Contact: Agusti camps Tel: [+ 33]

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Contact: Agusti camps Tel: [+ 33]"

Wilfred Blaze Small
6 years ago
Views:

1 Contact: Agusti camps Tel: [+ 33] agusti@free.fr

Other tropics A little more blue is the title of a song Caetano Veloso wrote when he was living in exile. To me, it reflects no doubt this journey through an intimate and ground-breaking repertoire.

I belong to that generation of Portuguese people who were not only brought up in Brazilian music from the cradle but were also strongly influenced by artists such as Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso,

2 Other tropics A little more blue is the title of a song Caetano Veloso wrote when he was living in exile. To me, it reflects no doubt this journey through an intimate and ground-breaking repertoire. We re going towards something bluer, more melancholic, slightly outside the festive celebration of a culture which is filled with colours and contrasts. I belong to that generation of Portuguese people who were not only brought up in Brazilian music from the cradle but were also strongly influenced by artists such as Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento and Gilberto Gil. When my friends and I were adolescents in Lisbon, the Revolution was still in full swing. Brazilian artists celebrated the period of joy and liberty we were experiencing in Portugal, and on our side, we listened passionately to their songs. But it wasn t merely a question of dancing to extraordinary rhythms or humming songs which were imbued with hypnotic languor. Because we were fortunate enough to share their language, we knew that not only were Chico Buarque or Caetano Veloso musicians, they were also great poets, thinkers and supporters of the resistance movement. For us, they were models. Listening to their music was a manner of being and seeing the world. But whereas we were living in freedom, they themselves were under a military dictatorship. They suffered censorship, they were hunted down and forced into exile. Their committed writing contained coded messages which we were able to decipher. Their songs were filled with hope, intelligence and courage. This is particularly true in the case of Chico Buarque s lyrics, which are admirable in their poetic genius and their spirit of resistance. The young musicians of the tropicalist movement, contemporaries of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were fired by a remarkable sense of provocation and desire for new expression. Their songs were nonconformist, sexy and unrestrained. An artist such as Caetano Veloso has constantly been seeking out new forms, both musical and poetic. It can be said of him that he has tried everything. His output reflects a thought-process which combines constant curiosity with an audacious and sensual wisdom. Distancing myself a little from the outward aspects of the Carnival, the feathers, the spangles as well as of the universally-acknowledged music standards of Samba and the Bossa Nova, my aim is to revisit these songs which are so full of meaning and at times of the most joyful nonsense, songs which guided my adolescent footsteps and taught me to look at the world with a critical eye, with sensuality, gravity and humour. A somewhat blue way of revisiting, perhaps, given the distance which separates us from the revolutionary years, one which certainly bears the mark of the saudade of my Portuguese background. I have inherited a shared mother-tongue, but my perception is inevitably different. Also, because I myself live outside my native country. I realize none of the participants in this particular enterprise is Brazilian, all of us perform in areas which are somewhat distant from this musical repertoire. Jeff Cohen is an American-born classical pianist, Joël Grare is a French percussionist who has played in baroque ensembles as well as rock groups, Emek Evci is a bass player born in Istanbul, who has played a lot of jazz and world music. As for me, my approach to these songs and their words is essentially that of an actress. We took hold of this repertoire in sheer joy and with a feeling of great liberty, proof no doubt that these Brazilian compositions also belong to the world-wide heritage. Maria de Medeiros

