SUMMER COMES TO COVERVILLE

Coverville 589: Summer Covers (Happened So Fast) � Coverville

The great podcast Coverville tackles songs about summer.

SCOTT SAUL: AFTERNOON IN ITAPOÃ

(Editor's note: Scott Saul is, among other things, an award-winning professor of English at UC Berkeley, the author of Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties, and in general, an impressive "man of letters" who has critically mused on everything from the mythologies of Los Angeles, the tragedy of Jonestown, and the Civil Rights Movement in the North; he is also currently writing a biography of Richard Pryor. All of which is to say - he's as interesting and dynamic a scholar/writer as one could aspire to (myself included). For his summer songs post, Saul riffs on the wisdom that can be learned from men in bathtubs. --O.W.)

Afternoon in Itapoã

By Scott Saul

Vinicius de Moraes (1913-1980) was, by turns, a precocious poet, publishing his first chapbook by age 20; a law student; a film critic; a diplomat, posted during the late-‘40s to the Brazilian consulate in Los Angeles, where he befriended Orson Welles; a playwright and scenarist, who first came up with the story for Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus; and a co-founder of bossa nova, that amalgam of cool jazz and samba that taught an earlier generation how to be sophisticated and taught a later generation how to lounge. He was also, throughout his life, a dedicated drinker who claimed that whiskey was man’s best friend (he called it “bottled dog”): after his feverish, three-month-long songwriting collaboration with the guitarist Baden Powell, he computed that the two of them had consumed 240 two-liter flagons of Scotch — close to three bottles per day, or, given that they wrote 25 songs in that period, about 10 bottles per song.

He also taught me — I was thirty-four; he had been dead for over twenty years — how to love city beaches and, through them, my hometown of LA, which is why he figures in this post. The song that did the job was “Tarde em Itapoã” (Afternoon in Itapoã), which he wrote in his late-‘50s. For me, it was a portal into another world, which turned out to be my hometown in an alternate guise.

Vinicius de Moraes: Tarde em Itapoã
From en Mar del Plata (Trova, 1971)

I first came across the song on the recording Days in Mar del Plata (1971), a loose-jointed “live in-studio” album that projects a sense of living-room intimacy, with Vinicius chatting up his imaginary audience as if they were one step away from being fast friends, fluently segueing from song to song, sampling from his own deep catalog as well as from younger tropicalists like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. There’s a perfect fit between music and milieu: while many bossa nova albums are cluttered by string arrangements so cheesy that only a hunk of Camembert could love them, the acoustic sound here harkens back to the informal jam sessions, at Copacabana apartments and bars, where bossa nova was born.

Best of all, the album conveys an essential but often overlooked aspect of the bossa nova sound — effortlessness. Not just the effortlessness that is virtuosity’s reward (though you can hear that too, when the guitarist Toquinho lets his samba and jazz chops loose), but the effortlessness that comes from feeling a sense of compatibility between the demands placed on you and the role you wish to play. This effortlessness was perhaps best expressed in bossa nova’s relaxed vocal sound, which revolutionized Brazilian pop music. Vinicius himself had a roughened baritone — no great shakes in the vocal sweepstakes — but in the service of his songs, his voice seems richly conversational, its texture a testament to a life fully lived. He never has to strain to hit notes, and even when the (often ingenious) melodies swerve in unexpected directions, he doesn’t seem to swerve.

“Tarde em Itapoã” is not just an effortless-seeming song, but also a song about effortlessness itself. More precisely, it’s a song about relaxing on the beach in the company of friends. The props described in the lyrics are modest: the singer arrives on the beach in an old bathing suit, with just straw matting to lie down on, and some homemade cachaça and agua de coco to drink. But the feeling evoked by the song is expansive — a contrast signaled by the first rhyme of “um velho calçao de banho” (an old bathing suit) with the more visionary “um mar que não tem tamanho” (a sea that has no size).

Put another way: a day with no plans except lounging —“um dia pra vadiar” — turns out to be the key to bliss. Laziness is next to godliness, in the Vinicius scheme of things. (It’s no surprise that Vinicius loved his bathtub, writing poetry and conducting interviews from it.)

And the music conveys this sense of happiness ingeniously and brazenly, with the G-minor key of the verses switching, in a flash, to the G-major key of the chorus. Admittedly this minor-major modulation, while unfamiliar in most American pop music, is more common in Brazilian music: a similar change of mode, and of feeling, can be found in the bossa landmark “Chega de Saudade,” in sambas like Paulinho da Viola’s “Tudo Se Transformou” (Everything Changed), and in Vinicius’s own “Canto de Ossanha.” Still, I can’t help but feel the pleasant surprise of this musical convention here, as all the minor-sevenths of the verse evolve into the major-sevenths of the chorus — a surprise delivered with nonchalance, as if pleasant surprises were simply the way of the world.

I’ve gotten this far into “Tarde em Itapoã” without mentioning Itapoã itself, which is a disservice to the song, since Itapoã is not just another Brazilian beach. In fact, Itapoã (also spelled Itapoan, or Itapuã, or Itapuan — in Salvador, you can see buses heading up the coast to the beach with all these spellings on them) is far from the picture-postcard paradise often conjured up in discussions of Brazil. It’s a Bahian beach made famous by songwriter Dorival Caymmi, who paid tribute, starting in the ‘30s, to the hard lives of the fishermen who worked from its shores; in the process, Caymmi galvanized a regional folk-music movement in Brazil. In Caymmi’s “Saudade de Itapoã” (Itapoã Blues), the beauty of the beach — the breeze singing through the coconut palms — is exactly what touches off a feeling of melancholy, the feeling that a promise of happiness has been left hanging.

Vincius namechecks Caymmi in “Tarde em Itapoã” — and apparently he originally wanted Caymmi himself, not his musical partner Toquinho, to write the music for his lyrics — but there are no fishermen trawling nets in his song. The idea of work has been banished for the day, and with it Caymmi’s melancholy. There’s even something like the promise of a Brazilian endless summer to the song. It begins with everyone arriving at the beach yet ends not with everyone leaving the beach, but with something more unexpected: the sun starts going down, the singer starts shivering with the rising of a wind, then decides to sleep under the moon of Itapoã. It’s a moment of total presentness — “sem ontem nem amanhã” (neither yesterday nor tomorrow) — that recalls for me how the word “happiness” shares an etymological root with the verb “to happen”: is there anything more time-sensitive than happiness? Anything more fleeting, yet seemingly out of time?

I first started listening to “Tarde em Itapoã” when I was teaching at the University of Virginia — a wonderful job but one that put me, for the first time in my life, in an utterly landlocked place. The city of Charlottesville felt small to me: there was only “one of everything” — one good sushi restaurant, one good breakfast joint, etc. — and I was accustomed to more. (It only later became clear to me that, in Charlottesville, it was easy to feel that there was only one of me, which was one of the underappreciated sources of my happiness there.) “Tarde em Itapoã” transported me to another world, where the ocean touched the sky and you could “feel, slowly, the world spinning” (“Bem devagar ir sentindo/A terra toda a rodar”). It was a promise of peace and possibility, both.

I settled back in LA a little while later, and the song took on a new meaning — as a description of a Los Angeles that I hadn’t seen before. I had been raised in the San Fernando Valley and had rarely ventured to the beach; it’s fair to say that, during grad school, I visited the gravelly beaches of East Haven, Connecticut, more often than I ever took to the beaches of LA. Looking back, I think that the mythology of LA’s beaches had sapped my ability to enjoy them. I’d seen David Lee Roth’s “California Girls” video one too many times on MTV, and so could only think of the beach as a place for looking at bodies — or, much more uncomfortably for me, for being looked at.

You won’t find any long-legged beauties or chiseled hunks in “Tarde em Itapoã”. The emphasis falls instead on the joy of spending time with friends — of debating the world sweetly (“argumentar com doçura”) with that cachaça in hand. The effortlessness of the music here suggests the effortlessness of true companionship.

When I returned to LA, I discovered that its actual beaches were closer in spirit to Vinicius’s Itapoã than to David Lee Roth’s erotic fairyland — this despite the fact that the LAPD would be likely to confiscate that homemade cachaça and would be certain to roust anyone who dared, nowadays, to sleep under the moon. Strolling around Santa Monica’s beach, I could hear “Tarde em Itapoã” run through my head and could see its promise realized in the motley crew assembled on the sand: families with their own tents and war-chest-like coolers; dudes scanning the surf; a circle of women talking Sex and the City; an elderly couple with tans approaching the shade of terracotta. All sorts of body types and all levels of social strata were on hand. It was LA at its most Brazilian — and perhaps its most LA.

Bonus Material:

• A video of “Tarde em Itapoã” (where Vinicius sings while sitting at a table where a bottle of whiskey is prominently displayed)


• A fabulous documentary – with English subttles -- on Vinicus de Moraes (featuring performances and interviews with Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethania, Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Adriana Calcanhotto, and a few of his nine [!] wives) — see it streaming at

• Toquinho and Gilberto Gil performing “Tarde em Itapoã” (great harmonies and guitar interplay)


• The song “Itapua” from Caetano’s Circulado (a postmodern take on the beach, with superinventive poetry)

• The song “Saudade em Itapoã” from Caymmi’s Cançoes Praieiras (thanks to Loronix).

MICHAEL GONZALES: PITTSBURGH ON MY MIND

Editor's note: Michael is one of the hardest working, most prolific writers on music and film out there - I first started reading his work back in the 1990s, thanks to the book he and Havelock Nelson put out: Bring the Noise. I more recent years, I caught his "On the Corner" column for Popmatters.com but he's penned for many outlets over the years, including Stop Smiling, Vibe, The Village Voice and Latina. His articles on soul music can be found at http://soulsummer.com and his own blog, http://blackadelicpop.blogspot.com.

Gonzales already wrote a great summer songs piece here and for us, he pens one about childhood summers spend in Steeltown USA. --O.W.

Pittsburgh On My Mind

by Michael A. Gonzales

Years later I laughed when telling the story of how mommy shipped me and baby brother off to her hometown of Pittsburgh every summer.

If we got out of school in June, two weeks later we’d be sitting on the Greyhound bus holding greasy bags of fried chicken and looking forward to life far away from our uptown apartment, the Harlem humidity and the wildness of the city.

Though Aunt Ricky wasn’t our real aunt, she and mom dukes had grown-up together in that steel mill city from which Billy Eckstine, Billy Strayhorn and George Benson also hailed. Still, after our first visit in the early seventies, Aunt Ricky became like a second mother. Or better yet, our summer mother.

There was also my cousin Denise, whom everyone called DeeNee. Three years older and ten years wiser, she had great taste in music. Last, but certainly not least, was Uncle Ed. Cool as Champale on ice, he was dashing as Sidney Poitier and always entertaining.

As though it were yesterday, I can clearly remember listening to Uncle Ed (born in Jamaica, he loved country songs and played a wicked acoustic guitar) bursting into a chorus of “Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow-Up to be Cowboys” while driving his green Mack dump truck through dusty construction sites or Aunt Ricky jamming Dr. John’s “Right Place, Wrong Time” as we drove to East Hills for frozen Cokes. “I’m always in the right place at the right time,” she assured me.

Once, while spinning a Jackson 5 single in the basement of our Lincoln Road abode, I silently wondered how come nobody I knew ever played the b-sides of records. Curious, I flipped the seven-inch over (I think it was “Looking Through the Window”) and discovered the funky Michael Jackson gem “Maria.”

For the remainder of that particular summer (please don’t hold my scattered brain to any specific year), I played that song continuously.

If I’m not mistaken, that might’ve been the same summer that another dapper Afroed kid calling himself Foster Sylvers released the bump-o-matic "Misdemeanor" and almost kicked the future king of pop to the curb. Luckily, a movie about killer rats was all the rage and Motown dropped the aural sugary single “Ben,” pushing big nosed Mike back to the top of the pop charts.

A few weeks later I went through musical puberty when the whole family attended a house and I witnessed a roomful of adults slow grinding to “Let’s Get It On.” Standing in the doorway as the sensuous song splashed from the speakers, I watched the grown folks dancing close (a few with their own spouses even) and realized that the song wasn’t about playing in the sandbox.

Two summers later, Cousin DeeNee introduced me to live funk music when Aunt Ricky made her ask me if I wanted to go to a concert. Being all of twelve, I hadn’t yet been to any real shows (except for old school dudes like Ray Charles and Little Anthony) and wasn’t sure it was something I really wanted to do. “Who’s playing?” I asked.

When DeeNee snidely replied, “Graham Central Station,” I didn’t know who the hell she was talking about, but promised I’d let her know. Later, when I overheard mention that her best friend Helen, a pretty brown skinned girl who’d be dead a few years later after a fatal asthma attack, was also going, my decision was made.

Bookish and shy as I was, my young ass had a love jones for Helen and would’ve followed her anywhere. “OK,” I want to go,” I told DeeNee the next day. She sucked her teeth as though I was ruining her life. Yet, as the show got closer DeeNee didn’t seem to mind too much. She even let me play GCS’s three albums, my favorite being Ain't No 'Bout-A-Doubt It. It not only had cool album art, but also featured the amazing ballad “Your Love” and the black vinyl celebration of “It Ain’t Nothing But a Warner Brothers Party.”

By the day of the show, I was well-versed in GCS tunes. “I heard Sly Stone might be there!” DeeNee screamed as Uncle Ed, who was our chaperone for that night, sped to the Civic Arena. Once inside, we choice to forego the seats for the opportunity to stand close to the stage in what was once dubbed festival seating.

Surrounded by an audience that looked like they had just disembarked from the soul train, we excitedly stood beneath cloud of reefer smoke; I had no idea what I was inhaling, but I felt great.

With hair that would’ve made Snoop Dogg jealous, Larry Graham slapped his bass into funky submission and rocked-out for over two hours. The highlight of the entire night was when the groovy Graham Central played a rousing version of their funk hit “The Jam.”

At some point Larry grabbed the mic and screamed, “We gonna wake Pittsburgh up tonight,” as the domed ceiling slowly open. Overhead the stars twinkled bright and the band was tighter than a pair of Flagg Brothers platforms.

Twenty-four years later, when my late girlfriend Lesley Pitts was doing publicity for Prince, she introduced me to Larry Graham. When I gushed that his Pittsburgh concert was my first, he asked, “Was that the same show where we opened that dome?”

“Gosh, with all the shows you’ve played, how do you remember that one?”

“It cost me $1,000 to open that dome,” he replied.

Foster Sylvers: Misdemeanor
From S/T (Pride, 1973)

Michael Jackson: Maria
From Got To Be There (Motown, 1971)

Graham Central Station: The Jam
From Ain't No 'Bout-A-Doubt It (Warner Bros, 1975)

PETE L'OFFICIAL: IT'S THE WIND

Editor's note: Before I ever met Pete in person, I knew him from his writing 1) he's been a valuable contributor to places like The Believer, Spin, Village Voice and Salon and 2) he boasts one of the coolest looking bylines out there: "The Official Pete" (which is considerably better than being, say, Pete L'Faux). Pete's now matriculating through grad school at Harvard, wisely avoiding the imbroglio of the journalism world for the safe security of the academi...oh wait, never mind.

Anyways, Pete really took to knocking out a Summer Songs post - one that begins Uptown, ends in the Dirty South and takes detours to Jamaica and Brazil in the meanwhile. --O.W.

It's the Wind

by Pete L'Official

"It feel hot at night and shit, like, the sun ain't even out."*

Summer is something like a seduction, suspended. A seduction, because of the season's more obvious trappings (skin, sweat, gratuitous uses of words like "sultry" and "sweltering"). And suspended, because for those lucky souls of seven, seventeen, or seventy for whom consciousness of the days of the week falls blissfully away, summer is little more than a collection of moments, where each moment continually offers the possibility of the simplest of ecstasies in the next, or recalls an almost immediate nostalgia for the one that has just passed. Ennui, even of the non-air-conditioned sort, is pregnant with promise. We never mind being seduced by the summer -- we always capitulate -- even though we would like to be the ones doing the seducing. And in attempting that seduction, occasionally, we'll take a bit of help. Music is preferable at these moments, and it becomes representative of them as well.

And though, as with the summer, there are phases to seduction, you might think of it as an endless cycle -- or a playlist, on repeat. This is but one of its soundtracks, joined moment to moment.

Camp Lo: "Luchini AKA This is It"
From Uptown Saturday Night (1997)

Wild out. That feeling you got when you opened the bedroom shades on the morning of the whole of the summer. And doubled, when you came up on your man's late-afternoon jam and heard this banging from the speakers. "Oh...word?" This is why you are friends: he recognizes the importance of you making an entrance. Upon hearing this song and taking a sly look to your left, then right, your movements become the metaphorical equivalent of flying backwards through heaven with angel wings (see: about 1:17 in). Pass the "am-a-red-da."

Crooklyn Dodgers: "Return of the Crooklyn Dodgers"
From Clockers Original Soundtrack (MCA, 1995)

Max. Relax. This is what you came here for. You had crazy visions; now you're wearing them. Hang your swag on the appropriate hook; you've got a minute. Sit where you can see, and maybe even where you can be seen. Find the space between Premier's boom-bap and the smoothed-out Young Holt Trio sample (ample room: it's 29 years). No need to stress, son. It's early yet. Smile only if you have to. Head-nods -- required, once Jeru attacks with authority -- should fall perfectly on a scale between spirited and subtle.

Desmond Dekker: "Intensified '68 (Music Like Dirt)"
From Rudy Got Soul - The Early Beverley's Sessions 1963-1968 (2003)

Go in. An irresistible invitation to the dance floor. What? It ain't no more to it.

Sister Nancy: "Transport Connection"
From One Two (Techniques, 1982)

Like the title say. A rhythm, caught by two, and shared. The physicality of flirting. Something about wining. A performance of coordination and symmetry has never seemed sweeter. At this point, in this heat, merely moving performs its own seduction.

Elis Regina: "Perdão Não Tem" | "Vexamão"
From Tabelinha - Elis & Pelé (Philips, 1969)

Whispers, part one and two. Simple, glorious exchange. Names. Conversation. Laughter. Nice to meet you, and so we move in unison. (And yes, it's that Pelé.)

Juelz Santana feat. Freeway: "My Love"
From Diplomatic Immunity (Roc-a-fella, 2003)

Really feeling yourself. The high point, the crest of the wave you're currently riding. The promises that you make to one and all. What you will do. For self, others. Where you will go in three weeks. Who with. How you're going to play this entire album on repeat in the car until you get there, because it's another entire, solid summer soundtrack unto itself. Sunshine's barely contained within the looped Moments sample: "Look What you've Done," look what you can do. You. You.

Caetano Veloso: "Remelexo" | "Sampa"
From Muito (Dentro da estrela azulada) (Polygram, 1978) | From Domingo (with Gal Costa) (Philips, 1967)

Infatuation. You want to see her again. You need to know "where she rest at." You want to translate literally, because it sounds extra-cute, because that's how she does it. What girl is that who came into my life now? No one knows her window. No one knows her door. Who cares. You have the urge to write letters rather than speak, because, well, mami told you your word game is tight. Ink, known from here on in as swagger juice, is everywhere.
Hell, you even call your man to thank him profusely for throwing that party (You don't use those words, exactly). Love letters to cities that contain you, that provide the spaces you love, in turn populated by those whom you want to love are not beyond your reach, certainly not your desire. You are most vulnerable now.

Jorge Ben: "Rita Jeep" | "Que Pena (Ela Já Não Gosta Mais de Mim)"
From Negro e Lindo (Philips, 1971) | From Jorge Ben (Philips, 1969)

Wrote a song about it. So you wrote a song about it. Said it outright: heart, sleeve, etc. You want her, you want her, you want her. But wait. Does she want you back? Does it even matter when you can manage to sing so joyously, so playfully, so impishly about either emotion? It's the speciality of the season, or rather, the sense of the season contained in these two songs (between them?) that allows these feelings to co-exist.

Beanie Sigel: "Feel it in the Air"
From The B. Coming (Def Jam, 2005)

Spider sense is tingling. Something is wrong; was that a chill I just felt? It's now late, and all this time you thought it would never come. Now, it's almost over. It's the sound of an undoing, an unraveling (or secretly, the beginning of a fierce winding-up.); it presages a decline, a fall. Indeed.

Tim Maia: "I Don't Know What to Do With Myself"
From Tim Maia (Continental, 1971)

What to do? You can listen and hear either an exultant ennui, or the same coupled with heartbreak. This is just about right for late August, but right anytime too.

Bun B feat. Pimp C, Young Jeezy, & Z-Ro: "Get Throwed" (Promo Only)
From Trill (Rap-A-Lot/Asylum, 2005)

What to do with yourself. What else is there to do now before it's all done? Get throwed, one last time, obviously. Or so the men say. Wise men, they are.

Lesson learned: Whether it's around 3 minutes, or 3 months, one ought to love every minute, because there's always a limit.

*see Raekwon, "Spot Rusherz," Only Built for Cuban Linx...," Loud/RCA/BMG, 1995.

SUMMER SONGS '09: LAUNCH!

Hello everyone,

I meant to have this up and running last week but hey, the beauty of summer is that it can start whenever - the end of school, the Memorial Day weekend, if the mercury creeps over 70, etc. And so, with today, we start yet another year in our long-running Summer Songs series here at Soul Sides. I know it's cliche to say that each year will be "bigger and better" but I've been more ambitious in the last few years, inviting more folks to contribute their take on "what does summer sound like to you?"

The first two posts are already up on our dedicated site - one from writer Michael Gonzales, thinking back on his summers in Pittsburgh. The other comes from writer-turning-scholar Pete L'Official. In the weeks to come, anticipate contributions from everyone from music historians Lauren Onkey and Scott Saul to incomparable mixmasters DJs Cosmo Baker and Monk One to political/cultural columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates to DJ-turned-soul singer Mayer Hawthorne (and many more!)

In the meantime, also check out my man Jeff Weiss' "Summer Jamz" series, rescued from Stylus Magazine. Mo' summer songs, mo' better.