The Queen of Exotica

It's not often that an ice-cream advert changes your life.

I first saw it on my parent's TV. I was still living at home, freshly out of varsity and adrift in the world, unemployed and so apathetic and uncertain that I was probably unemployable. I was trying to make it as an artist, dragging my little book of photographs (too modestly presented to even be called a portfolio) around Christchurch's smaller, independent art galleries. The folks I showed my work to in those galleries, they weren't impressed. Back then: in that city, in the conservative art scene of the day; the concept of outsider art, low-brow art...well, it wasn't anything that anyone had ever really heard of. Truthfully, I'm not even sure the phrase 'outsider art' had been coined.

My bestiary of papier mache chimeras and polymer clay grotesques just confused people. They recommended craft galleries that specialised in hand-painted bowls and wood-turned ash-trays. That wasn't my scene either and there was no place for me there. In spite of anything I landed a few small exhibitions, had my work featured in a Goth-themed fashion and art store (it was called Wyrd, the woman who ran the place had dyed hair and piercings, she loved my pieces; sadly the store is long gone, had closed up and faded away long before the earthquakes came and collapsed the entire street). Some of my pieces sold, but it was certainly never enough to live on, really it just supplemented my dole payouts.

But anyway...all that is neither here nor there; it's just where I was, at that time.
Where was I: the advert. This is a music blog, goddamnit.
Said advert showed a number of lean model types, kitted out in quasi-Mayan garb. They raised their hands in worship before a mountain down which achingly dark chocolate ran in a river. I'm pretty sure it was for Magnum ice-creams. But the music that played, that was what drew me closer to the flickering screen. The song sounded old: I figured it for the 1950s, it had that rich, glossy orchestral element, that swinging lounge cadence. The percussion was a weird mix of hand drums and decidedly world-music vibed instruments, and the voice was a thing of extraordinary power. It was a woman singing, that much was inarguable, but her lower register reached a bone-rattling Louis Armstrong grrrrrrrrrrrrowl and her upper notes soared like bright sparks of ash rising from a fire. It was deliriously, wondrously odd and it sounded like so much damn fun.

And of course, I had no idea who it was and little hope of ever finding out; this was a time when I could barely negotiate my way around a keyboard and broadband was something that happened to other people. But I never forgot that sound, and a part of me kept looking for it in other artists, at other times - trying to find a release that had some of that glorious exotic atmosphere to it.

Years later; in another city, with a high speed internet connection, a functioning credit card and a recently discovered passion for online shopping, I was skulking around one of my favourite websites of the time - a wonderful little distributor of independently-released CDs called CDBaby. And they had a live album entitled simply 'Recital', recently available, some lost treasure from decades ago. As soon as I read the description, even before I clicked the little speaker icon that would play a two minute (CDBaby were far more generous than Amazon with their audio snippets) sound-byte of one of the tracks, I knew I'd found her. My Incan ice-cream advert goddess. Yma Sumac.

She rose to prominence in the early fifties. Classically-trained; she had won early acclaim for her masterful performance of Mozart's gleefully difficult Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute), negotiating its impossibly high, lightning-quick coloratura with skill and grace (Mozart composed the piece as a sort of challenge to Sopranos, a means of really proving their mettle). A future in Opera beckoned and doubtless she would have excelled. Except she walked a different path.

Exotica was a strange hybrid genre. It coupled elements of the popular music of the day (lavish orchestrations, twanging guitars, rich vocalisations, melodramatic melodies and lively percussion) with strong world music influences, a bevy of exotic instruments and time signatures that whispered of some strange faraway land as yet undiscovered by the good folks of the Western world. It was a genre drenched in mythology, in elaborate back-stories created by marketing folks at record labels and inspired by the pulpiest of pulp novels. It conjured a world of dense green rainforests, leaves dripping and branches heavy with bizarre fruit; fierce natives who conducted strange mountaintop ceremonies in honour of long-lost pagan deities. It was a world of golden temples and colonialist explorers. It was pure escapist fantasy, an antidote to the mundane, an escape into the realm of the fantastic
For the most part it was very, very silly.

