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Craig Unger
2024 Mariner Books
Craig Unger was one of a handful of investigative journalists in the early 1990s who were digging deeply and trying to uncover the truth behind one of the biggest political scandals in United States history: the “October Surprise” events of a decade before.
Under the October Surprise scheme, the 1980 campaign of then-U.S. presidential candidate Ronald Reagan secretly and illegally arranged for the delayed release of 52 Americans being held hostage in Iran. The aim was to delay the saving of American lives overseas long enough to negatively impact the re-election campaign of incumbent president Jimmy Carter, handing the election victory to Reagan instead. And that is exactly how it played out.
Now Unger is back on the case with Den of Spies. His latest book lays out the whole story of the October Surprise scandal from decades ago, building on his own past reporting on the subject and tying up the loose ends from other journalistic investigations as well — including how the scheme evolved, who in American and Iranian political circles was involved, and why this political act of treason, as Unger views it, has gone unpunished in the U.S. all these years.
Under the October Surprise scheme, the 1980 campaign of then-U.S. presidential candidate Ronald Reagan secretly and illegally arranged for the delayed release of 52 Americans being held hostage in Iran. The aim was to delay the saving of American lives overseas long enough to negatively impact the re-election campaign of incumbent president Jimmy Carter, handing the election victory to Reagan instead. And that is exactly how it played out.
Now Unger is back on the case with Den of Spies. His latest book lays out the whole story of the October Surprise scandal from decades ago, building on his own past reporting on the subject and tying up the loose ends from other journalistic investigations as well — including how the scheme evolved, who in American and Iranian political circles was involved, and why this political act of treason, as Unger views it, has gone unpunished in the U.S. all these years.
Unger became obsessed with investigating the October Surprise scheme himself from the moment he first read about it in a New York Times opinion article in 1991 and watched it in a television documentary the next day being reported by veteran journalist Robert Parry.
At the center of the so-called October Surprise was a New York-based attorney by the name of William Casey, then head of Reagan’s presidential election campaign. Casey had some military and intelligence experience dating back to World War II, and ever since then he had been keeping one foot firmly planted in the global intelligence community and associating with many of the shady characters inhabiting that world.
As the Carter-vs.-Reagan election campaign became ever tighter in the polls, Casey reputedly used his connections in Europe’s intelligence communities to approach the Iranian government with a proposal: delay the release of the 52 American hostages for now and do not let them go. Toward that end, Casey himself was reported to have attended three secret meetings at hotels in Europe during the U.S. election campaign of 1980 — twice in Madrid, Spain and once in Paris, France. The top-secret meetings brought together representatives of the American, Iranian and European sides; intelligence officers from Israel were also reported to have been present.
What Casey, in those covert meetings, allegedly promised the Iranians in return for the delayed freeing of the American hostages was a quid pro quo — U.S.-made military parts and equipment much needed by the Iranian military, plus a freeing up of Iranian state assets that had been officially frozen by the U.S. government under Carter. Casey reportedly promised the Iranians that if they waited in delaying the American hostages, they would get a much better deal under a future Republican president, Reagan, than the raw deal they were getting now from the Democrats under Carter.
There was one big problem with Casey’s overtures to the Iranians, however: They were patently illegal and ethically wrong. In effect, Casey was working to subvert and sabotage, through unofficial, unseen back channels, the work the Carter administration was doing to get the American hostages freed through open diplomatic channels. At least some of the Iranian middlemen involved in the October Surprise — and likely some U.S. government officials too — were double-dealing at the same time for both the Carter administration and the Reagan election campaign under Casey.
The American public ended up voting Reagan into office as president over Carter. Within minutes of Reagan’s inauguration as president in January 1981, the American hostages were suddenly and inexplicably released in Iran. Reagan’s popularity soared. The October Surprise scheme that Casey had singlehandedly set in motion worked like a charm — and all behind the back of the U.S. government under Carter and out of sight of all American voters.
Fast forward a decade later to the early 1990s: Unger, like journalist Parry and other investigators of the October Surprise plot, came under attack by former Reagan administration officials and, somewhat surprisingly, were piled on by powerful corporate members of the American news media establishment too. The growing body of investigative reporting on the October Surprise plot was rejected outright and ridiculed as being little more than conspiracy-fueled fiction.
In 1992, the two houses of the U.S. Congress undertook their own sloppy investigations of the October Surprise scheme of 1980, eventually (and mistakenly) concluding that there was nothing to it at all.
Unger’s investigation was helped more than anything else by the groundwork that journalist Parry had laid over the years in investigating the October Surprise scandal and independently publishing his findings in books, magazines and on Parry’s own website. After Parry’s death in 2018, Unger inherited his vast collection of October Surprise files and added those to his own investigation. In Den of Spies, Unger recounts Parry’s discovery of some of the more explosive October Surprise files:
And that was how, on December 20, 1994, Bob Parry found himself at the Rayburn House Office Building, the biggest of three huge structures on Capitol Hill serving the House of Representatives. He took the elevator to a subbasement, and then snaked his way through a musty underground garage until he reached the exit ramp on the building’s south side. To the right, behind Venetian-blind-covered windows, was a small, locked office, inside of which were a few desks, cloth-covered partitions, disused phones (landlines, of course), and an antiquated, rumbling copying machine.
