Brazilian
music of the past four decades in particular the styles rooted in
traditional samba, bossa nova, Msica Popular Brasileira and, lately, electronic-dance-samba
hybrids - has, for many fans, composers and players, come to represent an
artistic approach closest to offering the best of all musical worlds rolled
up in one big, shiny ball.
The music's practitioners will tell
you this owes to a couple of factors: the country's cultural roots and the
music's pure form. The cultural aspect involves the history of Brazil's
people and the specific racial and cultural equations engendered when
African slaves mixed with European settlers and the region's Indians (sound
familiar?). The short version: When the brilliant African-derived rhythms
refashioned by the descendants of the slaves were infused with high-grade
European harmony and melody (mostly of French, Spanish and Portuguese
origins), the samba was created.
Yes, Brazil is a large country with
many musical strands. But it's samba's architecture that has come to
represent the country's lifeblood. The form not only offers a dominant rhythm,
but is also a strain of music whose basic requirement is a near-perfect
balance among rhythm, melody and harmony. And its younger kin, bossa nova
along with the more recent outpourings of DJ and electronic-inspired dance
styles puffs out in all directions from there. But dig far enough into
each, and you'll find the composers' common reverence for the golden braid
of Brazil's rhythm-melody-harmony.
The newest album by Kassin +2, Futurismo (Luaka Bop), is the third in
a trilogy of +2 albums (also Domenico +2's 2004 Sincerely Hot and Moreno +2's Music
Typewriter
from 2001) released by the three members of one of the best and most
relevant bands in Brazil. The trio, Moreno, Domenico and Kassin, are
bursting with great ideas about how to bring Brazilian music into the 21st
century. Each is an amazingly versatile composer and multi-instrumentalist,
with a typically Brazilian love of musical variety, Brazilian or not. In
this respect, they are the heirs to the greats of Brazil's Tropicalismo and
rock movements of the late '60s and early '70s, including Gilberto Gil, Tom
Zé,
Os Mutantes and Caetano Veloso, who proudly "cannibalized"
English Invasion bands and American rock and jazz artists to incorporate
into their own samba-rooted and Brazilian folklorical musics.
Moreno, in fact, is the son of
venerated Tropicalista Caetano Veloso, who helps out on a few tracks on Music
Typewriter.
(The two collaborated on Veloso's album Ce.) The record heralds a new
era of tasteful electronics/samba crossbreeds. Placed alongside the suavely
gorgeous, more traditionally lyrical gems of Brazil's past, the music makes
some kind of logical sense. That Moreno sounds like his dad when he sings
is nice, but what is mind-blowing is how, in tracks like "Enquanto
Isso" and "Paro X," the son has arrived at such a precise
synthesis of old and new, has written what sound to my ears like bona fide,
new Brazilian classics. He's composing music with a comfortable
familiarity, like you've been hearing it all your life. And the closing
tune, "I'm Wishing," is so achingly beautiful, it makes a
listener want to jump off the nearest cliff.
That "want to jump off a
cliff" quality termed saudade, which Brazilians insist can't be translated
into English but which in essence means a sweet-sad nostalgia comes and
goes on these +2 recordings, as if the band has updated the Brazilian
attitude and taken a plucky, headlong dive into unknown electronic- and
rock-flavored emotional terrain. The beauty in much of the trio's music is
there in spades, but, generally speaking, possesses a younger, more
leathery attitude toward nostalgia. It's far less bittersweet.
Singer-drummer extraordinaire
Domenico +2's Sincerely Hot is a head-spinningly eclectic batch of new Brazilianness
that stews samba, bossa nova, Tropiclia, MPB (Msica Popular Brasileira),
rock and electronic glitch/loop together in very tough-minded yet beautiful
ways. How can it be that someone so young can have this mastery of rhythm
and melody? He is (perhaps not coincidentally) the son of Ivor Lancellotti,
a highly regarded '70s samba composer and singer. (And in the '90s,
Domenico formed an experimental rock band called Mulheres Que Dizem Sim
or, Women Who Say Yes.)
Domenico, a human octopus of
ferocious percussion skills, presents minimalistic tracks, like
"Alegria Vai L," whose gurgling, buzzing synths, relentless
driving polyrhythms, quirky found-sound loops and repetitions deliver a
kind of ecstatic madness, a hypnosis, like a Brazilian version of NYC
proto-synth-punk band Suicide, or, better, a Carioca Deutsche-Amerikanische
Freundschaft. Yet the lovely "Aeroporto 77" has those timeless
descending/ascending bossa chords and lounge vibes, which ride over wobbly
Wurlitzer organ comps. (This just-killer chord sequence, by the way,
harkens back to the trick learned from the Brazilians' revered French
composers, especially Debussy, who hints at chord sequences that never
actually arrive.)
In Domenico's effervescent
"Possibilidade," bubbly with flutes, trombones, acoustic guitars
and rolling, marching polyrhythms, the impossibly pleasant chord
progressions suggest a sunny afternoon daydream that recalls British
orch-pop aesthetes the High Llamas. Want some contrast? "Voc e eu"
is, well, a death-metal mash-up dotted with random electronics and a lot of
noise. Hard to believe such claustrophobic mayhem comes from the same head
as something as soothingly dulcet as "Tarde de Chegada" or the
grainy analog mystery called "Arrivederci," which one might
mistake for the theme to a 1970s Jess Franco film.
The glory of Brazilian music's
historically unbiased mashing up of disparate musical strains and grand
song structures can be heard in the music of composer-performers such as
Tom Jobim, Lo Borges and Milton Nascimento, all of whom were probably
absorbed by Kassin. His Futurismo, like Music Typewriter and Sincerely Hot, visits a new place in
contemporary Brazilian expression, where beauty and lyricism are never lost
even as Kassin probes his fascination with unexplored electronic and
rock-aligned territory.
Kassin is the imaginative producer
of a number of popular Brazilian artists, including Bebel Gilberto and
Marisa Monte, and on Futurismo, he collaborates on several tunes with John McEntire of
Chicago instrumentalists Tortoise and Sean O'Hagan of the High Llamas
which makes wonderful sense. O'Hagan has arranged tracks for many artists,
all of whom mine an area of...hmmm, well, call it contemporary daydream rock.
Its common goal is to concoct the perfect pop admixture of sweetness and
modernity.
In
Kassin's "Tranqilo," the tremolo guitar, swishing/clopping
polybeats and aquatic feel of vibraphones amble about with no particular
place to go; it seems to have no goals, no worries. In "O Seu
Lugar," classic bossa chord progressions rise and fall simultaneously;
an easygoing beat, relaxed vocals, mellow electric piano and bird
tweets...these effects are subtle, panning left and right and twining 'round
Monsanto electronic sounds. You're in the '60s, the '70s or thereabouts,
and it feels good.
