Paulo Moura, master musician

The great Brazilian clarinettist and saxophonist Paulo Moura died on July 12^th last year. I’m usually on top of the news from Brazil but this event passed me by and I did not find out about it until a few days ago, when I visited his web site to see if there were any new recordings available. This was the second piece of bad news that I had received from Brazil this month (see my previous posting) and although it concerned the death of only one man as opposed to over 800 people in the floods at the latest figure, I was equally saddened by it.

I first became aware of Paulo Moura on a compilation CD that I bought about 18 years ago called ‘The Sounds of Brazil’ This particular album seems to have disappeared now, although a quick internet search reveals that umpteen different compilations with the same name are currently available. There was nothing that special about this one, except that there was so little Brazilian material available in my part of the world at the time that I would buy anything that I could get my hands on, even if a CD only had one or two tracks of apparent interest to me. Such was the case here. I bought the album for two tracks by Gilberto Gil and one featuring Milton Nascimento.

Imagine my surprise and delight when one track grabbed my attention far more than the ones I had bought the album for. That track was ‘Chorinho pra Você’ (Chorinho for You – you can read about chorinho -  or choro as it is better known in this country - here) and it was credited to one Paulo Moura. There was no further information but I was hooked by the sound, which was like no other Brazilian music that I had heard at that point. It seemed like some kind of weird hybrid of Latin-American rhythms and New Orleans jazz, but with amazing bass counterpoint runs which were played on what I now know to be a seven string guitar, a six string guitar, and another high, driving, stringed instrument sound that I thought was another kind of mandolin but which turned out to be a cavaquinho. This was magical stuff that combined great ensemble playing with improvisation of the highest order. Paulo Moura’s clarinet was great, and there was also a splendid trombonist with a unique sound and terrific technique. Oh, and the whole thing was powered by a three piece percussion section led by what I eventually discovered to be a pandeiro.

All in all, this one track laid the foundations for the major expansion of my interest in Brazilian music and acted as a stepping-off point to a whole new world of stuff. I made my first trip to Brazil the following year and set out around the São Paulo record shops (the CD format was slow to take off in Brazil and most shops had far more cassettes than CDs at that time) with a list of artists that I was interested in and with the guidance of Alberto, who I met on that first trip and who subsequently became one of my best friends. Paulo Moura was on that list but I didn’t get my hands on ‘Mistura e Manda’ ('Mixed and Sent'. Thanks to my friend Vagner for help with that translation!)* - the album from which ‘Chorinho pra Você’ was taken - until a few years later. By that time I was already pretty certain that the trombonist was the splendid Zé da Velha because I had subsequently recognised his sound on other albums that I had bought, but I now learned that the 7 string guitarist was the extraordinarily talented and now late lamented Rafael Rabello. Another notable musician on the album was the bandolim player Joel Nascimento - also a favourite of mine - and although he didn’t play on that first track that I heard, it does illustrate rather nicely how one discovery can lead on to another.

As I acquired more albums of Brazilian music I began to notice how often Paulo Moura would crop up in the credits, and not just as a choro musician. The 1962 Cannonball Adderley release – ‘Cannonball’s Bossa Nova’ – features the eponymous Mr Adderley with the Bossa Rio Sextet, a group which included Sergio Mendes on piano, Dom um Romão on drums (who would go on to play with Weather Report), and a certain Paulo Moura on alto saxophone. The fact is that Paulo Moura was another of those musicians who transcended genre and just played music. He was as at home in a classical setting as he was in a jazz environment and he brought elements of both to bear when he played choro. One of my favourite albums of his is called ‘Rhapsody in Bossa – Paulo Moura visita Gershwin and Jobim’ (Paulo Moura visits Gershwin and Jobim). It is a live recording from 1998 and features – unsurprisingly – compositions by George Gershwin and Tom Jobim. However, the whole programme is played with a mixture of jazz feeling, Latin rhythms and humour, not to mention a sprinkling of circus band and a touch of Klezmer!

I could continue to enthuse about his various albums at great length but if you’ve read this far then you are probably interested enough to go out and buy one of them. I know that I will be watching closely for any previously unobtainable material that may be issued in the wake of his death. For me at least, I feel sad to think that I will now never get to see him perform live…

This is a version of Chorinho pra Voce which is taken from a great film about Choro and Choro musicians, called 'Brasilerinho'. It's available on DVD and is an absolute joy of a movie. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that the trombonist on this is Ze da Velha.

