Back
to the Books and Other Writings page
Back to the Archive Contents page MARISA
MONTE
By Elijah Wald
At 30, Marisa Monte is the top-selling female singer in Brazil.
Despite this, she is something of an anomaly. Though a product of
the rock generation, she bases her sound in the acoustic instrumentation
of the older MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira) style. Her albums include
original material, and covers that range from MPB stars like Caetano
Veloso to Lou Reed. Her last album had guest appearances by Gilberto
Gil, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass. Famed for her cutting-edge
live shows, she chose to decorate her newest album with a crude
drawing of a topless woman by an underground comic artist of the
1950s.
To Monte, this is all completely natural. “I am from Rio
de Janeiro, and grew up listening to all this traditional information
of Brazilian music, and also my generation had a lot of pop, international
influence,” she explains in slightly broken English. “So
I represent this young music, which is based on mixes, like our
culture. Talk about Brazil is talk about variety, diversity and
mixes, because we are such a big country with a lot of different
styles of music. We had these mixes in our traditional music, and
we are still creating new ones.”
Monte, who appears at Berklee Performance Center this Sunday, became
interested in a singing career in her early teens. She received
formal classical training, and appeared in school shows and as a
backup vocalist for friends who were forming bands and making demo
recordings. Her decision to devote herself to Brazilian pop came
while in Italy, where she had gone at 18 to pursue her vocal studies.
“I was thinking of living there and doing a classical career,”
she says. “But when I was alone there in Italy, I saw Brazil
for the first time from outside and I realized how important it
was for me. I realized how I missed Brazilian music, and how impossible
it would be to have a classical career and live outside of Brazil.”
She returned to Rio a year later, and immediately attracted attention
with her dynamic live shows. For over two years she resisted making
a record, letting her reputation spread through the press and by
word of mouth, then recorded her first album as the soundtrack to
a live TV special. It was a sensational success, heralding a new
era in Brazilian pop. Since the end of the military dictatorship
in the early 1980s, rock had dominated the national charts. “There
was the political opening, and it was the opportunity for a lot
of young people to get into the musical area and to reestablish
the freedom of expression,” Monte says. “So they did
it through the rock movement; the music was powerful and screamed,
and it had to be like that.
“At that time, we had a break in our music. MPB had a temporary
decadence, because this rock movement took all the market. When
I really started, in ‘87, I was one of the first artists to
put together the new artists, the new poets of the rock movement,
and the traditional music, so young people could listen to MPB again
and a lot of old people could enjoy the rock compositions.”
At its best, Monte’s music combines disparate elements in
fusions that seem completely natural. “Cerebro Eletronico,”
off her new “A Great Noise” album, sounds at first like
techno-pop. It is only after a moment that one realizes that the
pulsing beat comes not from a synthesizer but an accordion. Her
voice on the chorus is electronically modified, providing a striking
contrast to the fierce cry of her unmodified lead vocal, and the
whole is driven by pounding drums and acoustic guitars.
“Accordion, percussion, acoustic guitar, mandolin, and voice,
these are the most popular instruments in Brazil,” Monte says.
“So I made this choice to make all the songs in this atmosphere.
The idea was to be very organic, acoustic, without synthesizors,
because the most important character of our music is to be human,
not to be electronic. We also use a lot of synthesizors, but it
is not our best. The best in Brazilian music is the human feeling,
and that’s what I was searching for.”
Asked about the album cover, a smiling nude who, for American release
only, has been censored with a black bar over her nipples, and the
naked couples who cavort through the pages of the CD booklet, Monte
explains that they are also an element of her cultural message.
“These are by an artist, Carlos Zefiro, who has a great historical
importance,” she says. “He produced these little erotic
books during the peak of the moralism and the dictatorship in Brazil.
He produced clandestinely, nobody knew who he was, and he distributed
millions and millions of these magazines, and he created a school
of pop Brazilian art and drawing. What I like in his work is he
talks about Brazilian values and Brazilian behavior at that time,
and the way he does it, it is simple, it is black and white, it
is cheap, not something expensive and sophisticated. It is accessible
to everyone.
“In Brazil, I’m kind of a sophisticated singer, you
know. So the normal, expected thing would be to have a photo, on
brilliant paper, colorful. And I wanted to go against that, doing
something for everybody, not sophisticated, but popular, that everybody
could get and understand. Then I took Zefiro’s work.
