Walter Wanderley: The "Bossa Nova" Forgotten

THANKS

In this walk I counted on the help of countless people and listing them here would not be easy task. I would like to thank CEMO - Centro de Educação Musical de Olinda - institution that I have been part of as a teacher since 2008 and that, every day, has been motivating to give students the best I can offer. I thank my friends immensely, teachers, staff and students for the support I have received. Special thanks Anaide da Paz, who as a manager has always encouraged my training, and the current manager, Wilson Soares, for friendship and respect.

To my doctoral advisor, teacher Drª Adriana Fernandes (UFPB). In every moment she showed herself to be a person very concerned with my trajectory in the course, with great patience and affection, always guiding in a light and respectful way, never hindering my aspirations or disrespecting my limits. I learned a lot from her and not only in relation academic work, but I also built a life learning experience in these years of living together. This book has much of her contributions. To Adriana all my affection and respect, making sure that I won, in addition to an advisor, a friend for life.

To all interviewed who contributed spectacularly to the construction of that work. Many were also interviewed in my research for the master’s degree and their contributions were as useful now as they were before. Some are no longer with us, but that does not diminish its importance and legacy in the History of Music in Pernambuco, in Brazil and the world. Special thanks to the exceptional guitarist and musician, from whom I am an unconditional fan, Heraldo do Monte, for the almost immediate responses when triggered via Facebook and for the patience in giving other interviews, collected by the friend, co-worker and also a researcher, Breno Lira (whom I also thank immensely).

To Barbara Major, an American fan of Walter Wanderley, who built a page about the artist. A detailed work of all the information that was possible to find. Without Barbara Major’s previous work, this research would lose a lot in its sources and references. I intend to translate this book and send to her, to demonstrate my gratitude.

To IFPE professor, colleague and friend Kelsen Gomes, for the transcriptions of excerpts performed by Walter Wanderley. Walter Wanderley’s execution technique was very complex and without the help of this professional it would not have been possible to bring here the examples enrichers.

To the teachers and servants of PPGM-UFPB, always helpful in my walk during and after the doctorate. To professor and author Carlos Sandroni for preface text so generous. Sandroni is, and always has been, a source of inspiration for his acting as a researcher and promoter of Brazilian Popular Music. To my friends from Recife, Olinda, São José da Coroa Grande (PE), João Pessoa (PB), Florianópolis (SC), São Paulo (SP), Porto Alegre (RS), Maceió, Colônia Leopoldina (AL) and many other places around the world, such as professor Gustavo Goldman (Montevideo, Uruguay). The everyone a grateful and affectionate hug. To my family, base of everything! It is for their that I try to be a better human being every day.

I was lucky to work with some of the most amazing musicians in the world, in most cases, people no one has ever heard of.

Paul Simon

PREFACE

Fernando Torres offers us, with this book, exquisite research around a musician born in Pernambuco, now almost forgotten, but with an important national career and international in the 1960s and 1970s: the organist and arranger Walter Wanderley. Like says the author, after starting his career in Recife playing with Duda, Heraldo do Monte and other beasts, Walter Wanderley moved to São Paulo in the mid-1950s, exercising intense activity of arranger, accompanist and soloist in the south east of the country. In 1966, he received an invitation to work in the United States, there have been countless recordings of success, like a version of Marcos Valle’s Samba de Verão, which reached the platinum disc (one million copies sold). The musician never returned to Brazil, dying in San Francisco (USA) in 1986.

His trajectory is similar to that of other Brazilian arrangers that internationalized in the 1960-70s, such as Eumir Deodato, Sérgio Mendes and also from Pernambuco Moacyr Santos. But, unlike these, Walter Wanderley had not, until then, left a mark remembered in the history of Brazilian music. Why? Fernando Torres tries to answer this question, almost than three hundred very well-documented pages, including excellent discography and iconography, in a broad-ranging work, which was originally a doctoral thesis presented to the Graduate Program in Music at UFPB.