Paulo was equally at home with the younger musicians. Here he is with Yamandu Costa in a version of  La Paloma which they recorded together when Yamandu was in his early twenties




Paulo Moura – 1932 - 2010

* updated translation - the phrase is roughly equivalent in meaning to: "chuck it in and see what happens". Thanks to Son of Voltarol for that.

A sad Anniversary

It’s exactly a year since I was in Teresópolis  ( see Back in Brazil again) and I was saddened to discover this morning that it had been badly hit by the floods in Brazil, with over 100 people dead. It’s hard to get one’s head around the fact that torrential rains can flood a place that is 2,800 feet above sea level, even though I’m well aware of the number of rivers in the vicinity and in fact have experienced heavy rainfall and rising rivers in that region first hand.

A few years ago we were travelling back to Rio de Janeiro after a week spent exploring in Minas Gerais. It started to rain and within a few minutes it was falling so heavily that we had to pull off the road and stop, as visibility was down to about ten feet. We sat in the car and watched as great chutes of churning, mud-coloured water began to burst from the banks at the sides of the road and gush down the highway, carrying all manner of detritus before them. Fortunately the rain eased back to a less terrifying level after about twenty minutes, and we were able to proceed – somewhat cautiously – on our way. Never-the-less, the rain continued to fall heavily and steadily for the next three hours and we drove past several rivers whose waters were lapping over their banks, and it became clear to us that we were not likely to make it to Rio that night.

We ended up in the vilest hotel it has ever been my misfortune to stay in, in the town of Petrópolis, which is quite near Teresópolis and has much to recommend it, although the Hotel Girassol definitely does not fall in to that category. But that’s a tale for another day.

For those of you who wish to know more about the floods you can check out the BBC report here.

That was the year that was

Well, another year is done and dusted and it is time for me to reflect briefly on the musical highlights of my year, before I get so drunk celebrating the start of a new one that I can’t even remember typing this sentence…

The whole of my last Brazil trip in January and February was chock-a-block with good musical moments but the highlight of all of those was also my GIG OF THE YEAR. You can (if you so wish and haven’t done so already) read more about the trip generally here, but the gig in question was a concert by Yamandu Costa and Hamilton de Holanda at the marvellous Auditório Ibirapuera, in São Paulo. It was a evening of sublime music played by two virtuoso instrumentalists who obviously have the greatest of respect for one another, performed in a near-perfect acoustic environment. When we left the building after the concert I was still having difficulty in seeing properly because their encore had caused me to quite literally weep with joy!

Here is a clip of them playing ‘Samba do Rafa’ - a Yamandu Costa composition that is a tribute to the great Raphael Rebello - at a concert that they gave at the same venue in 1997.

And here is a clip from the actual 2010 concert. I have included the first clip because they played the tune that night and it is one of my favourites but unfortunately I couldn't find that version on YouTube.
This one is called 'Meiga' ('Sweet') and is another Yamandu composition.

And for good measure here is 'Suite Retratos Numero Quatro' (Portrait Suite Number Four) which was composed by one of Yamandu's big influences - Radamés Gnattali.

My CD of the year is, I suppose unsurprisingly, also Brazilian. It is ‘Noites de Gala Ao Vivo'
 (Gala Nights Live) by Mônica Salmaso and Pau Brasil, 

which actually came out in 2009 but which I bought earlier this year. Monica had this to say about it on her website (I took the liberty of copying it here because I could not create a link to the English version.) - "When we released the DVD of this project, Biscoito Fino had already asked us to release the live CD.