At the rear of the office was an abandoned ladies’ room that had been repurposed and was now used as a storage room. The [U.S. congressional] task force’s taped boxes sat against the wall, under an empty tampon dispenser that still hung from then salmon-colored tiles.
There was no one else there, and Parry began ripping the tape off the boxes and poring over the files. Not only did he find unclassified notes and documents about the task force’s work, but he also found “secret” and even “top secret” documents that had been left behind, apparently in the haste to wrap up the investigation.
He had found the motherlode. Nirvana under the tampon dispenser.
Even more shocking was an intelligence report that Parry discovered from a high-level official in Russia’s state security agency, who, at the time anyway, was on relatively friendly terms with his American counterparts. The report confirmed the existence of the October Surprise scenario and the participation of its key American players. That Russian intelligence document had never seen the light day before:
The Soviets stated as fact that Casey, George Bush [Senior], and other Republicans had secretly met with Iranian officials in Europe during the 1980 presidential campaign. “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership,” the Russians wrote. “The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.”
At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA director George Bush also took part,” the Russians said. “In Madrid and Paris, the representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the US Embassy in Teheran.”
Both the Reagan Republicans and Carter Democrats “started from the proposition that Imam [Ruhollah] Khomeini, having announced a policy of ‘neither the West nor the East,’ and cursing the ‘American devil,’ imperialism and Zionism, was forced to acquire American weapons, spares and military supplies by any and all possible means,” the Russians wrote. According to the report, the Republicans won the bidding war, and the arms shipments were carried out by Israel, often through private arms dealers.
By the time the Russian report arrived on January 11, 1993, however, the [U.S. congressional] task force had already sent their report to the printer for release two days later.
When Parry later asked task force chair Lee Hamilton [D-Indiana], he told him, “I don’t recall ever seeing it.”
There are villains galore in Unger’s updated October Surprise investigation, as recounted in Den of Spies: William Casey, obviously, and Iran’s Islamic religious leader at the time, the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini, who secretly agreed to go along with Casey’s scheme to delay the American hostages until just the right time. Whether or not Reagan himself, his vice president George H.W. Bush, and others in their immediate circle also knew about or took part in the October Surprise has been a big question mark, long suspected but unproven to this day.
But there are heroes too in Unger’s narrative. Journalist Robert Parry and his dogged determination to expose the workings of the October Surprise to the world set the bar high for what journalists everywhere should aspire to — certainly so in the USA. It was Parry, in fact, who first broke the story of what became in the late 1980s the “Iran-contra” scandal, a lawbreaking operation run right within the heart of the Reagan White House that had its seeds in the earlier October Surprise scandal that Parry had so thoroughly investigated.
Another hero emerges in this book as well: Abolhassan Banisadr, the former president of Iran. It was Banisadr, a young protégé of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had gotten wind of the October Surprise overtures from the Americans in 1980 and vehemently opposed any participation in it by Iranian government representatives. Banisadr preferred getting the U.S. hostages released through diplomatic channels, which was looking increasingly possible, instead of through Casey’s unofficial Republican back channels.
But Banisadr was overruled by those around him at the time, including his mentor Khomeini, and ended up being impeached by Iran’s parliament. Fearing for his life, Banisadr fled his country to Europe, where he stayed for the rest of his life a strong critic of the radical Islamic leadership of the Iranian government and a proponent of a more secular, open form of democracy in Iran. He died in 2021, still in exile.
Author Unger himself, of course, is part of the October Surprise story, as one of a handful of journalists in the U.S. to bother investigating the story in the first place back in the 1990s — and one of the even fewer journalists to cry treason over it. Though there has been no real “smoking gun” in the whole October Surprise scandal up to now, there has been plenty of strong circumstantial evidence that only the most intrepid of American journalists, like Craig Unger, had the guts and the stomach to follow long after the media’s and public’s interest in the story had expired.
Prior to [Donald] Trump, these horrendous assaults on democracy, when and if they were uncovered, were largely dismissed as wacky conspiracy theories, or marginalized in the press. On the rare occasions that the offense in question became a national scandal — à la Watergate in 1972 — it was valorized for showing how well the system works. More often, it was buried under piles of disinformation and counter charges as with the October Surprise. Moreover, each time the Republicans went into battle they were aided by the unwitting assistance of Democrats who typically brought a knife to a gunfight and failed to hold the Republicans accountable. The few investigative reporters who were willing to take a deep dive into the weeds usually faced unpleasant consequences for their careers.
