“I've always liked the sound of drums -- the basic sound of hands hitting wood, hands hitting animal skin, wood hitting wood ... animal skin. The first sound is rhythm.”
Paul Simon is discussing ‘The Rhythm of The Saints’, his first album since the 1986 Grammy-winning masterpiece ‘Graceland’. Like its predecessor, ‘The Rhythm of The Saints’ is deeply rooted in the rhythms of Africa. But in the two painstaking years of writing and editing -- the longest time Simon has spent on any album -- a search for the perfect drum sound brought him from Africa back across the Atlantic.
“One of my African friends said to me during the ‘Graceland Tour’ that the greatest singers in Africa come from South Africa, but the greatest drummers in Africa come from West Africa,” Simon recalls. “I thought back to the overdubs on ‘Diamonds On The Soles of Her Shoes’, Youssou N'Dour, who is from Senegal, and two percussionists from his band were overdubbed onto the South African rhythm section. The statement about the African drummers and singers stuck in my mind.”
N'Dour told Simon that great drumming comes from West Africa to Brazil to the Caribbean and finally reaches a pinnacle in the polyrhythmic drumming of Cuba. It was that musical path that provided the artistic impetus behind ‘The Rhythm of' The Saints’.
The structural core of the album would follow this path of great drumming -at least part of the way. And the catalyst for what would become an adventurous musical odyssey surpassing even that of ‘Graceland’ would be an invitation from the great Brazilian composer/singer Milton Nascimento.
Simon
and Nascimento had been mutual admirers for many years.
“He wanted to
collaborate with me and, when the ‘Graceland Tour’ finally ended in the summer
of 1987, he asked me to work on two songs. I thought it might be a way to make
the transition from a couple years' work on the ‘Graceland’ album and tour -- a
way of decompressing without the usual sense of disorientation and slight
depression you get when you finish a big project.”
Simon wrote the harmony parts for a Nascimento album track, which the two dueted on at a Los Angeles session. It was there that Nascimento first invited Simon to visit Brazil.
“I was now very interested in listening to Brazilian drummers,” continues Simon, “and following the African diaspora from West Africa to Brazil, to the Caribbean and up to Cuba.”
The original goal was to mix the Latin rhythmic descendants of African percussion with African music, to keep mixing cultures that are all derived from the same 400-year-old roots. Hugh Masekela, the legendary South African flugelhorn player and political exile who starred in the ‘Graceland Tour’ and performs on the new LP's ‘Further To Fly’, recommended the Ghanaian guitarist Kofi Electrik, who in turn led Simon to guitarist Vincent Nguini, a Cameroon native living in Washington, D.C.
Then in March 1988, Simon made the first of four trips to Brazil, primarily to record various drum and percussion tracks.
“I recorded different grooves coming from mcumba and condomble rhythms. These are African Catholic, syncretized religions, like Santeria in Cuba, or voodoo. When the slaves came, they weren't allowed to practice religion and the worship of their Yoruba deities, so they syncretized the deities to Catholic saints, then practiced our form of Catholicism with drums. That way they fooled the slave masters and were able to keep their culture.
“I was basically looking to familiarize myself with these rhythms, then bring them back here and ask Kofi and Vincent to play West African style guitar over it.”
Nguini became ‘The Rhythm of The Saints’' chief guitarist, playing on seven of the album's ten tracks.
“We were making patterns of songs, using West African music styles, Brazilian drums and my song structures -- which were influenced by ‘Graceland’.”
Simon's first Brazil trip yielded three such song structures: ‘The Coast’, ‘Spirit Voices’ (The guitar part is based on an old Ghanaian song) and the closing title track. The riveting percussion track of what would become the first single and video, ‘The Obvious Child’, was recorded live in the streets of Salvador, capital of the music-rich Brazilian province of Bahia.
“We saw this group OLODUM -- ten bass drummers and four snares. There was no studio we could use, so we recorded them live in the street with an eight track. The song itself just sat there waiting to be written, and it took two years to edit.”
Another
percussion group, Uakti, was discovered and recorded during Simon's second trip
to Brazil, but these were classically trained, Steve Reich/Philip
Glass-influenced musicians who played self-invented instruments comprised of
industrial tubing and glass. Among the tracks originally laid down on this trip
was ‘Can't Run But’.
“My way of writing was such that once a song's structure and chord sequence were composed, I'd start improving the melody over it, says Simon. This could take months, but once the melody started coming, the words started coming.”
The entire writing process -- which also evolved from Simon's ‘Graceland’ experience -- took longer than any of Simon's previous albums, and finally ended only two weeks ahead of the album's completion. A song could take as long as two years to complete.
“I'd come back with a drum track with anywhere from six to ten percussionists playing at once, then edit the track by taking out sloppy bars and tightening it up until I had five minutes down very tightly -- the basis for putting in guitar. Guitar composition would take three days: one day of fooling around, one day focusing in and delineating the structure and the third day going for the performance. But even after that, I still edited it many more times.”
Typically, Simon shadowed the guitar parts with the exact same part on synthesizers, enriching the guitar sound in the manner carried over from ‘Graceland’. That way the guitar takes on a sound that's neither acoustic nor electric, but not synthesized.
