Calling @kaisfatdad!
I saw Black Orpheus for the first time last night. The 1959 Palme D’Or winner is french-directed but set in Rio at Carnival, and largely in the favellas. It is lyrical, colourful, vibrant and nor surprisingly full of Brazilian rhythm and tunes, including by Jobim.
This reminded of the many great Brazilian music threads on here – which I’m sure would have referenced Black Orpheus – and the discoveries I have made – are there any new ones out there?
In the meantime here is a clip
and here is a Jobim classic
Glad you enjoyed the film, Tim. It is wonderful and had no small role in popularising the music of Brazil, leading to the bossa nova craze of the early 60s.
I did a quick google and was delighted to see how many threads we have had where Brazilian music has made an appearance.
Here is Ed Motta, the Brazilian artist I have seen most recently.
I’ve mentioned the film Aquarius before. Great movie and fantastic soundtrack.
here it is.
Cheers, KFD – I did search for one I particularly recall which might have been around the last world cup but my skills let me down – which is why I thought i could excuse myself with asking for new ones..
Yes, I think I remember you recommending Aquarius – it is now definitely on my list as it’s on Netflix. The Black Orpheus I watched was the Criterion version which has the typical number of extra features including a 90 min doc on its impact!
Ed Motta – I must track that down, I first heard of when I got the ‘Too Slow To Disco Brasil’ compilation last month, which he compiles
Here is a track from it
Going to see this London-based lady on July 1st at Chandos Arms Jazz.
(Monica Vasconcelos – Fogo e Sal)
If you want weird, Brazil’s got weird too.
(Hermeto Pascoal – Música da Lagoa)
Hermeto Pascoal again in a more serious mood.
(Slaves Mass)
I like the sound of crazy Hermeto – where would you recommend starting?
I have no idea, as he’s pretty new to me. Not many albums available for sale from dodgerland, and most that are available are expensive. For example, “Slaves Mass” from them will cost you nearly 30 quid.
There are a good few of his albums on Spotify. One I fancy listening to right now, just because of it’s title is “Cerebro Magnetico”.
Miles Davis had him bring in some compositions and play on a May 27th 1970 session, some of which later turned up on the “Live/Evil” album. Miles failed to give him composition credits at the time but “Little Church” (originally titled Igrejinha), “Nem Um Talvez” and “Selim”, which is actually just a different take of “Nem Um Talvez”.
Here is one that we should hear when there are features on Brazilian music during the world cup.
Airto – Celebration Suite
And this is one version of the song that you will hear:
Tamba Trio – Mas Que Nada
For classic bossa nova stuff you can’t go wrong with a slew of new boxsets that have come out recently gathering classic albums at cheapo prices. Not hugely informative in terms of booklets etc, and presumably ‘out of copyright’, but there’s some stunning stuff on this one – including the first couple of Joao Gilberto albums and hard to find Sylvia Telles tracks.
More up to date – Eliane Elias turns out great Latin piano jazz albums on a regular basis – including last year’s ‘Dance of Time’ which was one of the best of the year for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlI5eTr5a-0
Here’s her live – hubby Marc Johnson on bass and the great Rafael Barata on drums – excellent deft drum solo at the 8 minute mark.
Excellent! A copy of that box is now winging it’s way to me.
Heavens, a tenner??
Some recent singer songwriterish stuff
Tulipa Ruiz . First heard in Sounds of the Universe in Soho and soon a firm favourite.
The exquisitely melodic Adriana Calcanhotto
Here is Maria Gadu doing a duet with Caetano, a daunting challenge for any young artist.
Ooh, I like that Adriana Calcanhotto
You have always been a man of taste, @timtunes.
Here is one of my favourite songs by Adriana.
As the mighty @Ivylander pointed out to me, it is a cover of this megahit by Claudinho & Bucheca.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd1c-gjsZ3U
A couple of talented guys from the favelas, they were an enormous success until Claudinho’s sudden death.
One more from them.
Cheers! Another one for the list!
Thanks to this thread I started digging in the AW archives and re-discovered Mestre Cupijo e Seu Ritmo who Alias recommended on a previous Brazilian thread. Steamy Siria music from the northern state of Para.