“It’s so naive, this kind of drawing. It’s something
from the ‘50s; it’s not something that can really excite
someone nowadays. So it’s different from Playboy and the photo-magazines;
there’s not this objective anymore. I think it’s pure,
and it represents the popular culture in Brazil. For me he is like
our Roy Lichtenstein.”
“A Great Noise” includes seven studio tracks, but is
mostly a live album, and Monte considers it a “Polaroid”
of where she is now, ten years after her debut. With it finished,
she is reassessing and relaxing before moving on to her next stage.
“I don’t have plans to do a new record,” she says.
“I’m just taking a break now. I’m composing, I’m
just thinking and talking and listening to a lot of music.”
Bale Folclorico da Bahia (Brazil 1997)
Elijah Wald
As a rule, the World Music production company avoids bringing the
same group into town two years running, for fear of exhausting its
audience. The striking exception for this season is the Bale[get
accent] Folclo[get accent]rico da Bahia, whose two shows last year
at John Hancock Hall were so successful that it is back for a four-day
run this Thursday through Sunday at the Emerson Majestic Theatre
(876-4275).
Recalling last year's visit, it is easy to see why the Bale[get
accent] is getting this sort of treatment. It is the most polished
and exciting African diaspora dance company to come through Boston
in recent times. Walson Botelho, the co-founder and director, is
an anthropologist and dancer from Brazil's northern province of
Bahia, the heartland of Afro-Brazilian culture, and he has a gift
for combining ancient traditions with a sure theatrical sense that
makes them come alive on stage.
This year's program includes most of the highlights of the old
show, plus a new introductory section, "Oxala[get accent]'s
Court,'' which has already won international awards. "It is
a piece about Candomble, the Yoruba religion brought to Brazil with
the slaves,'' Botelho explains, speaking with a thick Brazilian
accent. "We show some of the most important rituals. We start
with the offering to Exu, the god that makes the bridge between
the human beings and the gods, then we show the initiation of the
new adept in the religion, 'Yao[get accent]'s Initiation.' In Yoruba,
Yao[get accent] means woman, but in Candomble, even if you are a
man, you are considered the wife of the gods, so we use the same
word for a man or a woman.''
This section ends with "Pantheon dos Orixa[get accent]s,''
a procession of the main Candomble gods, from Ogun, the god of iron
and war, to Iansa[get accent], the goddess of storms and winds,
and Oxala[get accent], the supreme creator of the universe. Botelho,
who is himself a priest in the Candomble church, says that it was
only in the last year that he felt capable of putting together a
piece of this sort.
"This was something that I wished to do since I formed the
company,'' he says. "But it was very difficult. Before, I felt
I was not prepared to work with this kind of ritual. Because they
are very sacred, and it's not possible to work with these without
permission of the gods.''
Because of his personal beliefs, Botelho approached the piece quite
differently from his earlier work. "It's almost in the pure
state,'' he says. "Even the fabrics for the costumes are the
same that we use in the original religion. I told to the dancers,
'I don't want technique in this piece. I want this piece like we
can see in the rituals.' Because in the rituals, we don't have choreographers,
we don't have rehearsals. Of course, if you put a thing on a stage,
you have lights, sound, microphones, you have many things that are
not natural, but I wanted it as natural as possible.''
As for the rest of the show, there is a traditional fishermen's
dance that ends with the dancers squirming like fish in the net
skirt of the sea goddess, Iemanja[get accent], the dramatic "Maculele"
stick dance, and a piece based on the martial arts form capoeira.
There are also three contemporary Afro-Brazilian pieces: A modernist
depiction of the creation of the universe, the acrobatic showcase
"Afixire,'' and the final "Samba Reggae,'' a carnival
dance that ends with the dancers snaking through the audience and
urging everyone to join in.
For Botelho, such outreach is at the heart of his work. His dream
is to bring Bahian culture to the world, and to forge links between
African Americans, both North and South, and their root traditions
in West Africa. His only regret is that, for the moment, the company
is touring so constantly that it is virtually impossible to develop
new pieces. In the next year, they will have only a month and a
half in Brazil, between tours of the U.S., Europe, Lebanon and the
Caribbean.
After years of obscurity, however, Botelho is not complaining:
"Three years ago we had none of this. We had many difficulties,
in terms of how to survive in Brazil with minimal money, how to
maintain the company. So now we are in the right moment to do this,
and we cannot lose it. We are far from our families, and it is very
difficult for many of us, but this is our moment, and I think it
is our life.''
Back
to the Archive Contents page
|