Monday, May 29, 2006
Dino Sete Cordas
5 May 1918–26 May 2006
Dino Sete Cordas (photo: Leo Aversa)
The great guitarist Horondino José da Silva left this earth on Friday, 26 May.
Only a month ago, a dissertation by Remo Tarazona Pellegrini, analyzing Dino’s accompaniments in samba and choro, was made available for download on the Unicamp website.
If you don’t read Portuguese, there’s a moving tribute to Dino by Luís Filipe de Lima, published in these pages a year ago on the occasion of Dino’s 87th birthday.
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13:45
 
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Rádio Funarte
The best so far, to be inaugurated 18 July.
Funarte (Fundação Nacional de Arte) is an arm of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. In its days of glory (1976 to 1989), when Hermínio Bello de Carvalho ran its musical division, the foundation set up a number of innovative projects and recorded the fabulous Acervo Funarte collection of popular, classical, and folkloric music—65 albums featuring the cream of Brazil’s performing artists.
During Fernando Collor de Mello’s presidency (1990–92), the Funarte budget was slashed. Since then, the foundation had been merely limping along until Gilberto Gil became culture minister. Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Funarte is active again. Among the revived programs is Projeto Pixinguinha, which sends artists to perform all over the country.
Having taken a leaf from Instituto Moreira Salles’ book, Funarte has been digitalizing its musical collections and is making them available for listening on Rádio Funarte, which will be officially launched on 18 July. Thirty-four of the Acervo Funarte discs are already online. The music was composed by the likes of Villa-Lobos, Francisco Mignone, Radamés Gnattali, Sérgio Assad, Guerra-Peixe, João Pernambuco, Custódio Mesquita, Pixinguinha, Assis Valente, Cartola, Garoto, Herivelto Martins, Capiba, Candeia, Francisco Mário, and so it goes.
This is a very good thing because the albums, although reissued on CD (with truncated liner notes) by Atração Fonográfica, have not been kept in print. Only 32 of the original 65 are still available.
You’ll have several listening options on Rádio Funarte. For an auto-pilot mixed program, simply press the arrow button in the orange circle. For individual discs, select from the three CD menus: Música Popular, Folclore, or Música Erudita. You can also listen to a mixed program according to genre by selecting from the Samba, Choro, Etc. menu.
Two other menus bring music recorded live in concert. The Projeto Pixinguinha 2006 menu currently features a program with Mauricio Carrilho’s choro quintet, singer Jane Duboc, and the mineiro singer-songwriter Celso Adolfo. The Sala Funarte 2006 menu presently offers the sambista Monarco.
If you want to polish your Portuguese, several interviews are available. This section is bound to grow, as will the gallery, where biographies of veteran artists are accompanied by slide shows of their photographs.
There’s much here to keep you coming back for more.
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14:30
Monday, May 01, 2006
A toast to solitude
Exploring the dissonances of despair.
Carlos Fuchs and Marcos Sacramento
In May 1999 I met the singer Marcos Sacramento and the pianist Carlos Fuchs for the first time. I arrived in Rio shortly after Brazzil magazine had published my articles about the two (see Magic Marcos and Independent in Rio, Part II), and the very same day they played for me a demo CD of eight songs they had co-written and privately recorded.
The title was already in place: Fossa Nova. Fossa (from the Latin ‘ditch’) is the Brazilian equivalent of our ‘lower depths’ or ‘down in the dumps.’ In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Fossa as a musical style was popularized by Dolores Duran (“Castigo”), Antônio Maria (“Ninguém Me Ama”) and Maysa (“Bom Dia, Tristeza”). Fossa songs are often torch songs, plumbing the depths of despair. Broken hearts are a common byproduct.
Fossa Nova was different. No perfidious lover. No hand-wringing or wet hankies. No accusations. No ostentatious cries of anguish. Yet the despair was apparent in every word and every trill of the piano. This was modern despair—spare, restrained, too proud to ask for sympathy. At times, the piano came close to fooling you into believing that what you were hearing was a light-hearted ditty, but dissonance soon entered to dispell any lingering illusions.
There was also a measure of defiance behind the recordings. They had been made during the carnaval of 1998. There are Brazilians who detest carnaval and do everything in their power to avoid it (it’s not easy), but Sacramento isn’t one of those. In his case, it was a clear indication of the difficult times he was traversing. That year, Dabliú Discos released his second solo album, Caracane, which had taken him years to produce. The album was going nowhere fast, as was the singer’s artistic career. Concurrently, unacknowledged personal problems were clouding his professional life. Somehow, he was able to turn the anguish and insecurity into dark, oblique, intuitive poems.
Na Rua dos Animais 
Estou na rua
No seio, no meio, na veia da rua
E vejo os outros animais no escuro
Quero estar nu
No frio, no cio, no rio da rua
Como os outros animais
A rua é minha
Minha é a sua ruina
Minha sina de marau
Estou na praça
No poço da praça
Quero estar louco
Quero estar solto
Congraça com os outros animais
Fuchs’ settings for the poems turned them into art songs. This was a far cry from mass-market popular music and sufficiently remote from micro-market MPB. In short, it had no chance of being released by any label. The disc went into the drawer. Over the ensuing years, the authors added four songs (and 17 crucial minutes) to the CD, which pushed its duration into the acceptable range. Having overcome his debilitating problems, Sacramento finally emerged from obscurity with the breakthrough disc Memorável Samba, his immense talent acknowledged at last. With the cost of independent production dropping, Fuchs was able to co-found the label Olho do Tempo and release Fossa Nova.
It’s a happy ending for a declaration of profound unhappiness. What could be more apt?
Marcos Sacramento & Carlos Fuchs: Fossa Nova
(Olho do Tempo OLT-002; 2005) 37:36 min.
01. Um Brinde à Solidão (Carlos Fuchs/Marcos Sacramento)
02. Brinde ao Desejo (Carlos Fuchs/Marcos Sacramento)
03. Na Rua dos Animais (Carlos Fuchs/Marcos Sacramento)
04. Na Rua dos Loucos (Carlos Fuchs/Mathilda Kóvak)
05. Casa dos Outros (Carlos Fuchs/Marcos Sacramento)
06. Um Brinde à Palavra (Carlos Fuchs/Marcos Sacramento)
07. Fossa Nova (Carlos Fuchs)
08. A Casa do Tempo (Carlos Fuchs/Marcos Sacramento)
09. A Casa do Corpo (Carlos Fuchs/Marcos Sacramento/Fernando Morello)
10. Rua dos Varredores (Carlos Fuchs/Marcos Sacramento)
11. Um Samba (Carlos Fuchs/Marcos Sacramento)
12. O Fim (Carlos Fuchs/Marcos Sacramento)
Marcos Sacramento: vocals
Carlos Fuchs: piano
Production & arrangements: Carlos Fuchs
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18:44
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