…So, after more than three decades, I no longer doubt whether the October Suprise took place. The larger question to me was whether it would remain merely a footnote to history or whether America could accept it, come to terms with it, and confront it forcefully enough to prevent it from happening again. Just as individuals are often deeply in denial of the most elemental but darkest and most problematic parts of their lives, so too can entire countries deny the darkest iniquities that might well soil the legacies of their homeland.
Den of Spies may or may not be the definitive account of the whole sordid October Surprise matter; time will tell on that score. But the book does stand on its own merits as a worthy contribution to the canon of investigative journalism around the world. Just as importantly, this book serves as a solid example of the kind of robust, relentless reporting that will be especially needed from 2025 onward under the second go-round of a neo-fascist American president, whose future crimes of state are bound to make the October Surprise controversy of the past look like child’s play.
At the center of the so-called October Surprise was a New York-based attorney by the name of William Casey, then head of Reagan’s presidential election campaign. Casey had some military and intelligence experience dating back to World War II, and ever since then he had been keeping one foot firmly planted in the global intelligence community and associating with many of the shady characters inhabiting that world.
As the Carter-vs.-Reagan election campaign became ever tighter in the polls, Casey reputedly used his connections in Europe’s intelligence communities to approach the Iranian government with a proposal: delay the release of the 52 American hostages for now and do not let them go. Toward that end, Casey himself was reported to have attended three secret meetings at hotels in Europe during the U.S. election campaign of 1980 — twice in Madrid, Spain and once in Paris, France. The top-secret meetings brought together representatives of the American, Iranian and European sides; intelligence officers from Israel were also reported to have been present.
What Casey, in those covert meetings, allegedly promised the Iranians in return for the delayed freeing of the American hostages was a quid pro quo — U.S.-made military parts and equipment much needed by the Iranian military, plus a freeing up of Iranian state assets that had been officially frozen by the U.S. government under Carter. Casey reportedly promised the Iranians that if they waited in delaying the American hostages, they would get a much better deal under a future Republican president, Reagan, than the raw deal they were getting now from the Democrats under Carter.
There was one big problem with Casey’s overtures to the Iranians, however: They were patently illegal and ethically wrong. In effect, Casey was working to subvert and sabotage, through unofficial, unseen back channels, the work the Carter administration was doing to get the American hostages freed through open diplomatic channels. At least some of the Iranian middlemen involved in the October Surprise — and likely some U.S. government officials too — were double-dealing at the same time for both the Carter administration and the Reagan election campaign under Casey.
The American public ended up voting Reagan into office as president over Carter. Within minutes of Reagan’s inauguration as president in January 1981, the American hostages were suddenly and inexplicably released in Iran. Reagan’s popularity soared. The October Surprise scheme that Casey had singlehandedly set in motion worked like a charm — and all behind the back of the U.S. government under Carter and out of sight of all American voters.
Fast forward a decade later to the early 1990s: Unger, like journalist Parry and other investigators of the October Surprise plot, came under attack by former Reagan administration officials and, somewhat surprisingly, were piled on by powerful corporate members of the American news media establishment too. The growing body of investigative reporting on the October Surprise plot was rejected outright and ridiculed as being little more than conspiracy-fueled fiction.
In 1992, the two houses of the U.S. Congress undertook their own sloppy investigations of the October Surprise scheme of 1980, eventually (and mistakenly) concluding that there was nothing to it at all.
Unger’s investigation was helped more than anything else by the groundwork that journalist Parry had laid over the years in investigating the October Surprise scandal and independently publishing his findings in books, magazines and on Parry’s own website. After Parry’s death in 2018, Unger inherited his vast collection of October Surprise files and added those to his own investigation. In Den of Spies, Unger recounts Parry’s discovery of some of the more explosive October Surprise files:
And that was how, on December 20, 1994, Bob Parry found himself at the Rayburn House Office Building, the biggest of three huge structures on Capitol Hill serving the House of Representatives. He took the elevator to a subbasement, and then snaked his way through a musty underground garage until he reached the exit ramp on the building’s south side. To the right, behind Venetian-blind-covered windows, was a small, locked office, inside of which were a few desks, cloth-covered partitions, disused phones (landlines, of course), and an antiquated, rumbling copying machine.
At the rear of the office was an abandoned ladies’ room that had been repurposed and was now used as a storage room. The [U.S. congressional] task force’s taped boxes sat against the wall, under an empty tampon dispenser that still hung from then salmon-colored tiles.
There was no one else there, and Parry began ripping the tape off the boxes and poring over the files. Not only did he find unclassified notes and documents about the task force’s work, but he also found “secret” and even “top secret” documents that had been left behind, apparently in the haste to wrap up the investigation.
He had found the motherlode. Nirvana under the tampon dispenser.
