The Private Canon: "Ijexá (Filhos de Gandhy)"

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The Luaka Bop compilation Brazil Classics 2: O Samba probably merits a formative-album replay from me at some point, but this is a case where one song towers so high over the rest that it's easy to pick a place to start. Clara Nunes's 1982 gem "Ijexá (Filhos de Gandhy)" is one of the most burstingly radiant tunes I know, right up there with "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' " or "Free Nelson Mandela" or "Jeux d'eau." Musically it seems to be built on a fairly involved variation on the rhythm of its title, with the percussion mixed as prominently as the bass and vocals and various stringed instruments, flutes, and backup vocals adding flavor on top of the rich, thick, close brew circling at the song's center. Its instrumental intro also happens to comprise a series of inviting appoggiaturas, a favorite device of mine. There's one on every measure (C# over a B chord, A over an E chord, and so on) until the sixth (G# over the E chord):

The rest is resolutely consonant, with a chordal melody that stretches over an exceptionally long-lined verse—a full 24 bars—thus giving the felicitous chorus that starts at 1:10 a satisfying sense of arrival. (And then it literally ups its game by modulating up a key for the second verse, at 1:46.) It's such a delicious, heart-lifting tune that I presumed to put my own words to it for a praise song at the church where I lead music (though I cut the verse in half; you can find the sheet music of my arrangement and lyrics here).

A praise setting isn't far off from the song's original intent, though to really reckon with it requires crossing a uniquely Brazilian intersection of race and religion. Who, after all, are the "Filhos de Gandhy"—the "sons of Gandhi"—that Nunes sings about? (In the chorus she adds mention of "filhas" and "netos," or "daughters" and "granchildren," respectively.) This is no metaphorical reference to the Indian resistance icon but a tribute to a specific syncretic sect, an afoxé, one of the fraternal organizations and musical processions that are staples of the Brazilian carnival. And it has a stranger-than-fiction backstory that dates back to the year after Gandhi's assassination:

According to Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, on the afternoon of February 18, 1949, a handful of Bahian dockworkers gathered under a tree in one of Salvador’s poorest neighbourhoods. Faced with an uncertain future, the outspoken group proclaimed themselves “Sons of Gandhi” (Filhos de Gandhy) as a tribute to the Mahatma, while drawing on local cultural practices of incorporating global icons—and their modes of protest—as a means of legitimisation and assertion. The Filhos de Gandhy would later come to be linked indelibly to the Afro-Brazilian carnival.

Nunes, herself a late convert to Candomblé, a Bahian synthesis of Yoruba and Roman Catholic traditions, sings a series of names that don't go through Google translate because they're not Portugeuse but are proper names: Yoruba honorifics (Otum-Obá), Bantu deities (katendê), afoxés (Badauê, Malê Debalê), even a popular block of the carnival in Salvador (Ilê Aiyê). The song is a kind of incantation or prayer, then, building to a sort of Q.E.D.:

Daughters of Gandhi
Eh great people
Ojuladê, katendê, babá obá
Grandchildren of Gandhi
People of Zambi*
Bring to you
A new sound: Ijexá

It is a song about itself, in other words. But when a song is this good, it's not just worth singing but singing about.

*Zambi seems to be an alternate spelling of this legendary figure's name.