One of the suggested clues is the forget fulness of the instrument that enshrined Walter Wanderley, the electrical organ. The height of the electric organ in international popular music it happened with the Hammond organs, from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. This coincides with Wanderley’s active period. After that, the use of this instrument became much more restricted, being practically null in the most popular MPB. The very idea of records of samba where the main instrument is the electric organ, as Wanderley did several times, it looks a little bizarre today. Another factor, is that his style is difficult to classify in the standards Brazilians from the 1980s to here. The musician emerged professionally in the days of Bossa Nova. He shared, with none other than Antonio Carlos Jobim, the credits for the arrangements of João Gilberto’s third album, in a somewhat mysterious story that Fernando Torres helps to elucidate. In other words, he circulated through environments and works where the Brazilian music was made most consecrated and recognized of its time! But Walter Wanderley was dedicated to largely to dance instrumental music. And this option, although fully coherent and justified at the time, it gradually became difficult to assimilate, insofar as the idea of instrumental music became associated with a type of elite popular music, to be heard by attentive and... quiets. Instrumental music went one way, the dance for the other, and in that gap, it became more difficult to hear Walter Wanderley.

Thus, the important contribution of Fernando Torres, when discussing, through the case of Walter Wanderley, the themes of memory and forgetfulness in popular music, alerts us to a not-so-distant past, but which, seen from certain angles, contradicts in a way surprising our certainties and expectations. This is the best thing you can want from a historian – and how good it is when it happens in the field of music.

Carlos Sandroni

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Capa

Folha de Rosto

Créditos

INTRODUCTION

1. WALTER WANDERLEY

1.1 WHO WAS WALTER WANDERLEY?

1.2 THE INFORMATION ON THE DISCS

2. WALTER WANDERLEY´S DISCOGRAPHIC PRODUCTION IN BRAZIL

3. WALTER WANDERLEY IN THE USA

3.1 RECORD PRODUCTION IN THE USA

3.2 PHONOGRAPHIC INTERVAL

4. BOSSA NOVA, SAMBALANÇO & SAMBAJAZZ

4.1 BOSSA NOVA

4.2 SAMBALANÇO

4.3 SAMBAJAZZ

4.4 THE SONORITY WALTER WANDERLEY

5. CULTURAL INDUSTRY

5.1 PHONOGRAPHIC AND CULTURAL INDUSTRY IN THE 1950s AND 1960s.

5.2 AGAINST THE GRAIN OF THE HISTORY

6. CONCLUSIONS

7. BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANNEX I

ANNEXES II

ANNEXES III

Landmarks

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

This book is the result of a doctoral thesis which, on the other hand, is a consequence of curiosity and the topics chosen for research since the investigations for my work completion of the specialization course. In Recife, where I have lived since my childhood, I built my musical experiences, whether auditory, educational or practical. And in that environment, I always noticed the presence of a repertoire linked to Bossa Nova (or at least attributed to same). In the master’s degree, where I investigated the relations between the capital of Pernambuco and that musical expression, I found out about two characters that, from time to time, were mentioned in the consulted books and documents: Normando Santos and Walter Wanderley. Both from Pernambuco and linked, in different ways, to the nucleus of the changes that occurred in Brazilian Popular Music of the late 1950s and early 1960s and which would culminate in the emergence and expansion of what would be called Bossa Nova.

Since the 1990s, I have frequented music education environments in Recife and region metropolitan area, first as a student and then as a teacher. From 2008 I became professor at the Musical Education Center of Olinda (CEMO), an institution where I had already been student and who, until today, is part of my professional and teaching life. However, as a student or teacher, at CEMO or other musical practice environments, I realized a very significant presence in the repertoire linked to Bossa Nova. This happened in class saxophone and transverse flute, choral singing and other practices at the Pernambuco Conservatory of Music, in the Music course at the Federal University of Pernambuco or in the live music at night in Recife, where I worked as an instrumentalist and singer, even though were Brazilian Popular Music (MPB) environments, with voice and guitar, or even in places that traditionally were heard and played instrumental music and Jazz: Bossa Nova was there!

This sparked my interest in researching this Bossa Nova in distant Pernambuco, so far from his homeland, Rio de Janeiro. The research starts with specialization, where I focused on the influence of Bossa Nova on guitar teaching at CEMO. Such research, like this presence of Bossa Nova in Recife was much earlier and was much more striking than what had been reported as far as I was able to study.