3 About the songs 1. Joana Francesa was composed in 1973 by Chico Buarque for the film Jeanne la Française by Carlos Diegues, with Jeanne Moreau in the title role. I have a vivid memory of Jeanne Moreau, supremely slender and elegant in Pierre Cardin costumes, performing against an Amazon setting. The rhythm of the song is that of a little waltz and the words are a sensuous mixture of French and Portuguese. It is all about physical love. The music aims at evoking the insidious and sticky sweatiness of the tropics, where everything is dizzy-laden sweetness, desire and exhaustion. 2. Acorda Amor (Love, wake up!) is a samba with a dancing rhythm that Chico Buarque wrote in 1974 under the pseudonym of Julinho de Adelaide. With its carefree and very-nearly happy atmosphere, perhaps aimed at warding off censorship, it describes all the anguish occasioned by a raid by the political police. A man wakes up his companion in the middle of the night, he hears the police climbing up the staircase causing mayhem. He knows what awaits him. The farewells are hurried. A lot has to be said in very little time and the meaning only hinted at. And then, there are practical things to think about: Don t forget the soap, the brush and the guitar. There is also the need to face up to realities. If I m away for a few months, you can be expected to suffer over it sometimes. But after a year, you can put on your Sunday best and forget about me. 3. A little more blue After being imprisoned by the military régime in Brazil, Caetano Veloso was living in exile in London. He was cold and homesick. He wrote this song in English, adopting the typically Portuguese mood of the saudade. Just as he did in several compositions from this period of his life, Caetano simply set out to watch and describe what he saw around him, the overall atmosphere being that of pop. Nevertheless, these very details of everyday life meant that memories were aroused in his mind, leading him to sadness and nostalgia. 4. I can remember from my childhood days of watching television one particular actor, Jo Soares, a very well known comedian in Brazil. One of the funniest characters he portrayed was that of a Brazilian exile in Paris, slumped deep in a settee, wrapped up in dozens of pullovers and blankets. He put a lot of French words into his accounts of life in the French capital, which were full of nostalgia. He coughed a great deal and was in agony over being separated from Rio s warm beaches. Samba de Orly likewise evokes exile and cold. Two friends say goodbye to each other in a European airport. There are the farewell words and the sadness of the one who has to stay behind. It is a team-work song, a form much appreciated by Brazilian writers. On this occasion, the authors were Vinicius de Moraes, Toquinho and Chico Buarque. The song dates from 1970, when the dictatorship was at its height. Chico Buarque s exile had taken him to Rome, so the song was originally called Samba de Fiumicino. But since there were a great many Brazilian exiles in Paris and perhaps, also, because Orly airport had been made famous in particular by a number of films, the song was renamed Samba de Orly.

4 5. Chico Buarque and Edu Lobo wrote a great many songs together, often for plays, musical comedies or the cinema. Acalanto is a poignant and little-known song on the death of a brother. For me, it is also a song of brotherhood and on the deep feelings of revolt which are aroused by the death of a human being. 6. April 1974 witnessed the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. It was an explosion of sheer joy and its shock waves reached Brazil. Chico Buarque wrote Tanto Mar (So much sea) to celebrate the event. The song was immediately censored in Brazil and was recorded only in Portugal in When the song was liberated in Brazil in 1978, the taste of freedom had already been tainted with bitterness in Portugal. Chico Buarque was thoroughly aware of this and of the fact that his song no longer reflected the realities of the day. He wrote a second version of Tanto Mar: Your party has been gleaned, my friend, but there certainly remains a forgotten seed in a corner of your garden. I wanted to record both versions of the song in order to point out the way history evolves and also because I have always been impressed by the extreme attention Brazilian song-writers pay to what is actually happening. When we began to work on the piece, Jeff Cohen pointed out the baroque character of its construction. It is perhaps a surprising aspect of the Portuguese Revolution but it seemed worthwhile going into it. 7. O que será (What will be) is probably Chico Buarque s greatest hit. The tune is known the world over and it has been sung in many languages to a huge variety of words. In France, the most famous version is Claude Nougaro s You will see. Chico Buarque himself set the tune to a number of different poems. All of them are beautiful. So far as I am concerned, the most meaningful one is the one I heard as a child. It is also the one with the greatest political significance. It was a complete revelation to me that a song could convey such a powerful, disturbing and intriguing message. Time cannot wither this poem. Quite the opposite. It really would seem that daily events as the years go by take on their true meaning via this complex, subversive, anguished and visionary song of resistance. 8. Right at the end of the 1970s, Começar de novo (Beginning again) became a feminist hymn. The song was composed by Ivan Lins for the Brazilian television serial, Malu Mulher, which enjoyed a huge success in Portugal. The story was about a comfortably-off middle-class woman, the mother of a little girl, who decided to divorce and face up to life on her own account. When I listened to this song again recently, in spite of the emotional impact it still has on me, my first reaction was to think that the demands being made were perhaps somewhat dated. But present-day realities give the lie to this. Although oppression takes more subtle forms in the West, you ve only got to shift to another continent to realize that the song is absolutely up-to-date. As the very structure of the song declares, it s a struggle that constantly needs beginning again. Finally, quite apart from questions to do with the genre, the song can be interpreted quite simply as the testimony of somebody who succeeds in getting out of a dependency relationship and is overcome by the extraordinary fever of freedom and the responsibilities that go along with it. 4

