Alex Shoumatoff - Early Writing and Music Career

Early Writing and Music Career

Graduating at 1968 into the turbulence of the late 1960s, after hearing the young Dylan's "Another Side of Bob Dylan", Shoumatoff aspired to be a songwriter. After a brief stint on the Washington Post as a night police reporter, with a draft classification of I-A and having no desire to go to the Vietnam War, he enlisted in an obscure Marine Corps reserve intelligence unit, which trained him to be parachuted behind the Iron Curtain and to melt into the local population. He was given intensive Russian Language schooling in Monterey, California, and there he fell in with the psychedelic counterculture, which was in full flower on the coast. Now 22 years old, he realized that he had made a huge mistake thinking he could do what the Marines were expecting, including the interrogation techniques they were teaching him. He turned to the Reverend Gary Davis with his moral predicament, and Davis made him a minister in a heated moment in a store-front church in Harlem. This enabled him to get an honorable, IV-D discharge from the Marines (the D standing for Divinity).

In 1970 Shoumatoff chose to "drop out" with his girlfriend and they lived on an old farm in New Hampshire. Here, he taught French at a local college and drove a school bus, wrote songs at the rate of two or three a day and became deeply interested in birds, then trees and mushrooms, and eventually every form of life following the naturalist tradition that ran strongly his family. Breaking up with the girl that fall, he drifted out to northern California, hanging out on a succession of communes and playing music around bonfires and writing more songs. There, he sold his profile of Gary Davis for $300 to Rolling Stone, then a broadside printed on newsprint that chronicled the Sixties counterculture, and got a song-writing contract with Manny Greenhill, the manager of Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, and Doc Watson. He went to New York City to perform his songs but was not confident in his singing and guitar-playing to play publicly, and ended up instead writing for magazines, starting with the Village Voice. He developed a piece on Florida into his first book, Florida Ramble, and married his editor's assistant. The young newlyweds lived in the Marsh Sanctuary in Mount Kisco, where he was the resident naturalist, and there was an overgrown Greek amphitheater that Isadora Duncan had danced in, which he restored and put on a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream The marriage lasted only two years, and the heartbroken Shoumatoff, after turning in his second book, a natural and cultural history of Westchester County, New York took off for the Amazon which he had been longing to explore since seeing the film "Black Orpheus" and listening to the bossa records of Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz. There he spent nine months in the rainforest, getting to a remote Yanomamo Indian village where that no one from the outside world had set foot in, and nearly dying of falciparum malaria. His book on the experience is a riveting account titled The Rivers Amazon, which was published by Sierra Club Press, and compared by reviewers with the classic books on the Amazon by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Walter Bates.

Returning to Mount Kisco with a beautiful young Brazilian wife and his perspective permanently altered, he learned that his Westchester book had been taken by the New Yorker and joined its staff in 1978. Shoumatoff established himself as "consistently the farthest-flung of the New Yorker's far-flung correspondents", as the New York Times described him, doing pieces on the pygmies in the Ituri Forest, on the lemurs of Madagascar, tracing the legendary Amazon women up a tributary of the Amazon, the Nhamunda, that no one except the local Indians and mestizos had been up since a Frenchman in 1890.

On these trips, Shoumatoff often took a small traveling guitar. On his frequent trips to Brazil, which he would end up writing four books about, he met the masters of bossa nova at the time, Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa, and wrote the first piece in English (for the New Yorker magazine's "Talk of the Town"), about Caetano Veloso. In Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), he jammed with Okay Jazz, Le Grand Maitre Franco's famous Zairian rumba band, and became a close friend with the ethnomusiciologist and bass player Benoit Quersin (who played on Chet Baker's legendary 1956 recording in Paris). Quersin soon after accompanied him on several of his adventures into remote, unknown corners of the world, including Madagascar and up the Nhamunda River in the Amazon. Shoumatoff was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book on "cultural ecology" in the tropics (In Southern Light).