Hit the Ball-ee

What’s the first time I heard Jeorge Ben?  It must have been in 1989 when every other person in my post-college community had a copy of David Byrne’s compiled collection: “Brazil Classics Beleza Tropical.”  The first song on that album is “Ponta de Lança Africano (Umabarauma)” and I can still remember being somewhere in Middletown Connecticut, hearing that song for the first time and being captivated.  Someone, as I recall suggested to me that it was Cuban, and not knowing much about Cuban or Brazilian music at the time, I imagined this as some angry, revolutionary call for justice, thinking Cuba, must be a pretty heavy place. 

The myth was lanced quickly enough when my best friend explained.  I see, it’s from Brazil and, it has nothing to do with frustrations nor revolution, it’s a celebration of a phenomenal soccer striker.  Indecipherable, the Portuguese lyrics now filled out my mind’s imagination differently.  “You mean, he’s saying something like: “hit the ball-ee, hit the ball-ee, hit-it, hit-it, hit-it, hit the ball-ee.”   Till this day thirty years later, I can’t hear the song without laughing at that memory.  The proper translation, though beautiful and evocative is not far off my first guess.

I have the album it properly appears on “Africa Brazil” from 1976 up in the earbuds at the gym this morning.  I’ve long had one or another of Jeorge Ben’s albums but, after hearing him incessantly on the radio during my first Brazil visit in March, he’s been on my mind.  And this week, sitting fifty-five floors above the People’s Square, I’ve crowned Jerorge the performer-of-the-moment and decided to work my way through his entire discography, the way I might for a jazz luminary.  As he’s singing in Portuguese the lyrics don’t disrupt me and my work.  

Later in the day, my former student, a Brasilero who has wonderfully now, years later, become a good friend, and business associate, and I were standing in line to get some coffee.  “What do you think of Jeorge Ben?”  I asked, expecting perhaps a cap-doff to his countryman, as a national treasure.  “Yeah.  If he’s on the radio, I wouldn’t turn it off.”  It wasn’t the sort of rousing endorsement I was fishing for.  The cab driver I had in Sao Paulo had placed Jeorge Ben up on a pedestal with up-stretched arms, that should have been gripping the steering wheel.  But then he was my age. 

Tuesday, 5/28/19