Even more shocking was an intelligence report that Parry discovered from a high-level official in Russia’s state security agency, who, at the time anyway, was on relatively friendly terms with his American counterparts. The report confirmed the existence of the October Surprise scenario and the participation of its key American players. That Russian intelligence document had never seen the light day before:
The Soviets stated as fact that Casey, George Bush [Senior], and other Republicans had secretly met with Iranian officials in Europe during the 1980 presidential campaign. “William Casey, in 1980, met three times with representatives of the Iranian leadership,” the Russians wrote. “The meetings took place in Madrid and Paris.”
At the Paris meeting in October 1980, “R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA director George Bush also took part,” the Russians said. “In Madrid and Paris, the representatives of Ronald Reagan and the Iranian leadership discussed the question of possibly delaying the release of 52 hostages from the staff of the US Embassy in Teheran.”
Both the Reagan Republicans and Carter Democrats “started from the proposition that Imam [Ruhollah] Khomeini, having announced a policy of ‘neither the West nor the East,’ and cursing the ‘American devil,’ imperialism and Zionism, was forced to acquire American weapons, spares and military supplies by any and all possible means,” the Russians wrote. According to the report, the Republicans won the bidding war, and the arms shipments were carried out by Israel, often through private arms dealers.
By the time the Russian report arrived on January 11, 1993, however, the [U.S. congressional] task force had already sent their report to the printer for release two days later.
When Parry later asked task force chair Lee Hamilton [D-Indiana], he told him, “I don’t recall ever seeing it.”
There are villains galore in Unger’s updated October Surprise investigation, as recounted in Den of Spies: William Casey, obviously, and Iran’s Islamic religious leader at the time, the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini, who secretly agreed to go along with Casey’s scheme to delay the American hostages until just the right time. Whether or not Reagan himself, his vice president George H.W. Bush, and others in their immediate circle also knew about or took part in the October Surprise has been a big question mark, long suspected but unproven to this day.
But there are heroes too in Unger’s narrative. Journalist Robert Parry and his dogged determination to expose the workings of the October Surprise to the world set the bar high for what journalists everywhere should aspire to — certainly so in the USA. It was Parry, in fact, who first broke the story of what became in the late 1980s the “Iran-contra” scandal, a lawbreaking operation run right within the heart of the Reagan White House that had its seeds in the earlier October Surprise scandal that Parry had so thoroughly investigated.
Another hero emerges in this book as well: Abolhassan Banisadr, the former president of Iran. It was Banisadr, a young protégé of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had gotten wind of the October Surprise overtures from the Americans in 1980 and vehemently opposed any participation in it by Iranian government representatives. Banisadr preferred getting the U.S. hostages released through diplomatic channels, which was looking increasingly possible, instead of through Casey’s unofficial Republican back channels.
But Banisadr was overruled by those around him at the time, including his mentor Khomeini, and ended up being impeached by Iran’s parliament. Fearing for his life, Banisadr fled his country to Europe, where he stayed for the rest of his life a strong critic of the radical Islamic leadership of the Iranian government and a proponent of a more secular, open form of democracy in Iran. He died in 2021, still in exile.
Author Unger himself, of course, is part of the October Surprise story, as one of a handful of journalists in the U.S. to bother investigating the story in the first place back in the 1990s — and one of the even fewer journalists to cry treason over it. Though there has been no real “smoking gun” in the whole October Surprise scandal up to now, there has been plenty of strong circumstantial evidence that only the most intrepid of American journalists, like Craig Unger, had the guts and the stomach to follow long after the media’s and public’s interest in the story had expired.
Prior to [Donald] Trump, these horrendous assaults on democracy, when and if they were uncovered, were largely dismissed as wacky conspiracy theories, or marginalized in the press. On the rare occasions that the offense in question became a national scandal — à la Watergate in 1972 — it was valorized for showing how well the system works. More often, it was buried under piles of disinformation and counter charges as with the October Surprise. Moreover, each time the Republicans went into battle they were aided by the unwitting assistance of Democrats who typically brought a knife to a gunfight and failed to hold the Republicans accountable. The few investigative reporters who were willing to take a deep dive into the weeds usually faced unpleasant consequences for their careers.
…So, after more than three decades, I no longer doubt whether the October Suprise took place. The larger question to me was whether it would remain merely a footnote to history or whether America could accept it, come to terms with it, and confront it forcefully enough to prevent it from happening again. Just as individuals are often deeply in denial of the most elemental but darkest and most problematic parts of their lives, so too can entire countries deny the darkest iniquities that might well soil the legacies of their homeland.
Den of Spies may or may not be the definitive account of the whole sordid October Surprise matter; time will tell on that score. But the book does stand on its own merits as a worthy contribution to the canon of investigative journalism around the world. Just as importantly, this book serves as a solid example of the kind of robust, relentless reporting that will be especially needed from 2025 onward under the second go-round of a neo-fascist American president, whose future crimes of state are bound to make the October Surprise controversy of the past look like child’s play.
