Eccentric Flower:201007/Caballeros

So last night I was watching The Three Caballeros yet again.

This underrated Disney film is not for everyone; it is one of their rare films which is a journey without a destination. It wanders around, has a lot of fun; plays some excellent music; shows you some animation tricks which were, at the time, state-of-the-art and are still impressive more than sixty-five years later; and then it just ends.

To give you an idea of the impact of this film which many of my peers have never heard of, and which even some Disney fans of my acquaintance have never seen: At least one of the songs in the film, despite being written by Disney songwriters and not an authentic Brazilian song, became a hit in Brazil. And the sequences in which Donald Duck and his two animated friends are interacting with live actors would not be duplicated in complexity and technical quality until Who Framed Roger Rabbit - forty-four years later. And yet this film was basically a knockoff project for Disney, a goodwill project that probably wouldn't have gotten made if his animation factory hadn't been idle anyway because of the war.

The Three Caballeros was made at the request of the US State Dept. as a present to Central and South American nations, to improve relations with them, but also to familiarize Americans with some allies down south. The average American didn't know squat about Brazil, for example, which contained several US Navy installations and was our major seat of operations in South America during the war. (Come to think of it, the average American probably still doesn't know much about Brazil, who are shaping up to be one of the foremost in the next generation of rising economic powers. But that's a topic for another day.)

It's the second such project Disney did, but I find it far superior to Saludos Amigos from two years before. (The latter is barely a full-length; Disney's shortest ever, at forty-two minutes.)

Anyway, this is not about the film per se, but the tale begins with one sequence from it, where Donald, Jose (the Brazilian parrot) and Pancho (the Mexican rooster) pay a visit to some dancers in Veracruz. (The volume on this clip is very, very low but it's the only one I could find.)

You will not find an actual song "Lilongo" anywhere you search. (If you do, you will find only references to this film, or to a place in Africa which is no relation.) But this song is very much in the correct and distinctive style for Veracruz - in particular a type of son, literally the local "sound," called son Jarocho.

If the basic high guitar pattern (assuming you got your volume up high enough to actually hear it) sounds vaguely familiar, it's because there is one classic example of son Jarocho that got covered by a number of people and became, shall we say, fairly well-known.

That's right. And you will piss off people in Mexico if you hear one of the ten million versions of that and say, "Is that the Spanish version of that Ritchie Valens song?" O Americano!

Asking about verses or lyrics in any definitive sense is a moot point anyway. As this excellent page notes:

If you throw "La Bamba" or "son jarocha" as search terms into YouTube you will see many, many more videos than I can link here; many of them will be variations on the "La Bamba" tune or one with a similar rhythm. You will also see many examples of the Veracruz-style dancing, with the women in the long white dresses (although the page above would say that much of this is son commercial, a faster, and to him dumbed-down, version of the original style).

Of course with "La Bamba" itself there is an embarrassment of riches, ranging from good non-commercial performances to commercial-in-Mexico to people-you've-heard-of-even-in-America, such as Gypsy Kings and Los Lobos.

But other songs in this style are essentially unknown here. The second-best-known is probably "La Iguana," which gets covered occasionally. Here's a clip of two very much non-commercial dancers; the audio isn't the best but it does show the male dancer performing the distinguishing feature (viz. the name of the song!)

My favorite, I think, which has the rapid tempo I enjoy, and tends to emphasize my favorite part of this music, the interplay between multiple high-pitched (often tiny four-stringed) guitars, is "El Zapateado" (which could sort of translate as "foot-stomping" - if you watch any clips of people dancing it you will understand why). This clip is excellent; and it shows two items mentioned in the article linked above - the quijada, which is an animal jaw used as an instrument, and the fact that the wood floor, the tarima, is essentially a percussion instrument as well.

