Transa [Import]

Caetano Veloso | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (March 25, 1998)
• Original Release Date: 1972
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Universal Int'l
• ASIN: B00000GAC1
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #156,054 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. You Don't Know Me

2. Nine Out Of Ten

3. Triste Bahia

4. It's A Long Way

5. Mora Na Filosofia

6. Neolithic Man

7. Nostalgia

Editorial Reviews

Reissue of the 1972 Recording by the Master of 'musica Popular Brasileira', One of his First Acts after Returning from a Period of Political Exile in the UK. Features a Cut Written with the Help of the Poet Greg=rio De Mattos, 'triste Bahia', plus Six More Mostly Sung in English.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime sublime, March 18, 2006

By 

Salty Saltillo (from the road, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Transa (Audio CD)

This record is a masterpiece of tropicalia music. The Context: The tropicalia poet has been sent into exile in London by the forces of repression and artistic control in Brasil.

London, 1970: at the height of hippie culture. Surrounded by the sounds of 1960's British rock, the harsh noise of the English language, with the warmth of tropical Brasil and the soft Portuguese language only dreams and memories in a primitive, neolithic, rock-dominated nightmare of exile. He wakes up in the morning, singing an old Beatles song. It is a long way back to his homeland.

At home, in Brasil, the Poet is a star. In England he is a just a long-haired South American man with a guitar and a funny accent. He hears his voice among others... just a common man. His presence in London goes unnoticed. ... "You don't know me..." he says and "You won't see me." He feels anonymous and the feeling pervades these songs.

He has no idea when or if he will ever be allowed to return to his homeland. He might as well learn to play rock chords and sing in English. But it is awkward. He cannot take the hippies or the rock-&-rollers completely serious. He is an outsider to their ideas and life style. He mocks them: "You sing about waking up in the morning but your never up before noon!"

And he cannot escape his memory and his language. Bits of Portuguese surface up from his subconscious, even as he struggles to sing and write in this new, rhyme-less language. Verses in Portuguese force themselves into his English songs. The sound of cuicas and bossa nova chords intervene, even as he tries to play his guitar in the English style. But the sounds of Brasil, and the sounds of Portuguese words, come across as hallucinations, chunks of dream, trance-inducing (trance, a play on words on the title "transa", which is itself a word full of sexual, sensuous overtones).

The Poet goes into the streets of London. He walks down the street and hears a tropical sound: but it is just reggae, not the samba and bossa nova sound of his home land. He remembers a lesson from his days as a school boy, another poet 300 years his elder, Gregorio de Mattos, whose outrageous art earned him the nickname "Hell Mouth" and earned him an exile in Angola. "Triste Bahia" becomes a sort of seance, a dialogue of exiled poet to exiled poet, across the cosmos and the centuries, a communion of language and rhythms that evoke a homeland, Bahia, from which they have both been expelled.

So much for the context, now for the music. It is amazing how dreamy it is while maintaining a bare, minimalist production. No lush tracks recorded one on top of the next. Just a man, a microphone, an acoustic guitar, some background percussionists, and a bassist. If you close your eyes it almost sounds like you are in the sound studio with Caetano as he plays. And how he plays! Every one of these tracks is an amazing typically tropicalia journey to the limits of the accepted, conventional norms of mainstream music. Each starts off soft and conventional, and then builds, builds, repeats, repeats, until finally you are overwhelmed with the absolute force of the noise coming out of your speakers. And then silence. And typically a return to the beginning again.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "That's what rock'n'roll is all about", April 24, 2000

By 

Michael Sean (Seattle, WA - US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Transa (Audio CD)

Originally released in England in late 1971, "Transa" (Making Out), was the last of the three albums that Caetano Veloso recorded while in London. The songs are longer and a bit more complex, and five of the seven tracks are written in English. The fabulous "Triste Bahia" features excerpts from the poetry of Gregório de Mattos. Shortly after his return home in 1972, "Barra 69" (a live recording of the last show Caetano and Gilberto Gil did before their exile) came out, followed by the Brazilian release of "Transa" (complete with a 3-D album cover), insuring Caetano's triumphant comeback. This disc is a milestone in his career, marking the end of his 'English' period and hinting at the musical experimentation that he would push further on subsequent releases. It's among the best of his early records and definitely worth checking out.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Caetano Veloso, a genius..., September 12, 2003

By 

Carlos Lopes "charlesanjo45" (Portugal) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Transa (Audio CD)

I became an addicted listener to Caetano Veloso when I was around 15. Twenty years have passed but my great genius of the Brazilian music still keeps visiting my home day after day and heartbeats assault me nervously whenever a new cd springs up or a show calls for me. To tell the truth, I still can't help feeling excited with Caetano Veloso, really.

The 'Transa' record goes back to 1972 and it's among those Top10 records of our lives which I would take to that desert island all of us have already been invited to visit. 'Transa' was recorded during the London phase of Caetano, when he and Gilberto Gil were forced to exile for political and dictatorial reasons. It is a superb record, full of a wide musical richness, where silence achieves a never-heard dimension. Marked by solitude and also by the fact that he was living in a foreign country, 'Transa' shows a Caetano with traces of musical psychedelism, geniously seasoned with musical flavours from Northeast of Bahia, his homeland. The father of Tropicalism gave birth to an album with a strong identity, strongly winking at the European sound (many of his songs are sung in English), with several references to rock (one of the flagships of Tropicalism), to the Beatles ('woke up this morning / singing an old, old Beatles song' , in 'It's a Long Way') , but still deeply Brazilian. It's a record made by an unknown singer in the London of that time, a record by someone that lived in a country that he didn't know and that wouldn't dare to expect his music being fully understood by those to whom he would open the door of his talent. Solitude and depression that he was facing at that time blurred some musical freshness, categorically evidenced in some of his Brazilian albums. There is no room for doubt when Caetano sings: 'You don't know me / bet you'll never get to know me / you don't know me at all.', in the opening track.
'Transa ' is a conceptual album about homesickness, about absence, about his anguish imprisoned in European walls, about nostalgia and its own marks engraved on music, on his Popular Brazilian music, on rock'n roll which Tropicalism merged with to expand and that definitely changed everything about the sound produced in Brazil. As Caetano sings in 'Nostalgia', the last track of the record: 'That's what rock'n roll is all about / I mean, that's what rock'n roll was all about.'
The best justice that we can do to 'Transa' is, obviously, listening to it from the bottom of our hearts.