音楽 music
Nomade Orquestra
2024
O Nascimento Do Sol Invencível
Nomade Orquestra
Nomade Orquestra
The 10 members of the instrumental band Nomade Orquestra drop their latest album, Terceiro Mundo, a feast of big-band-style, funky fusion for which they are known in Brazil and beyond.
Hailing from São Paulo and its industrial environs, the musicians blow it up with these eight new tracks of their trademark brass section meshing with guitars, drums, bass and indigenous acoustic instruments. Jazz, rock, folk, reggae, African, Brazilian — these influences and more all come together once again in a musical gumbo that grooves from start to finish.
The track “O Nascimento Do Sol Invencível” (The birth of the invincible sun, audio clip above) sports a ’70s-ish vibe with a social message of standing up and making one’s voice heard. The tune samples a spoken-word audio message in Portuguese by renowned Brazilian anti-fascist activist Paulo Galo: “We are preparing a revolution without speaking.” This could well serve as the band’s own credo too.
Hailing from São Paulo and its industrial environs, the musicians blow it up with these eight new tracks of their trademark brass section meshing with guitars, drums, bass and indigenous acoustic instruments. Jazz, rock, folk, reggae, African, Brazilian — these influences and more all come together once again in a musical gumbo that grooves from start to finish.
The track “O Nascimento Do Sol Invencível” (The birth of the invincible sun, audio clip above) sports a ’70s-ish vibe with a social message of standing up and making one’s voice heard. The tune samples a spoken-word audio message in Portuguese by renowned Brazilian anti-fascist activist Paulo Galo: “We are preparing a revolution without speaking.” This could well serve as the band’s own credo too.
With wah-wah guitar in full effect on “Cidade Estrangeira” (Foreign city), the band pays tribute to the cultural diversity of São Paulo, symbolized by smooth shifts between differing styles and tempos, all while percussively painting scenes of urban hustle and bustle.
“A Invasão de Pindorama” (The invasion of Pindorama) simmers with a feeling of historical unrest over European colonization. Pindorama is the name that the indigenous Tupi people have for centuries called the territory that is now the nation of Brazil. Pindorama is also today a city in the band’s home state of São Paulo.
The keyboards, flutes and brass section of the band paint a haunting story on the track “Revolução dos Cocos” (Coconut revolution) about the decade-long struggle (1988-1998) of the indigenous peoples of Bougainville Island during the Bougainville civil war in Papua New Guinea. That indigenous movement is widely regarded today as the world’s first successful eco-revolution.
This latest album serves as the final installment of a trilogy of sorts following the group’s first two studio recordings, Nomade Orquestra (2014) and EntreMundos (2017).
The albums Vox Populi Vol. 1 and Vox Machina Vol. 1, both from 2019, followed. The band changed gears and branched out into Jamaican reggae, ska and dub styles with their 2022 album Na Terra das Primavera.
The new album’s title, Terceiro Mundo (Third world), stems from the lived experiences of Brazilians, especially in the urban areas. “The choice of title also refers to the geopolitical term itself, in which third-worldism is present in our experiences: Brazil, São Paulo, ABC [industrial region],” the band says. “We face reality and all the challenges imposed on us with hope.”
Nomade Orquestra’s five records all rock tightly yet still manage to maintain a loose, improvisatory feel to them. Nowhere is that more evident than on the band’s new album, where the full ensemble recorded together live in the studio on all tracks and shunned sophisticated digital-recording techniques in favor of a more gutsy, in-your-face sound.
If there is one drawback to the new album, released on the Nublu Records label of New York, it is that timewise, the recording runs a bit too short. Clocking in at just 38 minutes, the album feels more like an EP than an LP. The record could use a couple tunes to fill it out and make it complete. That, and a CD version of the album to go along with the digital and vinyl releases of the new album on the market.
The 10-member lineup of Nomade Orquestra currently stands at Ana Eliza Colomar on alto sax and flutes, Victor Fão on trombone, Bio Bonato on baritone sax and flutes, Marco Stoppa on trumpet and flugelhorn, Beto Malfatti on tenor sax and flutes, Raphael Coelho on percussion, Guilherme Nakata on drums, Ruy Rascassi on bass, Luiz Galvão on guitars, and Marcos Mauricio on piano and keyboards.
Nomade Orquestra adheres to the collective philosophy of engaging with Brazilian society on the frontlines of change rather than from the sidelines, and using the power of music to resist and rise up over social injustice and oppression.
“We fully believe that music and art are necessary expressions for a mentally blocked society,” says the band. “Our journey is an ode to the sensory and the powerful invisible [force] that permeates our lives.”
Check out this new album, Terceiro Mundo, in its entirety as well as the band’s past releases for free on YouTube.
If Nomade Orquestra proves one thing, it is that musicians can be authentic and innovative and still have popular appeal while staying true to their roots. Whether or not the revolution is ever televised, the band members demonstrate with this latest musical endeavor that the revolution will be heard loud and clear — and on their own brassy terms.