So, in the master’s degree, concluded in 2015, I defended a dissertation entitled: Bossa Nova Fora do Eixo: Uma História da Bossa Nova na Capital Pernambucana (Bossa Nova Outside the Axis: A History of Bossa Nova in the Capital of Pernambuco), which presents clear evidence of an interaction between Recife and Pernambuco musicians with music embryonic and modern, which would later be called Bossa Nova. And more: that some two artists from Recife and region, were artistic/musical partners of national Bossa Nova, international and that Recife and other cities in the Northeast, such as João Pessoa and Campina Grande, also had its Bossa Nova space, with all their regional peculiarities, such as it was to be expected. It is enough to remember that João Gilberto, appointed as many as the creator of Bossa Nova, is from Bahia.

There was for a long time in Brazil (and in a way it still is), a need for migration of musicians, artists in general, due to a cultural market established in the southeast of the country. It is not for nothing that these migrations went to Rio de Janeiro, mainly while it was the Federal Capital, and São Paulo, for being the national industrial capital. This had relations with the cultural industry. A very interesting thing to score is that Bossa Nova is carioca on the label, but its structure has a heavy participation of migrants, starting with your Bahian pope.

When choosing the theme for the doctorate, and encouraged by some professors who followed my research trajectory in the master’s degree, I decided to continue the theme of Bossa Nova and its non-Rio correlations, so to speak, but in a more specific way: choosing a character that could well represent this cosmopolitan interaction of Genesis of the musical expression based in Rio de Janeiro. That’s when I started to realize that with each new information about Walter Wanderley, more threads and wefts enveloped him with characters, stories and events that outline the panorama of Brazilian Music and that he, as well like so many others, he was a stranger, distant, seeming to have been part of history only by chance. What happened to each new source of information was just the opposite.

The choice of Walter José Wanderley Mendonça (*1932 - +1986) as the subject of this research took place, at first, as a result of news of the existence of his production discographic. There was always information about his record sales success in the USA with the song Samba de Verão, but nothing that was much more than that. However, when starting research preliminary study of the artist, it was revealed to be a robust production, of almost two hundred records, both as a solo artist and as an arranger and instrumentalist for various singers, as well as collections released before and after his death. This production can be relatively evaluated throughout this work, but due to a conjuncture of factors impediments, described throughout this book, it is not possible to accurately determine all their record production. It is very likely that new discoveries of recordings will be made, with participation, that were not listed in this research and that is one of the intentions of this work: to arouse curiosity, through the information presented here, for new revelations. Not only about the figure and work of Walter Wanderley, but of all the characters and situations that involve our Music. For approximately fifteen years, Walter Wanderley proved to be a tireless worker piloting his organ and his piano, in homes nightclubs and record companies, as we will see. Many other non- famous artists also did the same.

Brazilian Popular Music has built countless icons and through the cultural industry and phonographic has expanded nationally and internationally. Even though we are aware that this construction counted with the participation of countless anonymous workers, as composers, instrumentalists, arrangers, producers and others, research on MPB reveal a tendency to ratify an iconization of the artists best known for their media. The lack of information about the other characters of Brazilian Popular Music ends for leaving gaps that are difficult to measure in the historiographical understanding of it. Each once these characters and their stories are shed light, more documents and evidence are present us for a more holistic understanding of the, very difficult to define, MPB (Música Popular Brasileira).

Walter Wanderley’s migration between important urban centers of his time and those of current days: Recife - São Paulo - Rio de Janeiro - Los Angeles and New York (USA), brings the need to perceive its transit through multiple musical / geographic spaces. It would be in minimal frivolous to disregard the peculiarities that each environment / city carried in the historical moment in which the artist lived and produced. These interactions were essential for to form the musical cauldron that resulted from his record production throughout his trajectory.

A concept widely discussed in this work is that of Memory and Forgetting. Through from authors such as: Ecléa Bosi, Michel Pollak, Howard Becker, Rui Bebiano, Paulo Castagna and others that, directly or indirectly, translate aspects of how they are built and having selected our collective and individual memories, it is possible to understand how we, as a society, we build our memories and how we feed them back in times, with the intention of preserving what seems to us worthy of being safeguarded. It is also possible to understand that forgetting is something natural in our physiology and without it we would live in a pathological mental state. In this book are presented the paths that point to the signs of how certain artists are remembered and others forgotten in the imaginary popular.