The word 'kitsch' is nicked from the Germans; as is much of the English language, to be honest. It translates fairly accurately as 'cheap'. It is often applied to this genre and to much else that is currently borrowed from the fifties. There is nothing cheap about the work of Yma Sumac. But she was most definitely mythologised; early tales of her history had her elevated to the level of an Incan princess, worshipped by some isolated and insular tribe, whose voice was used to sing the praises of their gods. Discovered (and effectively diva-napped, though with her consent, of course) by some white colonialist types who risked poison darts and worse in their abduction, she was brought to Hollywood, backed by a full orchestra and thus launched a musical career that would last several decades and make quite a number of people very rich indeed. A simpler, less improbable explanation continued to assert that she was indeed still an Incan princess, descended from the Atahualpa, but skipped the Edgar Rice Burroughs-ish parts of the narrative. Yet another popular myth was that she was really Amy Camus, a Jewish housewife from Brooklyn, who'd adopted the exotic reversal of her name in her bid for stardom.

The truth is probably simpler. An immensely gifted singer of undeniably Peruvian descent she began her career performing arrangements of mysterious Peruvian folk-songs with the help of composer, musician and occasional husband Moises Vivanco (in truth, he invariably wrote the 'ancient and authentic' folk songs himself). Awesomely her real name was...deep breath, Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chavarri del Castillo, though she originally performed under the moniker Imma Sumack, which she alleged translated as 'beautiful girl' in Quechua. The record label really just made the spelling of her name a bit more otherworldly and fleshed out Vivanco's lovely guitar playing with full orchestral arrangements.

Her first major release was 'The Voice of the Xtabay'. It is a glorious album. The music is wild and utterly conjures that wonderful, fictional world in full, explosive technicolour. The percussion and rich, plucked guitar underpins every song, forming a solid spine on which the meat and muscle of the strings, brass and woodwinds can sit. Male backing vocals lend their own exuberance to many of the pieces; rough (no doubt meant to sound tribal) and joyful chants, shouts and claps. The music-writing and arrangement is startlingly avant-garde (certainly by the standards of the day; it often bewilders and amazes still) with many songs switching tempo and mood so abruptly and absolutely it almost seems like two or more songs stitched together (which considering many of the tracks do not even break the three minute mark is really quite the feat). But the star, the burning supernova that scorches itself across every inch of the album, is Sumac and her extraordinary voice.

To this day, Sumac is often cited as possessing the widest recorded vocal range. It is believed to have reached to five full octaves at her peak and it certainly sounds it. In her upper register she was capable of exquisite trilling notes and delicate, razor-precise coloratura that sound more like birdsong than anything the human voice should be capable of. Her lower register stretches deep, deep down into that husky, Armstrong-meets-jungle-cat growl I mentioned earlier. This lower register delivery is, to put it as delicately as possible, a extremely raunchy vocal - bordering on the sexual; it must have startled the bejeezus out of folks in the presumably straight-laced fifties. But Sumac doesn't just stop at the two polar extremes, instead she uses her voice through every note and key and pitch in between, sounding no less confident in any aspect  of her bewildering range. Though she often returns to the middle of her register: a rich, dramatic contralto. In case you're curious, the song on the ice-cream advert was 'Tumpa (Earthquake)' and yes, it's on this album.
Fun fact for music trivia types: 'The Voice of the Xtabay' is held as the one album to remain longest in print; since it's release in 1950, it has never slipped out of print.

Other albums followed; the gorgeous and decadent 'Legend of the Sun Virgin' in 1952 saw her and Vivanco move their wild, exotic sound in a more stately, Classical direction. 'Inca Taqui' (1953) demonstrated more stripped-down arrangements than it's predecessors'; the focus clearly on the interplay between Sumac's voice and Vivanco's guitar. And then, in 1954 'Mambo!' happened.