“A Invasão de Pindorama” (The invasion of Pindorama) simmers with a feeling of historical unrest over European colonization. Pindorama is the name that the indigenous Tupi people have for centuries called the territory that is now the nation of Brazil. Pindorama is also today a city in the band’s home state of São Paulo.
The keyboards, flutes and brass section of the band paint a haunting story on the track “Revolução dos Cocos” (Coconut revolution) about the decade-long struggle (1988-1998) of the indigenous peoples of Bougainville Island during the Bougainville civil war in Papua New Guinea. That indigenous movement is widely regarded today as the world’s first successful eco-revolution.
This latest album serves as the final installment of a trilogy of sorts following the group’s first two studio recordings, Nomade Orquestra (2014) and EntreMundos (2017).
The albums Vox Populi Vol. 1 and Vox Machina Vol. 1, both from 2019, followed. The band changed gears and branched out into Jamaican reggae, ska and dub styles with their 2022 album Na Terra das Primavera.
The new album’s title, Terceiro Mundo (Third world), stems from the lived experiences of Brazilians, especially in the urban areas. “The choice of title also refers to the geopolitical term itself, in which third-worldism is present in our experiences: Brazil, São Paulo, ABC [industrial region],” the band says. “We face reality and all the challenges imposed on us with hope.”
Nomade Orquestra’s five records all rock tightly yet still manage to maintain a loose, improvisatory feel to them. Nowhere is that more evident than on the band’s new album, where the full ensemble recorded together live in the studio on all tracks and shunned sophisticated digital-recording techniques in favor of a more gutsy, in-your-face sound.
If there is one drawback to the new album, released on the Nublu Records label of New York, it is that timewise, the recording runs a bit too short. Clocking in at just 38 minutes, the album feels more like an EP than an LP. The record could use a couple tunes to fill it out and make it complete. That, and a CD version of the album to go along with the digital and vinyl releases of the new album on the market.
The 10-member lineup of Nomade Orquestra currently stands at Ana Eliza Colomar on alto sax and flutes, Victor Fão on trombone, Bio Bonato on baritone sax and flutes, Marco Stoppa on trumpet and flugelhorn, Beto Malfatti on tenor sax and flutes, Raphael Coelho on percussion, Guilherme Nakata on drums, Ruy Rascassi on bass, Luiz Galvão on guitars, and Marcos Mauricio on piano and keyboards.
Nomade Orquestra adheres to the collective philosophy of engaging with Brazilian society on the frontlines of change rather than from the sidelines, and using the power of music to resist and rise up over social injustice and oppression.
“We fully believe that music and art are necessary expressions for a mentally blocked society,” says the band. “Our journey is an ode to the sensory and the powerful invisible [force] that permeates our lives.”
Check out this new album, Terceiro Mundo, in its entirety as well as the band’s past releases for free on YouTube.
If Nomade Orquestra proves one thing, it is that musicians can be authentic and innovative and still have popular appeal while staying true to their roots. Whether or not the revolution is ever televised, the band members demonstrate with this latest musical endeavor that the revolution will be heard loud and clear — and on their own brassy terms.
映画 film
Sahra Mani, director
2024 90 min.
Small but loud groups of women protesters in Afghanistan take their lives into their hands as they march through the streets of Kabul, the capital, demanding “work, bread, education!” They are variously met with public beatings, arrest, tear gas or water cannons by Afghan soldiers and police aligned with the Taliban terrorist organization that holds political power in the country.
Bread & Roses is the story of some of these brave women and, by extension, the 20 million girls and women of Afghanistan today who are denied even the most basic rights by their government. Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani, a political exile herself, directs the documentary film.
Shot mostly in secret using a cameraperson on the ground and activists wielding mobile phone cameras, the film takes viewers inside the daily lives of Afghan women affected by the Taliban’s misogynistic and extreme fundamentalist rule — a rule under which women are not allowed to be educated, employed or even go out in public without a male chaperone, among many other sadistic decrees.
Bread & Roses is the story of some of these brave women and, by extension, the 20 million girls and women of Afghanistan today who are denied even the most basic rights by their government. Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani, a political exile herself, directs the documentary film.
Shot mostly in secret using a cameraperson on the ground and activists wielding mobile phone cameras, the film takes viewers inside the daily lives of Afghan women affected by the Taliban’s misogynistic and extreme fundamentalist rule — a rule under which women are not allowed to be educated, employed or even go out in public without a male chaperone, among many other sadistic decrees.
The story of Bread & Roses centers mostly around three women and their experiences in confronting and resisting the daily assault on their womanhood and their human dignity.
Dr. Zahra Mohammadi is a dentist who operates her own clinic and is a leader in local women’s rights activism. She is engaged to be married. Taranom Seyedi is an uncompromising, outspoken activist. Sharifa Movahidzadeh is a former government employee who, like other women following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, is now forced to stay at home. They all despise the Taliban and are determined in their own ways to subvert it.
