There’s a story, often repeated, about Elza Soares’ big break. The future samba icon was just a teenager when she went on Rio de Janeiro’s “Calouros em Desfile,” a talent show whose name translates as something like “Freshmen on Parade.” The daughter of a washerwoman and a laborer, she cut a strange figure for a talent show, wearing an ill-fitting dress she had pilfered from her mother’s laundry, gathering and pinning its billowing extra fabric. The audience cackled as the show’s host, Ary Barroso, incredulously asked her, “What planet are you from?”
She wasn’t kidding. Soares, born in 1937 (by most accounts, anyway) in one of Rio’s favelas, grew up poor and desperate. At 12, her father had forced her into an abusive marriage with the neighborhood teen he believed was raping her. She had given birth to her first son at 13; by the time she was widowed at 21, she would have four more children. She gave up one for adoption; another died of malnutrition. It’s often said that she appeared on “Calouros em Desfile” in order to win the money she needed to buy medicine for her sick child.
It goes without saying that she won the show. Afterward, Soares would go on to develop one of the most distinctive voices in música popular brasileira, or MPB, adopting elements of scat singing and New Orleans jazz and making the most of her richly expressive rasp. Today she is fêted as a national hero: Her biographer José Louzeiro has declared her contributions to Brazil’s folk music analogous to Bessie Smith’s and Ella Fitzgerald’s to the blues.
Black, working class, and self-taught, Soares is the literal embodiment of the classic rags-to-riches story. But hardship has never loosened its grip upon her. She has endured exile, scandal, and racist opprobrium. She watched the love of her life, the legendary Brazilian soccer star Garrincha, spiral into alcoholism; he was drunk at the wheel in the accident that killed her mother. They split after he beat her, knocking out her teeth shortly before she was scheduled to appear for a television interview. Not long after he died of cirrhosis of the liver, penniless and forgotten, her son from that union died in another car wreck. All in all, she has lost five of her sons and daughters.
Soares is 79 now, and her latest album, A Mulher do Fim do Mundo (The Woman at the End of the World) marks the kind of record few artists ever make, much less iconic figures who could be reasonably expected to live out their remaining years resting comfortably on their laurels. The album is part autobiography, part reinvention, and all provocation, channeling both her life’s pain and her incredible resilience into an alloy that is by turns jagged and molten. Written by and recorded with a group of young experimental musicians from São Paulo’s “samba sujo” (or “dirty samba”) scene, including artistic directors Guilherme Kastrup and Rômulo Fróes and members of the bands Passo Torto and Metá Metá, it is a searing, surging work of fusion that combines Afro-Brazilian styles with wiry, dissonant strands of punk and noise-rock, where the Ex mingles freely with Tom Zé.
This is not morbid music; it is full of life, of spit and grit. This is an album in which a 79-year-old woman barks a snarling ode to the joys of fucking, “Pra Fuder”; it is an album in which a battered woman threatens to douse her abusive husband with boiling water, to parade him before the neighbors, to humiliate him in front of his mother (“Maria da Vila Matilde”). “Get him!” she shouts as the dog tears off after him, her voice ricocheting down a dizzy chain of dub delay. The combination of sounds and textures is nothing short of astonishing: the hardscrabble guitar-and-drum interplay; the horns, betraying the faintest hint of two-tone ska; and above all, her impossibly malleable voice, like a scrap of sandpaper turning into a tsunami. I don’t know of any other records that sound quite like this one: by turns wiry, warm, playful, and elegiac, it evokes twisting vines and cracked cement, with guitars that snake like the pichação graffiti of São Paulo and Rio.
The album doubles as a portrait of contemporary Brazil—a country beset by crises, including corruption scandals, the worst recession in over a century, a wave of police brutality, and a rising tide of anti-gay violence. The opening song, “Coração do Mar,” is a musical setting of a poem by the modernist writer Oswald de Andrade—a melancholy, imagistic meditation upon loss and slavery that becomes, in her weary recitation, something like an inverse national anthem. In the stirring title track, over bright cavaquinho and swelling strings, she sings a heart-rending ode to samba, carnival, and the lifesaving qualities of music itself. “I go on singing ’til the end,” she promises, and you can tell that she means it, her voice bristling like the hair on a dog’s back.
Soares has long advocated for the downtrodden (“I’m always singing to remind you that blacks exist,” she once said; “gays and prostitutes” too), and in “Benedita,” she pays tribute to a crack-addicted trans woman with a slug lodged in her flesh and a silver bullet in her pocket, “to kill the careless cop.” But Soares and her co-writers take more abstracted paths, too: The breezy “Firmeza” turns a brief encounter on the street into a wry, dissonant tone poem. “Dança,” a song about a dancing corpse, channels Tom Waits’ junkyard fantasias. And the cryptic, mournful “O Canal” sings of death and exodus in “the gleam of Alexander the Great’s lighthouse.” (The album’s excellent lyric sheet, including Portuguese and English translations and even footnotes for select cultural cues, goes a long way toward unlocking its intricacies.)
It all adds up to one of the year’s most original and exhilarating listens; that is equally true of its raucous, unorthodox fusions and its quietest, contemplative moments. Just as it opens with an a cappella, the better to highlight Soares’ inimitable voice—soft as a spring lawn, coarse as ground coffee—it closes with another, “Comigo.” The song begins with dark, droning tape loops, swollen as rain clouds, but they abruptly cease, ceding the stage to Soares alone. The song is about her mother; her voice wears the scars of a lifetime of grief. “I carry my mother with me/Even though she’s gone,” she sings, a hoarse, funereal lament. “I carry my mother with me/Because she gave me her own self.” You don’t need to understand the Portuguese to feel the weight of her words: It might be the saddest song you ever heard. She sounds exhausted, worn out, run into the ground by sorrow. But in every click in her voice, in every catch in her throat, there is also defiance. All these years later, the girl from Planet Hunger refuses to back down.
