TWO musicians passed on two days apart each other: Michel Legrand on January 26 and Pepe Smith on the 28th. For this country passionate about music, the death of a French composer whose melodies and the songs crafted from them gilded our memories of some of the most unforgettable cinemas are as significant as the rhythms and blues created by a lanky rock ‘n’ roll man who never lost his leanness and meanness till kingdom come.
I was not into rock. In fact, I was not even into the Beatles. It was already the 1980s. The 1970s were gone and had become part of nostalgia. Memory has ways of coloring remembrances, and I was missing the sound of the late-1960s and the 1970s. Perhaps, I was not looking back at the sound but the events that went with those sounds and beats.
Research had brought me to Olongapo, my very first time to be in that place. My friends who were with me knew I was into jazz and blues. That night, they brought me to Magsaysay Strip. It was a place that looked production-designed for a film noir. The place had an unusual scent of regrets, sensuality, adventure and love lost.
I forgot the politics of the place—the fact that those clubs were there because Filipinas sold their soul for US dollars, and that inequality and poverty were part of what simmered above as R&R and goodwill Philippine-American relations. We were looking for jazz bars but I noticed there was a segregation: some clubs were “white” and some were “black.” It was intimidating. We walked for an hour, encountering MPs on the street, and we saw them in action—hauling into cars military men involved in a brawl. Magsaysay Strip was not real; it was a street stage-managed by a colonial dream that brought possibilities of the good life and the facts of exploitation and heartbreaks.
The women were not interested in Filipinos. We were nonentities. That gave us the chance to inspect more bars until we reached one that seemed democratic. There were American soldiers but there were more Filipinos. The place was jumping. We needed to navigate a steep staircase to reach the higher level, which allowed us to look down onto a circular stage, or what looked like a performing area defined by a spotlight.
We were not prepared for what happened next.
A voice filled with whiskey sounded from somewhere: Pepe Smith! There was no introduction. There were no greetings. There was only that name and the leanest, tallest figure striding to the middle, a thin gladiator without an opponent, a gangstah in a black leather jacket and chains going around and around below his waist. He had metal necklaces, or were those black leather-and-steel dog collars? With the surplus of accessories, he was Coco Chanel’s roughest nightmare.
The crowd was going wild. There were stomping of feet and clapping of hands. And there was that voice: an unforgiving voice that without the gravelly sound could have sounded like a tenor’s tool. I do not remember now what he sang. I do not even remember how long he stayed on that floor. What is clear even up to now was that stage presence that was scary because it was demonic but welcoming and embracing.
Pepe Smith was part of the Juan De La Cruz Band that was completed by Mike Hanopol and Wally Gonzales, the least flamboyant but perhaps the original “crush” of those women—and men—who loved rock.
One cannot really talk of Pepe Smith without mentioning the music he created with Hanopol and Gonzales. They sounded like the Rolling Stones and all those bluesmen but they were singing about local things like “Divisoria.” They even transformed a Samar-Leyte folk song “Di Ak’ Nahuhulop” into a flag-waving blues called “Inday.” They were way, way ahead of deconstruction and the post-colonial both in the theoretical and practical forms of the said thoughts.
Pepe Smith, the Amboy, that Amerasian, his flamboyance and angas were our colonial selves put to hard-driving, gritty soul music. He was local and he was global; he was national and he was international. He was all of us and our country—lost and found in the ruins of many wars and foreign interventions, and saved by a music that came from the West but made into a subaltern’s subversion.
I do not see Michel Legrand as purely colonial. He came though through the “inescapably inter-national” and colonizing technologies of films.
Legrand came to me through movies. I do not know how young I was when I watched The Thomas Crown Affair. I do not think I already possessed then any semblance of sophisticated ways of reading a film. The movie was what we called then a “detective story.” Steve McQueen, to us, was an action star who made fast-paced interesting movies. But I remember that in the middle of the film, when the character of Steve McQueen flew a yellow glider and the music soared with the plane, I realized how music could have movements. The intro music was swirling as if in a circle and the words of the song were clear: they were about moving in circles, whirling and going around and around. The song stopped the film! Long after the glider had landed, I was thinking of and humming a bit the sad, lovely music.
Some years after, I and other cineastes would recognize the song some more. It was “The Windmills of Your Mind.” The man who originally sang the song for the movie was Noel Harrison but sadly very few people remember him. This was because after the film became a hit and the song won an Oscar for Best Song, many other singers made it their own. Outstanding versions include those made by Jose Feliciano (who sang it during the 1960 Oscars and upped the song to more maudlin level compared to the faster rendition of Harrison), Jack Jones, Johnny Mathis, and the Palestinian balladeer Omar Kamal.
The song “The Windmills of Your Mind” would come to us non-French speaking fans through the lyrics of Alan and Marilyn Bergman as with the other songs of Michel Legrand.
It was in 1964 though that Michel Legrand caught the attention of Hollywood and music fans when he composed the music for Jacques Demy’s La Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). The French lyrics were by Demy and the English lyrics were by Norman Gimbel. It would be nominated in the 1965 Oscars but would lose to Johnny Mandel’s “The Shadow of Your Smile.” The song, however, would be sung by various singers from Connie Francis to Jessye Norman, from Frank Sinatra to Greek singers George Perris and Mario Frangoulis. It would change in the relentless vocal styling of Sarah Vaughan and would be transformed into a dirge by Louis Armstrong.
Michel Legrand would compose more songs and would win more Oscars and other awards. His songs would be remembered by how the other vocalists would infuse their own approaches to the complex melodies of Legrand. Known to be lover of jazz and improvisations, Legrand would sometimes be at the piano when some jazz artists like Vaughan and Bill Evans would experiment on Legrand’s tones and chords, most of the time altering melodies at certain points, although they would always come home to the original lines of sound Legrand offered to us in bountiful directions.
Such is the art of Michel Legrand that he allowed other artists to breathe life into his works. Such was the power of the music in Pepe Smith that he pushed for lush and vibrant life amid the violence and peace of his world. No two artists were more disparate and similar.