At first, I was against this idea because when the DVD was recorded (March 2008), there had been very few changes in our performance regarding the CD recorded in the studio. We were the same group, playing the same songs with the same arrangements.
I thought that launching a product that was so similar to the one we had launched the year before didn’t make sense.
Between April and November 2008, our dream came true. We went on a tour that covered 21 cities in all regions in Brazil.
I had fulfilled the dream of being able, for the first time, to take the same show with the same technical team and part of the equipment to so many cities for almost a year.
After a 10-year career, I had the opportunity to kind of “map” the audience that has been gradually formed, without a great commercial exposure.  And what surprised me most was the fact that my work had an audience in many cities I had never been to before, formed in a spontaneous way and with great identification. Brazil, such a big country and with difficult communication (beyond the unilateral reach of television), became a little smaller with this tour and I felt, more than ever, like a “countrywide” artist, not only from the southeast region where I was born, live and work most of the time.
When we were on tour, we performed in the most beautiful theaters of each city, historical theaters where both the artist and the audience feel happy for being there.
We visited the cities, met people and got to know places and, the same way as the show, we ourselves had the opportunity to “unify” Brazil by means of those trips. 
When we returned to Fecap Theater in São Paulo on October 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 2008, there had been considerable musical changes in the show. We had performed the show for more than 80 times in several theaters and other nuances, novelties and more musical property were incorporated into the arrangements, besides having included the song FLOR DA IDADE in the repertoire. Like food that is slowly cooked in a wood-burning stove, the show got the same “flavor” of being well done and that only practice and time can provide.
To our luck, the show on October 3 was recorded and, we were even luckier, well recorded without the need of major changes to be made. It was very musical and reflected exactly our feeling that it had gained musicality during the tour, the trips, after the repetitions, with the different audiences and in the various theaters. When I listened to this recorded show, I finally decided to launch it so that the cycle of the project could be completed and we could share this recording and the maturation of the show.
I thank the musicians of the Pau Brasil group for the partnership, all the team that worked seriously and with love for the success of our tour, the local producers, the press in all the cities where we had shows, the sponsors of the tour (Bradesco Prime), Fecap theater for the place we love and for having recorded the show and Biscoito Fino for all support and beautiful projects."

It has to be said that, great though the Yamandu and Hamilton de Holanda gig was, if I’d seen this gig this year then it would have been gig of the year as well. Oh, and there’s a DVD of it as well and I nominate that for DVD of the year! Here is a a promotional clip for the DVD. If you look on YouTube there are a number of clips that have been posted by people who have filmed from the audience but non of them do justice to the sound quality of the original and I therefore do not add them here. Rather, I would urge you to track it down and buy it!!!

Well, that's it for 2010. I trust that it has been a good year for you and that the next one will be an even better one. 

Happy New Year!

Feliz Ano Novo!

Voltarol’s Christmas Cracker

The festivities are upon us once more and who am I to cry “Bah! Humbug!”? Well - a fairly disgruntled senior citizen of the UK, that’s who, but my gruntle is no more dissed than most peoples and I don’t feel inclined to vent my spleen here. There’s plenty of time for that next year.

No – since it is the time when chestnuts are nipping at your toes and Jack Frost is roasting on an open fire (thanks for that line, Denny. I stole it shamelessly), I thought I’d share a few things with you that make me laugh. I shan’t bother to annotate them as they will either entertain you or they won’t and they are all self explanatory. All you need to know is that they are a source of great amusement to me – and if they don’t amuse you well “Bah! Humbug!” anyway…

Cheers!

Danu Fox in Falmouth

Landlord Nick Swan is promoting the first in what he anticipates will be a series of innovative musical evenings in the restaurant area of the Four Winds Inn in Falmouth when he presents Danu Fox and Sorisso on Saturday December 11^th. Danu and Sorisso have put together an evening of music that combines musical influences from both North and South America, combining Latin rhythms with jazz standards and throwing some bossa novas and other Brazilian music into the mix.

Singer Danu Fox is known for her musical eclecticism and is equally at home in the jazz, folk, Latin and World music fields. This original and accomplished singer has been likened to Sarah Vaughan. Her spellbinding voice has been described as ‘the smoothest in Cornwall’.

Sorisso is the latest of a series of musical units featuring Pete Kubryk Townsend and Pete Turner. Whenever these two get together you can be certain of a strong Brazilian slant to things. Pete Kubryk Townsend, whilst better known in Europe as a superb double bass player, is also a fine exponent of the nylon string guitar (or ‘violão’ as it is known in Brazil). It is on this instrument that he joins percussionist Pete Turner (who has honed his skills playing all over Brazil in recent years) for this venture. The trio is completed by double bassist Tim Greenhalgh, an excellent player with some twenty years of professional experience to his credit, who has previously played with both Petes in separate ventures.

p.s.

Any resemblance between Voltarol and Pete Turner is purely coincidental (it says here...)