5 9. In 1969, an erotic year according to Gainsbourg, Chico Buarque wrote Samba e amor (Samba and Love). As was the case with Jeanne la Française, we are once again back in bed, an eminently political and creative place where you stay late, very late, whilst all around you, the town screams out the need to go about one s business, to produce and to consume. In this case, sheer idleness appears as a form of subversion. 10. O quereres (As you like it) by Caetano Veloso is in my view one of the most beautiful songs ever written about desire and its elusive freedom. Caetano once said that when he was writing it, he had in mind Bob Dylan s song It ain t me babe, in which there is the verse It ain t me you re looking for, babe. Here, we are smack in the middle of what was going on in May 1968, when private preoccupations became a political issue. A loving relationship is beyond any doubt an area where a multitude of ideas are explored. It is also a place where power can be exercised. But the very nature of desire is to escape from all control. The question therefore is: amalgam or otherness? Where does love lie? 11. Outros sonhos (Other dreams) is a leap of many years forward in time that Chico Buarque suggested to me. When I talked to him about my project and showed him my selection of songs, he said that I should have a look at his most recent production, his CD Carioca. I was immediately hooked by it. Its atmosphere is very moving and quite different from that of the other songs I had selected. I like it particularly because it provides a complete contrast with the extreme violence and sarcasm that Chico Buarque put into his songs of political dissension in the 1970 s. With apparent innocence and the lightness that springs from wisdom, the song stresses the relativity and fragility of all struggles. And isn t the struggle which aspires to the establishing a hold over the heart of another person, the one surely lost in advance? 12. O seu amor (Your Love) seems to me to be a lucid response to the love-situation contradictions expressed in O quereres: Your love, leave it and let it be what it is. In this playful and crystalline song, there is a suggestion of naive art which enchants me. But we all know that simplicity is often the end-result of the utmost sophistication. It is far from easy to match, using another language, the original interpretation of O seu amor, presented as it was by the four voices of Maria Bethania, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso on the recording published in 1976 under the title Doces Barbaros. It seemed to me that only a very minimalist version could come anywhere near the clarity of the song. 13. Ela faz cinema (She s just putting on an act) is also in Chico Buarque s recent album Carioca. Unlike what he often did, which was placing himself directly in the point of view of a young woman and speaking as a female voice, Chico Buarque here watches a grown up woman from a distance, in fascination, but cautiously. Where once there was passion, there is still feeling, but all is tainted with sham, with the awareness of multiplicity and the need for masks. When she lies, I don t know if she feels the lies she s telling me. Nevertheless, within this deep otherness, there is still a source of comfort: I cannot live without her. End of story. 5