A little more background.
https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/brazil/mestre-cupijo-e-seu-ritmo-siria-23369/
Nice deep cut there
Not usually associated with Brazil, but Dionne Warwick plus an afro bloc do a tremendous version of Duke Ellington’s Caravan.
And also another thing not associated with Brazil – Afrobeat. Bixiga 70 are a great live band.
5 Esquinas
I loved Black Orpheus! It was one of my stepping stones to Brazil, where I’ve lived for the past 25 years! Here’s one I don’t remember having posted on one of my few posts here. It’s friends of mine in a fishing village on the other side of the bay here (I’m in Salvador). This is samba chula, Brazil’s analogue to the delta blues. The older guys here, the “men in black hats” in particular, grew up without electricity. No radio, no record players. Their music was what other people in the village made. They are the last generation in Brazil to grow up like this and in this sense are the last indisputably folk musicians in this amazing (and messed up) place (Brazil has problems). I was out there last on May 14th for a party.
Dionne Warwick, posted above, had a house here in Salvador. I don’t know if she still does. A lot of people who could have abandoned the city.
That wins the authenticity test!
I think it’s part of the thing where commercial music can be great, but it’s got to be music that would be made whether it earned money or not. An English friend of mine (I’m American) here in Salvador once said to me “Usually when you’re watching musicians on a stage, they have more money than you. But when it’s samba de roda (primordial Bahian samba), you have more money than them!” (although it’s rare that this kind of music makes it up to a stage; usually it’s down in the dirt)
It sounds so joyful. They may have no money but they know how to have a good time!
Hey Tiggerlion! I think that’s one of the keys to Brazilian music. That clip is of the original samba, born on the sugarcane plantations of Bahia where working/living conditions for slaves were horrible. Whatever despair they had in their lives was not expressed in their music and dance…quite the opposite. The common wisdom is that joyous samba was born in tears. The way I think of it is that samba was born in slavery and grew up in favelas (ghettos) under dictatorships and oligarchy. Brazil continues to be a horrible mess, but it also, probably because of that, continues to produce amazing, spirit-lifting music.
It’s amazing. I think that’s true of a lot of African music too. The music of Mali, a country torn apart by war, for example, is just wonderfully uplifting.
Nice to see you here @sparrowroberts. Our only contributor based in Brazil!
That samba kings clip was stupendous stuff. From your own YTube channel I see.
Who filmed it and where? It is done rather professionally and does not look like something that a tourist happened to chance upon.
E aí (“and there”, literally; but really “What’s up”) Kaisfatdad!
The film was organized and produced by a friend of mine Jorge Pacoa, out of love. Like many people here (me included) Jorge lives on the extreme edge financially, sometimes without money to put gas in his old car. Jorge’s retired and loves the Recôncavo, the area around Bahia’s bay which is basically Afro-Brazil Central, Brazil’s Mississippi Delta so to speak.
Actual filming was done by the brother of a friend of mine, who I don’t know well, but my friend is Roberto Torres, a writer from Pernambuco who is Hermeto Pascoal’s right-hand man. The music production was by Alex Mesquita and Yacoce Simões, who were part of a European tour ten years ago, with a show I wrote. Our director producer for that show, Toby Gough, is in London now, just having left the hospital having had a tumor removed from his brain. He came out very well, nothing impaired, having been advised of all sorts of horrible things that could have happened, including death.
Yacoce produced a record for Olodum, a group Paul Simon recorded with and with whom Michael Jackson recorded the clip “They Don’t Care About Us” (around the corner from where I’m sitting now, in my Brazilian music record shop, Cana Brava Records). To me it’s kind of interesting that the Olodum drumming style began as a way to play very traditional samba in a form allowing it to be marched to during Carnival (for bloco — group — Ilê Aiyê; David Byrne made a documentary about them). Then from there all sorts of variations and styles were created.
The “Samba Kings” location was the village of São Braz, located at the north end of the Baía de Todos os Santos, Bay of All Saints. The girls and lady with the boat on her head are from a bit further south down the bay, a place called Bom Jesus dos Pobres…Good Jesus of the Poor. The boat is a traditional thing in the village, where on New Year’s Eve it’s paraded around by singing residents and people put into it offerings to Yemanjá, female deity of the salt waters…and the boat is put into the water at midnight, a means of asking protection for the village fishermen.