Zahra secretly holds meetings of women’s rights activists in her clinic during off-hours, a dangerous thing to be caught doing by the Taliban. At other times, she is out front leading women’s street demonstrations against the Taliban — “Down with terrorists!” are among the slogans they shout — and she knows the police are watching her but is determined to continue resisting just the same.
During one street demonstration by the women, they are ordered into a car driven by a Taliban officer and told they are being taken to the nearest police station. As they harangue the driver, he shouts back, “I told you not to talk. I will kill you right now, right here!” The women call his bluff and tell him to go ahead and kill them if he wants. They are unbowed and unafraid.
To its credit, the film relies not on stock footage from news media sources but almost solely on videos taken by Afghan women themselves. The footage they capture on their phones is often jarring, out of focus and rough, not slick and polished. But it is that visual authenticity that carries the whole film.
Taranom, the activist, eventually manages to flee over the border to neighboring Pakistan, where she finds refuge from the long reach of the Taliban in a safe house. She is determined to visually record every second of her life now in exile as a reminder to the world.
“May history remember that once upon a time, such cruelty was permitted against the women of Afghanistan,” she says into her camera. “Before the [eyes of the] United Nations. Before all human rights organizations. Before the whole world. Before countries that denounce cold-heartedness and cry for democracy.”
It was the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 after two decades of a failed “war on terrorism” that led to the Taliban’s second reign of terror in the country (the first one being back in 1996 after the demise of the former Soviet Union). Oppression against women in Afghanistan and Iraq, once cited by war hawks in the United States as justification for illegally invading those countries 20 years ago, is today more horrific than ever.
Soft-spoken Sharifa, the former government employee in the film, is determined to break her Taliban-imposed home confinement and re-engage with society. She volunteers at a food distribution center, then, defying the wishes of her parents — like increasing numbers of Afghan women feel compelled to do — she joins the protests in the streets. She films the ensuing violence against the women at great personal risk, knowing that the Taliban, citing Islamic law, will not hesitate to kill any woman for any reason.
At one point in the film, Zahra the dentist is arrested for her participation in anti-Taliban protests and is not heard from again. Other women assume the worst. She is eventually released from jail; the brutal experience has left her traumatized and listless. She relates how other women activists still in jail have been tortured by the Taliban police almost beyond physical recognition.
Fearing the Taliban is closing in on her, Zahra makes the painful decision to go underground and flee from Afghanistan, telling no one of her whereabouts except her beloved fiancé, Omid. “I studied hard, became a doctor and was able to maintain my work despite a very dark time in my country,” Zahra says in the film. “I can’t bear the thought of the Taliban possibly burning it all to the ground. Everything I’ve worked for.”
Director Mani has said that she decided to leave out of Bread & Roses some of the worst scenes to make it more palatable to western audiences — scenes depicting women who had been tortured by the Taliban, “killed, kidnapped and illegally detained. The situation is much worse than I say in the film.” Mani, founder of the Afghanistan Doc Film House production company, made the movie essentially as an act of resistance against the Taliban on behalf of millions of other Afghan women who continue to be beaten down and silenced by the ruthless thugs in charge of their country.
One of the executive producers of Bread & Roses, Malala Yousafzai, had her own horrific run-in with the Taliban in 2012: As a 15-year-old girl in Pakistan, she was shot in the head on a bus by a Taliban gunman as punishment for her daring to go to school and get an education. She survived the assassination attempt, and her continuing fight for women’s rights in the Middle East garnered international attention. At age 17 in 2014, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism, making her the youngest person ever to receive the award.
Hollywood actor and producer Jennifer Lawrence, along with her business partner Justine Ciarrocchi, serve as co-producers of the movie, securing some much-needed visibility and viability for the project. It is being released by Apple Original Films, the cinema unit of the Apple computer company.
And as dire as the situation is for women and girls in Afghanistan, Lawrence is correct in understanding that nations like the USA have no room to point fingers at other oppressive societies. Women’s rights are now under attack in the U.S., and the Trump regime’s second act in power ensures that fierce battles for gender equality and freedom to choose will need to be fought by Americans too.
“I live in a country where women’s rights are being taken away,” Lawrence said in an interview. “We live in a world in which women are oppressed. And when apathy begins to spread and shatter our empathy and our humanity, we lose contact with each other. It ruins the world, and it spreads. And that really scares me.”
Bread for all and roses too, a political slogan in the early 1900s, was originally coined by Helen Todd, a suffragist and worker’s rights activist in the U.S. More than a century later, Bread & Roses, the new guerrilla documentary film about Afghanistan, brings that spirit of resistance to oppression and gender apartheid to international audiences effectively as a call to action. May that call be heard and acted upon far and wide.
