Alfa-Gungadin – Carcara
Alfa-Gungadin – Aprender A Ser So
Alfa-Gungadin – Purple Haze
Alfa-Gungadin – Para Decir Adios
Today is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 89th birthday. Jodo is one of my favorite artists, and I use that word very deliberately, because while he’s best known as a director, Jodorowsky has produced exceptional art in multiple fields, painting, poetry, illustration and music. That final field is the one I’m focused on here in presenting an album that I only learned about because Cool Chris of Groove Merchant fame, recently dig it up and brought it with him down to LA for his pop-up record store at Rappcats.
I really don’t know much of anything about Alfa-Gungadin, it’s clear that it was Mexico based, and given the year, it appears to be around the time Jodo produced his first feature length film, Fando y Lis, but before his breakthrough El Topo.
I really had no idea what to expect, though the cover and artwork would suggest a psychedelic freak out of the highest order. But aside from “Purple Haze,” and a short interlude, there really isn’t much psychedelic music here. In fact, most of the songs are honestly fairly pedestrian, especially the multiple Beatles covers. But then there are these exceptionally beautifully arranged Brazilian songs which were a total surprise and a complete revelation. They give a small inkling of what would come in just a few years (the Intro to “Carcara,” sounds almost as if it was lifted from the El Topo soundtrack sessions) but also show that Jodo must have had an affinity for Arthur Verocai or Rogerio Duprat orchestrations.
It’s extraordinary to me that at this time Jodo was roughly 39, and though he’d been an artist since being a teenager, he still mostly lived in obscurity. Since then he’s had 50+ years as an internationally known artist and even at this stage, he shows no signs of really slowing down, as evidenced by his recent appearances here in LA, to showcase the artwork he’s created with his partner Pascale Montadon-Jodorowsky, as pascALEjandro, and multiple Q&A’s ahead of his classic film “Holy Mountain,” and his most recent effort (and perhaps my favorite) Endless Poetry. I hope there will be many more birthdays to come for this exceptional artist, one who continues to surprise and inspire.