I go through periods where I forget about The Afterword then then I’ll be sitting in here on a slow day and think to have a look. There’s a lot of great stuff in here! Wickedly funny! I get a lot more out of this site than I get out of, for example and with all due respect, The New Yorker.
That said, sometimes I have, not a problem at all, but the shadow of a personal doesn’t-rise-to-a-quibble, where a lot of the guys on here are children of the ’60s (I was born in ’53) and a good deal of the conversation is about the music popular when we came of age, which for the most part wasn’t even my bag when I was a long-haired kid with wire-rimmed glasses. Particularly not my bag was heavy rock drumming without swing, which didn’t keep from hanging out in places where this music was played because that’s where my friends went.
NOW my friends go to the sambas!
And THAT said, I’d like to own up to the fact that I found that A Flock of Seagulls song hereabouts quite enchanting! Everything I normally dislike. And there’s a parallel with Brazil there too:
The Brazilian music scene isn’t age conscious like in the U.S. (speaking of what I know). For example there’s a great samba group here — Grupo Botequim — run by Pedrão (Big Pedro), in his ’50s, with guys in their ’30s playing, and often Walmir Lima, now 86, will sing with them, songs written in the ’30s and ’40s, and teenagers and twenty-somethings singing along, knowing all the lyrics. I’m sticking a clip in below (Walmir’s not in it, but Martinho da Cuica, diminutive white-haired eminence, is there)…it’s kind of a Brazilian version of a session (I LOVE Irish traditional music too!!!)
Fab post, don’t be a stranger!!
Seconded!
Helpfully the whole album Casa Da Mae Joana has been posted on Youtube. Samba fans will love it.
Gave it a quick listen and that Casa da Mae Joana CD sounds like a treat, Alias.
And thanks for a wonderfully comprehensive answer to my question, Sparrow. I must Google a bit and find out more.
Let’s pay a visit to Bom Jesus dos Pobres and see that boat!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf5szkSrv6Q
Any comment that manages to include Hermeto Pascoal and A Flock of Seagulls gets my vote! Love the eclecticism on this site!
Ha! That’s the Festa de Yemanjá! Happens every February 2nd! I’m out there somewhere wandering around with a can of beer in my hand!
I’d love to get out there to Bom Jesus with you Kaisfatdad! I’ll be in the area on the last Sunday in July for Nego Fugido — something of a reenactment of slaves running away — in the village of Acupe, up the road from Bom Jesus. Then a couple of weeks later it’s the Festa da Boa Morte (Festival of the Good Death) in Cachoeira, also close by.
Brazil does government very badly but is unmatched for festivals and parties!
Brilliant quote there Sparrow!
Brazil does government very badly but is unmatched for festivals and parties!
I could rephrase it for my new home country:
Sweden does government fairly well but is not quite so hot on festivals and parties!
That is a bit unfair. Things are organised well here. And we get some great free concerts in the summer. But wild Bacchanalian ecstasy is really not the Nordic thing. We have a mini festival in our square in June. But it ends at 17.00!!
What is that about?
Anyway, I just stumbled across this clip of two of my great favourites: Marisa Monte from Rio and Adriana Calcanhoto from Porto Alegre.
A close friend of mine, another American who’s been living here in Salvador for the past 25 or so years, just got back from Portugal, Greece, Armenia, and St. Petersburg. He came round the record shop yesterday evening, my first visit with him since his return. Among much else he talked about the lack of street crime in these places, even Russia, which for no good reason I had rather assumed was something along the lines of Brazil’s.
And Brazil’s seems to be what many people now associate now most with this place. So the festivals can be great (and great emphasis on “can” there…they can also be lowest-common-denominator commercial awful), but security is what Brazilians are longing for. Security on the streets and in the neighborhoods. The security of not feeling that the government and economy could fall apart at any moment.
Sweden sounds very alright to me! I’ll bet that given the chance, 99 percent of the Brazilian population would be happy to move to there, settle in, settle down, and wind things up at a tidy 5 p.m. too!