The central question of this book would be to understand Walter Wanderley’s reference in Brazilian, North American and international record market, as well as in written references to the penetration of Bossa Nova in other cultures and not in Brazil. I propose evidence Walter Wanderley’s trajectory in Brazilian and international popular music within context of the cultural industry, in an attempt to clarify the market tactics used by this industry, reasons for these occurrences and their respective consequences.

The main objective of the book is to shed light on the relationships of musician Walter Wanderley with Brazilian Music and its interactions with the musicians and agents who helped to build the country’s sound image, including its reflections on the international scene, with a view to his contribution in the creation and expansion of what would come to be called Bossa Nova. Also, later, in Brazilian Popular Music, within the national and foreign music scene, taking into account its contextualization within the cultural industry.

The book also aims to understand the music / personal exchange relationships of Walter Wanderley with those who started Bossa Nova, Sambalanço and Sambajazz. Even being aware that some labels and subgenres of Music were promoted by the industry, in order to direct the consumption and reception of certain productions, a lot is done necessary to clarify how these relations of Walter Wanderley took place and how he moved through various aspects of musical record production and nightlife, mainly in the cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles. Transit this apparently without conflicts between versus ideological / musical marketing interests, very discussed in the 1950s / 1960s.

Also analyze the relationship of these musical expressions and how the cultural industry interfered in this relationship; investigate the moments and musical practices of Walter Wanderley realizing the proportions that Samba, Bossa Nova and MPB reached in the scenario international and how the ambiguous relationship between artist and cultural industry happened reflecting on your choices. Finally, it is intended to deepen the knowledge about the creation and artistic / musical production by Walter Wanderley, taking into account the multiple scenarios where he served as Recife - São Paulo - Rio de Janeiro - Los Angeles – New York - San Francisco, helping to understand the minutiae of each location and, through its peculiarities, to understand how these local characteristics themselves influenced the production and action by artist Walter Wanderley.

The methodology I used to obtain the data presented in this book can be described as follows: I gathered all the possible covers and back covers of the production discography by Walter Wanderley and others, which, in a direct or indirect way, is related with the work presented here. At first, I tried searching for physical disks, but once realizing that the artist’s production was numerous and that the acquisition of much of the material would be very difficult and too expensive, I chose to research the cover photos and back covers, in addition to obtaining audio from the original recordings, almost all available on platforms such as Youtube, with all the links made available during the text and references of that work.

Most of the cover and back cover photos were found on two websites: Barbara Major’s website: http://www.bjbear71.com/Wanderley/main.html and the Institute’s website Brazilian Musical Memory (Instituto Memória Musical Brasileira): http://www.immub.org/artista/walter-wanderley.The first email address was created by an American fan of Walter Wanderley and features a thorough and arduous work of research on the record production of the Recife artist with photos of the covers and back covers of all the discs she managed to gather, in order of media that has been released and by record company in alphabetical order, from the originals to versions and collections released today. In addition, the page features interviews with musicians, friends and family, and Barbara Major’s own comments on the technical sheets and other information.

The page of the Instituto Memória Musical Brasileira presents an index of the records released by the artist, in chronological order, with covers, back covers and audio from them (whenever possible). In a way that it was possible to collate and complement the information presented on both websites and other pages. Sometimes pictures of discs only could be found on buy and sell websites (such as Mercado Livre) due to the rarity that some of these media have. The fact that there is a profile of Walter Wanderley on the Instituto Memória Musical Brasileira’s page (Brazilian Musical Memory Institute) demonstrates that the artist is part of the memory of Music in the country. At least on the part of those who strive to build a broader picture of that memory. What is clear when researching authors who write about Popular Music in Brazil, is that Walter Wanderley does not receive the same laurels as other artists much more commented - in this book there are some reasons for that.

After gathering this material and reading the information presented in it, it was possible to compare with the texts found in books (academic or not), dissertations, theses and articles, where direct or indirect reference is made to Walter Wanderley. A good part of this material had already been used in my research for the master’s degree, which offered other possibilities of sources for this new doctoral research. The information was gathered and analyzed, including chronological comparisons. All textual sources, as well like the others, they are listed in the reference index.