With
six tracks in the can after two trips to Brazil, Simon returned a third time.
‘She Moves On’ was among the rhythm tracks cut on this trip, as was ‘Cool, Cool
River’.
“A group of women called Ya Yo de la Nelson played the chakeire, a gourd with beads around it, like a shaker. Vincent had a West African rhythm in 9/8 time and a guitar pattern he played. The chakeire played 9/8 and left some space where I played the guitar part.”
Now Simon still had the OLODUM drum track from the first trip, and he still didn't know what to do with it. Since it recalled the second line drumming style of New Orleans, he took the track to famed Crescent City producer Allan Toussaint, only to find that Toussaint's acoustic piano didn't mix well with the OLODUM sound.
Meanwhile, Nguini continued improvising guitar parts. Simon then decided that instead of going back to Brazil, he would bring Brazilian musicians to New York, which he did last year at Christmas. While a number of tracks were cut, only ‘Born At The Right Time’ was kept.
Simon subsequently traveled to Paris to record with the large contingent of West Africans who reside there.
That was back in April. Reversing what had become the normal procedure to give a different feeling, Simon took the guitar track cut in Paris to Brazil, where he overdubbed the percussion. It was his fourth and final production trip there.
“I'd long ago discarded the idea of continuing the Caribbean, Cuban and African drumming, because I liked the Brazilian drums so much. They had enough of the musicality and information we demanded.”
Now it was time to refine the emerging song patterns with musical fills or additions and percussion overdubs, to move from the original abstracts to the specifics.
‘Spirit Voices’ became a duet with Nascimento, who also supplied the Portuguese lyrics. Other songs were enlivened by different horn groupings, including a soca section from Brooklyn that appears frequently on Caribbean recordings.
“Michael Brecker was a big addition to the album,” notes Simon. “I've known him a long time, and he played a well-known sax solo on ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’. He was intrigued with the idea of the album and played on five cuts, once with sax and four on the Ewi reed synthesizer.
“We put Uakti on some other tracks. I saw J.J. Cale play at the Bottom Line in New York, and I asked him to play a blues thing on ‘Can't Run But’. It was a way of bringing American musicians into it.”
C.J. Chenier, son of the late zydeco accordion king Clifton Chenier, played accordion on ‘Born At The Right Time’, while fellow Louisiana accordionist Jimmy McDonald played on ‘Proof’.
We had a Brazilian accordionist, too, but I always try to connect with Louisiana. From West Africa to Brazil to the Caribbean to Cuba, you have to go to Louisiana.
To
fill out the finally finished OLODUM track ‘The Obvious Child’, Simon enlisted
The Fabulous Thunderbirds' harmonica virtuoso Kim Wilson, with Brecker again on
Ewi. The last element on ‘The Rhythm Of The Saints’ was discovered in June, when
Simon traveled to Czechoslovakia.
“I was part of the U.S. delegation invited to observe the elections, he says. We stopped off in Paris and listened to some singers from Cameroon who lived there, and I picked out a few and brought them over a week later to sing backgrounds.”
That pretty much explains the rich musical textures behind ‘The Rhythm Of The Saints’. As for the words, Simon points to a natural progression in the lyrics of his '80’s solo albums ‘One Trick Pony’, ‘Hearts And Bones’ and ‘Graceland’.
“‘The Rhythm Of The Saints’ is a continuation of my investigation of rhythm and lyrics, a combination of ordinary, conversational speech and enriched language and imagery. It's what I did naturally in the early days without thinking, and then later on became interested in and focused on it.”
But a big difference between this album and the one before it is that Simon saved the singing for last.
“After I was on the road a few months with ‘Graceland’, I was singing the songs better than I did on the album, he says. I figured out different ways of phrasing and slightly different melodies. So this time, instead of singing and recording, I didn't sing until the very end.”
Rewriting and resequencing, however, continued throughout the duration of the project.
“As you go, you sequence -- not just shuffle ten songs and then make a choice. We went through all the permutations, recording tracks that were just slightly different from each other, making sure that the drums were tuned so that they were compatible with the key the songs were in. And recording percussion is such a difficult thing. Some stuff is so delicate -- a conga sounds like a cardboard box if you don't move the microphone to the right spot. If I didn't have Roy Halee a genius ---for a friend and engineer, we couldn't have done this album.”
At the heart of ‘The Rhythm Of The Saints’, again, there was rhythm.
“I just made a video in Salvador with OLODUM for s, and the melody I'm singing over their drumming is nothing like they would ever sing over it. But it's a rhythm that has a vaguely 50s, early '60s R&B feel to it, which is why I wanted the harp and sax sound.
“What impels me to do this? Essentially, what I'm doing with all this stuff is looking for sounds that are real and emotional, elements of the rock & roll I first heard when I was 12 or 13. This album cost much more than any album I've ever done, with all the travel and bringing people in and experimenting.
“But the musicians who worked on this album, to the man, were the most extraordinary musicians, even though I had never met or even heard of many of them. If something didn't work, it didn't work. But we wouldn't know unless we tried. Because we're sailing cultural seas that haven't been charted, instead of merely pursuing popularity.”