A man of constant Choro

The other week my good friend Pete Kubryk Townsend phoned me with the suggestion that we get together to run through some Choros together. He had acquired the music for some and was eager to give them a try. A few days later we sat down in my living room with two other curious recruits and began to work through some of the tunes. Four hours later we agreed that we had the makings of a Choro group on our hands and agreed to meet up on a regular basis to knock some of this material into shape.

“So what?” I hear you yawn. Well, the point is that this particular music form dates back to the late nineteenth century and has a lot in common with ragtime and yet the musicians involved in this particular project include two young students and one of the teachers on the Truro College jazz degree course. They, like me, are totally enthused by it and obviously find it relevant and satisfying music to play. So what is this music that we’re all getting so excited about?

Choro seems to have started in Rio de Janeiro around about 1870. According to Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha in their book ‘The Brazilian Sound’ – “ In its early days, choro was less a genre than a style, with Afro-Brazilian syncopation and a Brazilian flair added to fashionable European dance music of the time, including waltzes, polkas, schottishes, quadrilles and mazurkas. The pioneering figure Joaquim Antônio da Silva Calado (1848 – 1880) founded the group Choro Carioca in 1870, the same year he was appointed a teacher at Rio’s Imperial Conservatory of Music” Calado, a virtuoso flautist, was joined by two guitars and a cavaquinho. The music that he composed for this group seems to have been based around his virtuosity and set the tone for the Choro groups that were to follow – as did the instrumental line up. By around 1900 Choro had settled down as a distinct and recognisable genre which continued to evolve and spawn new talent.

The evolution of this music seems to have a lot in common with the evolution of Ragtime in North America, being an admixture of African and European musical styles, although Choro is generally believed to slightly predate Ragtime, which seems to have emerged around 1890. Never-the-less there are distinct parallels to be found between the two forms Just as elements of ragtime helped shape the newly emergent Jazz, so elements of Jazz were incorporated into Choro – particularly by the great Pixinguinha, who added saxophone and trombone to the sound. By the late1930s Choro has even penetrated the market outside of South America. I’ll hazard a wager on the likelihood of most people over the age of forty having heard ‘Tico Tico’ (originally ‘Tico-Tico na Fubá’) which was written by Zequinha de Abreu in 1917 and sung by Carmen Miranda in the Hollywood movie ‘Copacabana’ in 1947.

This is not the original film version but dates from around the same time

The fortunes of the genre have waxed and waned in the intervening years – sometimes generating a new batch of great composers and performers and sometimes lying dormant for years at a time – but it has always remained there in the background of Brazilian popular musical taste, influencing many musicians and often being reworked and reinterpreted in new and interesting ways. In the last few years it has generated a new following in North America (which I have written about elsewhere in this blog (Strike up the Bandolim), and is currently undergoing another revival of interest in Brazil. I was fortunate enough to visit a private Choro club in São Paulo a couple of years ago and was delighted to see that the age of the audience ranged from about 12 to 75 or more. More to the point, the age range of the musicians wasn’t that different, starting as it did at around 24 or 25. Brazilian jazz musicians continue to draw on the Choro repertoire for inspiration  and the great Benjamin Taubkin has recently released a whole CDs worth of Choros under the title ‘Modern Tradição’ (Modern Tradition’) which includes works by some of the genre’s finest composers – Pixinguinha, Jacob de Bandolim, Kchimbinho, Garoto and Ernesto Nazareth.

Yes, this music is alive and well 140 years after it first emerged, and is still finding new adherents every day.  I can’t wait for the next gathering of our group.


If these few words on the subject have whetted you r appetite then here are a few examples for you to savour - first, a classic Pixinguinha tune performed by the master and his band.

And next the same tune reinterpreted in 1978 by the great Elis Regina





Next, a more classical interpretation of a Garoto tune by Paulo Bellinati -






and finally, two great young contemporary musicians from Brazil - both of whom I have written about elsewhere on this blog - perform an Ernesto Nazareth tune. Enjoy!

Taubkin's back in town

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that that masterful Brazilian pianist Benjamin Taubkin will be appearing in London on Saturday November 6th. The bad news - well for me at any rate - is that I will not be there for the concert. I can't tell you how cheesed off I am to be missing the gig. As followers of this blog will know, Benjamin Taubkin is one of my favourite musicians and I was fortunate enough to be able to interview him  the last time he was here. All I can say is - go and see him if you possibly can. You won't regret it!