for
culture and history. Through those dimensions people can feel connected to each
other, shape their history, have their imagination aroused and maybe even find
“new old” premises to bridge the political gap. Even when art, like a left-wing
protest song, is coloured by a clear political preference it still can be
perceived more lightly and political conditions change throughout history.
Moreover the intellectual core of people who have created this music and had
been connected to student movements had a less uncompromised way of shaping
their political views and were also fighting for their rights against an oppressive
government during Venezuela’s seventies. So back then a left-wing orientated
political philosophy also had an emancipatory dimension to it.
Nowadays politics
is like growing up in religion: it exacerbates forming own opinions, because
there exists no initiation of the self with the religious values. But a change is perceivable and people are
very engaged with their arts and culture. It seems that everybody knows some
national cultural expression which contributes to the beauty of the country,
but many things keep being scattered and fragmented in the memories of
individuals and don’t find the right path to the public. In my opinion the
conservation of cultural expression can for example create political plurality,
but also shows something which can shape identity and have people connect to
each other. At least people can learn from these individual artists how much
one can extract from her/himself without being a product of commerce, excess or
machismo which would already be positive no matter what political colour.
The upload of this album, made available for the first time after 43
years (not to be found on the web, I can barely believe it), is for everyone in Venezuela and the world.
It has never been sold on Ebay, nor Discogs. Gloria Martín still lives and
people have to re-release this album. Make it happen. This is a musical and
cultural jewel. This is the definition of essential. Gracias a Gloria Martín y gracias a Venezuela! El
disco es cultura!
Highly Recommended!
Full album on Youtube
Other Gloria Martín albums here:
More Venezuelan obscurities are to be found on this music channel:
