With the recent passing of the late, great Jon Hassell, I think it’s important to break down something worthwhile he’d be proud of playing a role in: Francesco Paladino’s Eroi A Rio. Twelve tracks. If to be believed, inspired by a vivid dream Francesco had where he recorded a concert held in 1993 at the Maracana featuring the “world’s greatest avant-garde, jazz, folk, and rock musicians playing with local Latin American folk musicians” minus Sting (who missed the concert, somehow). All, unsurprisingly, recreated by himself and longtime musical partner Pier Luigi Andreoni (with the help of very special guests).
What we have here is dream world music birthing itself through a “Fourth World” concept.
Appropriately released in 1991 on their own Piacenza-based, Il Museo Immaginario record label, Eroi A Rio (or “Heroes of Rio”) is a lighthearted, joyful, and in some cases, intense listen where all these rungs of music — Brazilian, Italian, American minimal, African, and more — go through the slipstream of electronics and experimentation, landing on songs that speak of an influence (or influences) using them as touchstones to do something entirely else. Venturing into Franscesco’s dream world, another world is landed on.
Jon spoke once of something being of the Fourth World when “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques.” I believe, as with all the music shared on this blog, and tagged as “fourth world”, there’s more to it than chin-scratching concoctions assuming that mantle. As hinted by Jon elsewhere, in the music of Brazil, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere (including European tradition) there is a level of sophistication in those musical structures and strictures that whatever one would add “electronically” might in the end be superfluous or entirely unnecessary. Dream worlds can be had (or created) simply by thinking both within and outside of our existing worlds. Borders and nationalism only exist, if we buy into existing history (as told by those who have the means/power to write it).
On albums like 1989’s Aeolyca (with Riccardo Sinigaglia) and on releases like those with The Doubling Riders, such worldly influences were a blur, creating music that aptly felt and sounded “otherworldly”. However, therein lay the rub. At some point that haze descended into a sigh and a meditation. Our ties to worldly music can be more than that. Eroi A Rio appears to be an unconscious corrective, of sorts.
Inhabiting the role of others (imagined or unimagined, it’s hard to tell), Francesco and Pier Luigi invite/imbibe the luminary spirits of Mr. Hassell, Brian Eno, Simon Jeffes, Laurie Anderson, Earl Scruggs, Mark Isham all the way to the Chieftains, Astor Piazolla, Arto Lindsay, Yma Sumac, and Metallica, treating them as guests inspired by tango, by afro-sambas, by raga, by showtunes, and ambient minimalism. They treat this album as a wormhole to worlds within worlds. And like any good dream, the surreal has a way of appearing so real.
The opener, “Cortez”, on paper, is supposed to be the outcome of that first dream, one where Jon Hassell and Arto Lindsay commune to the Yoruba rhythms of the Candomblé. “Lamento Del Indio” is supposed to be a traditional Andean song gone through the mercury of PCO’s Simon Jeffes, and sung by Francesco himself, as laced with a stellar crew of Peruvian and Indian musicians. Laurie Anderson’s entrance in “Cantiga De Marajada” (with Tina Weymouth on bass and Phillip Glass on piano) joining a group of Brazilian folk artists to play a “traditional” song expands into territory entirely of Francesco and Pier Luigi’s own making.
Annarosa Cortellini, who sang on previous Doubling Riders music, dances her vocals through music more approximating the Lena Platonos method of abstraction this idea of a “study in the mythology of urban population of the contemporary metropolis and also a gaze into the future life of it.” This is music not entirely of a “fourth world” but of an inevitable one. These are people, memories, scenes, and ideas semi-entirely of one’s making.
As technology spreads, increasingly, everywhere and knowledge goes through the ringer of each new blur of communication introduced to it, so too do our tastes hyper-evolve to meet or surpass each new flavor we’re introduced to. As in cooking, as in art, as in poetry, music is no different. New music we treat as our own folk music shouldn’t be thought of as alien to the “tradition” — that’s been everyone’s tradition for time immemorial. A fourth world is just a placeholder for new and newer worlds of music. In the end, as you’ll hear in Eroi A Rio by Francesco Paladino and in future music, this is all our future music. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.