Mambo had become huge at the time and every studio wanted their own Rosemary Clooney. Hell, the record label figured: Cuban music isn't all that dissimilar to Peruvian folk, why not give it a shot and fuse the two. And what an album they wound up with. 'Mambo!' is possibly the coolest, cultiest album that I have ever clapped my ears on: those infectious Cuban rhythms, pounded out beneath dizzying volleys and blasts of tumultuous brass, the fine-fingered fret-mastery of Vivanco and the multi-octave whoops and wordless exclamations of the Incan princess all add up to something spicy, zesty and utterly irresistible. And advertisers certainly noticed it too. Go on, Google the song 'gopher'. You'll have heard it before, somewhere, I can almost guarantee it. 'Goomba Boomba' popped up in the opening of a play I saw a while ago - that unmistakeable brass arrangement. Hell, even the Black-Eyed Peas perverted a sample for their own unwholesome purposes. A couple of the tracks featured in a Danny DeVito directed black comedy called 'Death to Smoochy' that starred Robin Williams (during the time he was trying to prove that he didn't have to be all beardy and sentimental in movies) and Edward Norton (back when he still acted in flicks rather than just appearing in them). That film sank without a trace and I doubt I'd have any interest in it if not for the presence of the afore-mentioned Sumac songs and a very rare acting spot for genius comedian Jon Stewart (who sports remarkably strange hair for the role). Far more impressively; one of the tracks off her debut album (the song 'Ataypura!', I believe) appears in 'The Big Lebowski'. A film which is, of course, a masterpiece of cinematic awesomeness.

One thing I love about 'Mambo!' is it immediately takes me back to another time, another place. I believe it must have been the late nineties. Swing and lounge had made a slightly ironic comeback and whatever the hipsters of that era were called (I number myself among them, absolutely) were fancying themselves sipping Martinis while listening to some sexy, sassy retro delight. There was a show on my favourite radio station (RDU, the one run out of the University of Canterbury) dubbed 'Departure Lounge' and it was a smorgasbord of delightful, cheddary treats. The DJs ran a spot at some grimy little pub once a week as well and I'd often head along with some friends and there we'd hang out; in between the press of smoke-grimed walls, listening, laughing and occasionally dancing. After a couple of hours someone would usually break out a pole and those who were game enough would attempt the limbo (that's the West Indian dance where you bend over backwards and shuffle forward, not the Roman Catholic purgatorial state between heaven and hell, incidentally). I never drank a thing the whole time I was there, couldn't afford the prices. I was young. And always broke.
They were some good times.

Anyway, the music of the fifties rapidly changed and moved on. What later became known as lounge and swing faded in popularity, exotica along with it. Sumac's time was closing. 1959s 'Fuego del Ande' possessed a more overtly South American sound. The Golden Age of Hollywood-style strings were gone, in their place was more naturalistic percussion, Spanish-inflected guitar and harp interplay. It is a lovely album, but strikingly different from what she made her name performing. 1961 saw the original release of the afore-mentioned live document 'Recital' and then, for a decade, she was gone.

Nothing prepared the world for her 1971 release 'Miracles'.
The seventies were a very different time from the fifties. It was a time of tight pants, long hair, and unreasonably wide lapels. Exotica was long buried and still more than two decades from it's later revival. Led Zeppelin were the most popular trip, man. Scalding, psychedelic rock and heavy guitar licks, lethal drumming and buzzing organs. That's what the young people were hanging out for.
So, God help them, that's what the label drew Sumac back into the studio for.
'Miracles' is undeniably a rock album. Veteran session musicians were pulled in to lay down the tracks. The guitar was heavy and smoking, the organs fat and hazy, the drumming crisp and tight; set to odd time signatures as it tried to evoke some element of her lounge music past. Over it all Sumac sang, wordlessly and across the entirety of her five octaves, she sang. The end result is a wild ride. A thrilling, glorious folly. It is a delightful and deeply odd disc. It all sounds a bit...wrong. I adore it.
Unfortunately, audiences didn't. It slipped almost immediately out of print. It stayed that way for many years (surfacing once, briefly, under the awkward moniker 'Yma Rocks') until, only a few years ago when a small independent label laser-carved it into polycarbonate plastic and sent the brand-new (with original cover and title restored) CD out into the world, and my collection.

Sumac herself never recorded another album. She did however continue to tour and perform in a number of musicals, appearing once on Late Night with David Letterman. Her voice never became tarnished with age nor otherwise damaged from such rigorous usage. She didn't burn her way through her vocal capital the way Maria Callas did.
She died November 1, 2008. She was 86.

She is, and will always be: a musical oddity (in the very best sense), a phenomenal artist, and a truly original legend. She was the queen of exotica.