Dr. Zahra Mohammadi is a dentist who operates her own clinic and is a leader in local women’s rights activism. She is engaged to be married. Taranom Seyedi is an uncompromising, outspoken activist. Sharifa Movahidzadeh is a former government employee who, like other women following the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, is now forced to stay at home. They all despise the Taliban and are determined in their own ways to subvert it.
Zahra secretly holds meetings of women’s rights activists in her clinic during off-hours, a dangerous thing to be caught doing by the Taliban. At other times, she is out front leading women’s street demonstrations against the Taliban — “Down with terrorists!” are among the slogans they shout — and she knows the police are watching her but is determined to continue resisting just the same.
During one street demonstration by the women, they are ordered into a car driven by a Taliban officer and told they are being taken to the nearest police station. As they harangue the driver, he shouts back, “I told you not to talk. I will kill you right now, right here!” The women call his bluff and tell him to go ahead and kill them if he wants. They are unbowed and unafraid.
To its credit, the film relies not on stock footage from news media sources but almost solely on videos taken by Afghan women themselves. The footage they capture on their phones is often jarring, out of focus and rough, not slick and polished. But it is that visual authenticity that carries the whole film.
Taranom, the activist, eventually manages to flee over the border to neighboring Pakistan, where she finds refuge from the long reach of the Taliban in a safe house. She is determined to visually record every second of her life now in exile as a reminder to the world.
“May history remember that once upon a time, such cruelty was permitted against the women of Afghanistan,” she says into her camera. “Before the [eyes of the] United Nations. Before all human rights organizations. Before the whole world. Before countries that denounce cold-heartedness and cry for democracy.”
It was the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 after two decades of a failed “war on terrorism” that led to the Taliban’s second reign of terror in the country (the first one being back in 1996 after the demise of the former Soviet Union). Oppression against women in Afghanistan and Iraq, once cited by war hawks in the United States as justification for illegally invading those countries 20 years ago, is today more horrific than ever.
Soft-spoken Sharifa, the former government employee in the film, is determined to break her Taliban-imposed home confinement and re-engage with society. She volunteers at a food distribution center, then, defying the wishes of her parents — like increasing numbers of Afghan women feel compelled to do — she joins the protests in the streets. She films the ensuing violence against the women at great personal risk, knowing that the Taliban, citing Islamic law, will not hesitate to kill any woman for any reason.
At one point in the film, Zahra the dentist is arrested for her participation in anti-Taliban protests and is not heard from again. Other women assume the worst. She is eventually released from jail; the brutal experience has left her traumatized and listless. She relates how other women activists still in jail have been tortured by the Taliban police almost beyond physical recognition.
Fearing the Taliban is closing in on her, Zahra makes the painful decision to go underground and flee from Afghanistan, telling no one of her whereabouts except her beloved fiancé, Omid. “I studied hard, became a doctor and was able to maintain my work despite a very dark time in my country,” Zahra says in the film. “I can’t bear the thought of the Taliban possibly burning it all to the ground. Everything I’ve worked for.”
Director Mani has said that she decided to leave out of Bread & Roses some of the worst scenes to make it more palatable to western audiences — scenes depicting women who had been tortured by the Taliban, “killed, kidnapped and illegally detained. The situation is much worse than I say in the film.” Mani, founder of the Afghanistan Doc Film House production company, made the movie essentially as an act of resistance against the Taliban on behalf of millions of other Afghan women who continue to be beaten down and silenced by the ruthless thugs in charge of their country.
One of the executive producers of Bread & Roses, Malala Yousafzai, had her own horrific run-in with the Taliban in 2012: As a 15-year-old girl in Pakistan, she was shot in the head on a bus by a Taliban gunman as punishment for her daring to go to school and get an education. She survived the assassination attempt, and her continuing fight for women’s rights in the Middle East garnered international attention. At age 17 in 2014, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism, making her the youngest person ever to receive the award.
Hollywood actor and producer Jennifer Lawrence, along with her business partner Justine Ciarrocchi, serve as co-producers of the movie, securing some much-needed visibility and viability for the project. It is being released by Apple Original Films, the cinema unit of the Apple computer company.
And as dire as the situation is for women and girls in Afghanistan, Lawrence is correct in understanding that nations like the USA have no room to point fingers at other oppressive societies. Women’s rights are now under attack in the U.S., and the Trump regime’s second act in power ensures that fierce battles for gender equality and freedom to choose will need to be fought by Americans too.
“I live in a country where women’s rights are being taken away,” Lawrence said in an interview. “We live in a world in which women are oppressed. And when apathy begins to spread and shatter our empathy and our humanity, we lose contact with each other. It ruins the world, and it spreads. And that really scares me.”
Bread for all and roses too, a political slogan in the early 1900s, was originally coined by Helen Todd, a suffragist and worker’s rights activist in the U.S. More than a century later, Bread & Roses, the new guerrilla documentary film about Afghanistan, brings that spirit of resistance to oppression and gender apartheid to international audiences effectively as a call to action. May that call be heard and acted upon far and wide.
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