Other sources were the interviews - some found on internet pages or even in documentaries published on Youtube. Other interviews were conducted during my master’s research, in addition to others that I did specifically for this work. These interviews conducted by me on video, were made available on Youtube in a format called unlisted. This means that in a search on the platform’s search icon interviews will not be found. Only those people who have the exact link, made available in that book, they may have access to them. This was done to preserve the interviewed privacy and rights¹, in addition to giving access only to people who are interested in them for research purposes.

The newspapers of that time were also a source of research. Most of the information was found in the Los Angeles Times, as the digital collection of the periodical presents a navigability that facilitates the search in the entire archive of the newspaper since its foundation. When typing the name of Walter Wanderley, the page indicates all the times that he was mentioned (more than a hundred), the year, specific date and still presents the exact page and reinforces the name searched. The search for USA newspapers was due to the fact that Walter Wanderley went living in that country in the mid 1960s and staying there until 1986, when he came to passed away, although references to the artist were also found in newspapers in Brazil, like Folha de São Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo, as we will see.

After gathering, analyzing and comparing all the written data and the interviews, I auditioned accuracy of the original recordings of Walter Wanderley’s records, of others in which he was arranger and / or instrumentalist and also some others related to the period and the musical expressions in which he transited. It was possible to perceive its sonority, the peculiarities, such as the use of piano techniques called locked hand and block chords, in addition to the use of percussive chords (staccato attack), and to compare with other contemporary instrumentalists, close in styles and expressions, in addition to analyzing theoretical references related to musical sonority. Finally, after collecting and analyzing from all sources, I present an overview of how Walter Wanderley presents himself in the historiography related to Brazilian Music and how its trajectory, at least in this historiography, differs from other more famous names. But also, how it resembles so many others that seem to go through the same historical opposite.

Against the grain of History was the term chosen to address this historiography of artists which, like Walter Wanderley, seem to be outside the central themes of Music in Brazil. Against the grain of History would be everything that is not in history. I understand that the term is quite adequate, since this work seeks to look at little angles explored in the History of Music. The new research tools, added to the new perspectives in Ethno / Musicology, allow for less centralized investigations in the main characters of Music in Brazil. Every time you walk the paths transversal, it is possible to have a more holistic view of the panorama.

In the first chapter I present the information gathered from various sources about life of the artist born in Recife. As there are no specific texts about it, I present a descriptive panorama based on several references found throughout the research, including the information collected on the covers and backs of the discs, trying to describe who Walter Wanderley was and how his musical trajectory took place. The purpose of this chapter is to present a biography of the artist in an organized way, especially when dealing with the chronology, which is very dispersed among the different sources consulted.

Researcher Ivan Vilela (2014) states that many works in Musicology are based on opinions and texts read by other researchers, thus repeating the opinions hearing from others; leaving aside, often, the most natural exercise of research in Music: listening. In this way, the personal discoveries and sensations that affect in every musical work. Even though millions of experts have heard and studied a work, the perceptions are individual and unique, and each contribution in that sound interpretation is important. In this book I was careful to listen repeatedly and judiciously, all available work by Walter Wanderley. This helped me to identify almost that immediately, for example, when it comes to the Recife organist on a disc or audio made available on the internet.

Information is presented about Walter Wanderley’s move from Recife to São Paulo, definitively, around the mid 1950s. There seems to have been a previous change, still in his teens, but not permanently. The sources almost show nothing about his life while he stayed in the capital of Pernambuco. Some interviewed for this research, such as maestro Duda and guitarist Heraldo do Monte, played with Walter Wanderley while still in Recife, but they didn’t have a deeper relationship to the point of remembering many details of the life of the organist / pianist. The move to São Paulo was fundamental to establish its inclusion in the nightlife and artistic life of the capital of São Paulo, it was becoming the largest industrial center (including phonographic) in the country.

Chapter 2 presents a sample of the artist’s discography while in Brazil, that was until 1966, the year in which he moved permanently to the USA. Discography produced while the artist was in Brazil is, for the most part, released by record labels Odeon and Philips, who named Walter Wanderley as the greatest organ soloist in Brazil. This wave of titles for certain artists is a marketing strategy, widely used by phonographic industry at the time and that still