Of course now I will want to buy some music. So far my favorite of the latter-day recordings of son Jarocho I've sampled has been by Conjuto Jardin, a group which is unusual in that it has female vocalists (if all other things are equal I will always prefer a female vocalist to a male one). That album not only will give you "La Bamba" and "La Iguana" but also the classics "El Cascabel" (which is sometimes translated "little bell," but more often as "rattle") and "La Bruja" (witch).

But I may also have to buy El Son del Pueblo's "Jarocho de Corazon," or at least one track of it, because their version of "El Zapateado" has exactly the high-guitar-bell sound I most love. (In this case I believe it is guitar plus harp. As you'll see if you watch enough of the clips, full-sized harp seems to be surprisingly common in these combos.)

And of course I cannot resist buying a Los Lobos album I had not previously known about - probably because it does not contain any tracks that would have gotten pop-radio airplay, but is instead (for them) a standards album. If you buy this you will not only get two examples of modern son Jarocho interpretation, but also representative examples of several other styles, including the ranchera, which I'm also quite fond of. And after all, there is no such thing as a bad Los Lobos album.

(What's that you say? You are not up on your Los Lobos? OK, start by buying "Kiko" and "The Ride." Listen to each of them five thousand times. Then go buy the rest of their catalog. While you're at it, if you found any of the audio linked on this page to your taste, go pick up "Mambo Sinuendo" by Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban. Just do it. You'll thank me for it later.)

As long as I'm talking about songs which turn up in some form in The Three Caballeros, I might as well mention my second and third favorites, and their real-world versions.

Unlike, say, "La Bamba" where you can do one search and get fifty slightly different versions, the piece "Jesusita en Chihuahua" will get you something very specific. It is sometimes called the "Cactus Polka" and in the Disney version, which plays the music very traditionally, it literally is - a live-action young woman dancing with animated cacti. This piece, which is associated with the Mexican revolution in some way I have not yet been able to pin down, was apparently well-known enough in the thirties and forties that Spike Jones was able to use the theme which begins at about :55 in the clip above as the basis for one of his songs (and at least some of his listeners presumably got the joke).

You can find any number of versions of this song by plugging its name into Amazon, and for the most part you will get exactly the same thing, except for differences in choice of instruments (some horn-heavy, some guitar-heavy, but otherwise pretty much the same). However, if you are insane like me, and have a high accordion tolerance and a sense of humor, I will suggest that you might have a look at Brave Combo's "Polkatharsis." Not for everyone, but those it amuses will be highly amused.

My other favorite from the film (I stress again that all its music is excellent) is the title song - whose sequence in the film features frenetic animation, with sight gags piled on thick and fast, but whose lyrics are unfortunately ruined for idiot modern audiences because the word "gay" has been totally destroyed for innocuous use in English. Assuming you are enough of a grown-up to get past that, and unfortunately many alleged grown-ups are not ... actually, you know what, never mind, I'll just get pissy. Let's consider the song without the lyrics.

In this particular case, Disney took a much older song and just wrote new lyrics for it. The song itself is often just listed as "Jalisco." If you want to make sure you're getting the right one (and a trad version of it, at that), you could always try looking for "Ay, Jalisco" or "Ay, Jalisco no te rajes," which is its right name. (But watch out, that's also the name of a movie.)

While, like "Jesusita," you will pretty much always get the same melody for this, you will find a much vaster variety of covers and interpretations of this old standby. I have heard a jazz version, a bluegrass version, a disco version, a marching band version, and so on. I'll mention only two versions in particular and you can dig for others if you like.

The first is a pretty conventional bluegrass/country adaptation of the song, found on this collection by Al Dean and the All Stars, but I link it because it is a near-exact clone of the first version of this song I ever heard, as a kid, from an old 45 of my dad's. The distinctive feature of this version is the added arpeggios.

The second is Esquivel. Esquivel needs no further commentary here, because he is ESQUIVEL, just as SWINTON is SWINTON. He defies further logic or explanation.

And that, I think, ends the musical symposium for today. Tune in next time we convene, when we shall contemplate musical themes sonically quoted in Warner Brothers cartoons.