6 14. My grandmother used to sing me A noite do meu bem (The night of my love) as a lullaby. In reality, it is a love song and it is probably the first Brazilian melody that I ever heard. It was composed by a woman, Dolores Duran, a poet and composer who died at the age of 29 in Amongst the gems she left behind, there is this one which has been interpreted by many international artists. Over the years, it has maintained its astonishing emotive impact, expressed in many languages and in a wide variety of cultural settings. Biography Maria de Medeiros was born into a family of intellectuals. Her mother is a journalist, her father a pianist, composer, conductor and music historian. She spent her childhood in Vienna, in Austria, and then followed her parents to Lisbon, after the Carnation Revolution in Both in Austria and in Portugal she went to the French School. At fifteen, she performed her first leading role in a movie, Silvestre, by João César Monteiro. Still a teenager, she started to act in classical theatre plays, directed by Philippe Fridman. At eighteen, she moved by herself to Paris where she started to study philosophy before she entered a National Theatre School (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre). Two years later, she became a pupil at the prestigious Conservatoire National Supérieur d Art Dramatique de Paris. She studied with Michel Bouquet and Jean-Pierre Vincent. Simultaneously, she played Elvire, Jouvet 40, directed by Brigitte Jaques at the Athénée Theatre. This play was performed in Paris for three years and was shown in many countries all over the world. Later, Maria acted in numerous plays and films both in France and abroad. She played Corneille, Lorca, Mairet and Calderón, with directors such as Brigitte Jaques, Jorge Lavelli, Jean-Marie Villégier and José Luis Gomez, in important National Theatres like Chaillot, Théâtre de la Colline and Théâtre de l Odéon. She performed in France in films by Chantal Ackerman, Christine Laurent, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean-Charles Tacchella, Serge Moati, Didier Le Pêcheur, Bernard Rapp, Christian de Challonges, Gérard Pullicino, John Lvoff, Patrick Braoudé and Richard Berry amongst others. In the United States, Maria starred in big productions such as Henry & June by Philip Kaufman and Quentin Tarantino s Pulp Fiction. But she also acted in a few independent films. Maria remained very faithful to Portuguese cinema. She worked with Manoel de Oliveira, Teresa Villaverde, Luis Galvão Telles and Joaquim Leitão. She also performed in Spanish films like Golden balls (Huevos de Oro) by Bigas Luna, The detective and Death, by Gonzalo Suarez or Airbag by Juanma Bajo Ulloa. She worked with directors from England, Canada, Italy, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Brazil English, Canadian, Italian, German, Austrian, Japanese and Brazilian productions. 6

7 In France, she starred in a few TV movies, by directors such as Joyce Buñuel, Robert Enrico or Miguel Courtois. Recently, she played one of the leading roles in the successful series by Tonie Marshall Venus and Apollo. Simultaneously to her career as an actress, Maria started at the age of twenty to direct short and medium length films, such as Fragment II, based on the play by Samuel Beckett, and Death of the Prince, based on the play by Fernando Pessoa. In 1999, she directed her first feature film, April Captains (Official Selection at Cannes 2000) about the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. The film won the Grand Prix at the International São Paulo Film Festival in Brazil, the Golden Globe for the best film in Portugal and several public awards in France. Later, she directed a documentary, Je t aime, moi non plus Artists and critics, on the relationship between artists and critics. She also directed a few shorts such as Alguma coisa acontece, which is part of a feature film commemorating the city of São Paulo s 450 years, together with many internationally renowned film makers. As an actress, she was given the Prix Gérard Philippe in 1990 and several Best Actress awards in international film festivals. She was awarded the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress at the Venice International Film Festival in 1994 for the film Two Brothers, my sister by Teresa Villaverde. She also received two Portuguese Golden Globes for Best Actress for Adam and Eve and April Captains. In 2001, she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France. Maria often sang in her career as an actress, in theatre musicals such as Zazou by Jérôme Savary, or more recently, in Guy Maddin s film The saddest music in the world. But A little more blue is her first exclusively musical project. More info Concerts info Agustí Camps agusti@free.fr a_little_more_blue@mariademedeiros.net Phone number

LEILA PINHEIRO. International Management Marcus Fernando / skype: marcusfernando

LEILA PINHEIRO. International Management Marcus Fernando / skype: marcusfernando LEILA PINHEIRO Leila Pinheiro was born in Belém, in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. She started playing the piano when she was 10, and ten years later dropped out of medical school to devote herself