Paul Simon on Almost Everything, Chapter 5 of 5: "Errand to Brazil (1987-1990)"

"It’s taken a while," Simon said, "before people begin to realize that "Rhythm of the Saints" is more interesting than "Graceland" is."

“DR BYRNE, I PRESUME?” In Drew Friedman’s famous 1989 cartoon in Spy magazine, the world-music explorers David Byrne and Paul Simon do not look especially pleased to encounter each other in the bush, ie. “Hey, this is MY music to appropriate!” It would not be surprising if Simon and Byrne actually had crossed paths—in 1988, Simon was in Brazil recording The Rhythm of the Saints and Byrne was there, too. filming Ilê Aiyê (The Tree of Life), his 1989 documentary about the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé.¹

The Graceland tour ended in 1987 (though, as we saw in the last chapter, Simon would triumphantly bring the show to Johannesburg in 1992, ending the decades-long cultural boycott of South Africa).

What now? For almost 30 years, Simon had been drawn to the case of the so-called “Capeman,” a 16-year-old New York gang member, Puerto Rican-born, who’d been convicted of a double homicide and undergone an apparent redemption in prison. Simon saw it as a project with which he could test his mettle in yet another format, the Broadway musical.

As was his practice, Simon asked a handful of experts to help him flesh out his knowledge of, in this case, Nuyorican and Caribbean music. “After I finished Graceland,” he told the New York Times’s Stephen Holden in 1990, “[the Latin bandleader] Eddie Palmieri was helping me with the first stages of a musical that began in Puerto Rico in the 1940s and ends in New York in the 1980s.” Palmieri steered Simon in a unexpected direction, which immediately appealed to Simon. According to Palmieri, Cuba was where the great polyrhythmic drummers resided, the final stop of a musical diaspora that began in the 1600s with the enslavement of the Yoruban people of West Africa, who brought their music first to Brazil, then the Caribbean.

When he realized that the percussionist Youssou N’Dour, whose playing had ended “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” the last track that Simon recorded for Graceland, was Senegalese, ie. West African, Brazil looked more and more like a logical destination. In 1987, when the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento invited Simon to sing on Nascimento’s album Yuaretê, Simon was fascinated by Nascimento’s stories of the spectacular Brazilian drummers who believed that the entire pantheon of Yoruban gods lived in the drums used in religious rites. This was meaty material indeed; Broadway could wait. Shrugging off renewed accusations of musical tourism, Simon set his course for Brazil. His original plan was to follow the diaspora to its third stop, Cuba. But he was so thrilled by what he found in Brazil, and probably so exhausted by what turned into a two-and-a-half-year project, that he never got to Cuba. Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints stand as Paul Simon’s two great experiments with world music.²

Simon backstage at a 1993 concert with one of the later-20th-century’s great vocalists, Milton Nascimento, who sang on, and contributed lyrics to, The Rhythm of the Saints song “Spirit Voices.” (That’s Harper Simon, Simon’s first-born, at rear left.)

When Simon arrived in Brazil, Nascimento’s producer, Marco Mazzola, got things underway by introducing Simon to Grupo Cultural Olodum, the majestic drum troupe and cultural collective from Salvador, Bahia’s capital city, with whom Simon recorded the track that opens The Rhythm of the Saints, “The Obvious Child.”³

Above: Simon and the Bahian drum troupe Olodum perform “The Obvious Child,” the first track on The Rhythm of the Saints. I was impressed to learn that the fade that occurs at 2:30 was accomplished not via studio manipulations, but by Olodum itself. I was less surprised, but equally delighted, by a falsetto vocal lick, at 4:00, that Simon had clearly lifted from somewhere in his deep catalogue of Fifties doo-wop. Yes, he said, it was from “Deserie,” a 1957 hit by the doo-wop quintet the Charts. As in the song “Graceland,” in which the South African guitarist Ray Phiri had dipped, without thinking twice, into American country music, “The Obvious Child” was a true musical exchange (or, if you will, mutual appropriation).

Below: The Charts’ “Deserie,” which begins with, and later repeats, the falsetto lick that found its way into “The Obvious Child.” In Graceland, Simon had journeyed to South Africa in search of the wellsprings of the music he’d loved as a boy. In The Rhythm of the Saints, he found another source of his beloved doo-wop and R & B, and didn’t have to travel as far: the music had already made its way to the New World, courtesy of enslaved West Africans.