Brazil, Rio, and music

OK, so what else do I love about Rio?

The first time I came here was in 1990. I was a journalist at the time, and my writing assignment was to cover Rio’s famous Carnival and do some interviews with Brazilian musicians.

Even though I had already lived in Brazil for two years back in the late 60s, at that time I was in Porto Alegre and Curitiba, two cities with a European style and influence. They were nice, but I didn’t really feel at home until I spent some time in Rio, where the influences are more African than European. Why is that? Mostly because of the music, samba in particular, and the people who play this music. I almost always found a feeling of real camaraderie and mutual respect among the musicians, rather than a strong sense of competition, and I liked that.

There was nothing I enjoyed more than hanging out in a bar or restaurant where people would sit around a long table, singing and playing. Everyone knew the words to the songs, and there was such a feeling of joy and community…like a family.

In the USA, music is generally thought of as a performance, where some people play and/or sing on a stage and others sit in the audience and listen. Although we have shows and concerts here, too, we also have spontaneous musical “happenings,” which I found to be rare when I lived in the states. Here, even birthday parties usually end up with everyone spontaneously breaking into song, and it’s not unusual for a mini-batucada (percussion) group to warm things up on a public bus.

Aside from these popular get-togethers, Brazil is famous for its groundbreaking musical geniuses—people like Dorival Caymmi, Tom Jobim, João Gilberto, Hermeto Pascoal and many, many others. I’ve always loved Brazilian music, and am happy to find myself here where I’m surrounded by it. Of course there’s junky music, too, but nothing will ever override the wonderful musical heritage created by these outstanding Brazilian composers and musicians.

Callings vs. “hobbies”

A fellow friend and blogger wrote a post about writers being a strange breed—exceptionally acute observers, attentive listeners to what’s going on inside their heads (which can make them seemed spaced out to others), and passionate and focused workers once they get started. They can seem obsessed to those who aren’t writers, and each one seems to have his or her own special set of neuroses about getting their stuff out there (i.e. publishing) and even about the old cliché, writers’ block.

I found myself resonating with a lot of what she said—especially the part about getting an inspiration and having to write it down somewhere, anywhere, as if it were a matter of life and death. Any napkin or scrap of paper will do—or even the back of your hand.

The funny thing is, though, that I don’t really think of myself as a “writer” and never have, even though I was a journalist for more than a decade. Now that I’ve got a book for sale on Amazon, I’m trying to get into author mode, but it all feels a little strange to me. Writing is something I do for fun. I don’t find it hard, and it’s not hard, it’s not a struggle, I don’t fight with writers’ block, and I’m not afraid to put my stuff out there. I’m not bragging, this is just the way it is. Let me explain…

Writing isn’t really my calling. I know, I know, you’re probably thinking, well why did you write a book? Why do you write a blog? I guess I could call it a hobby, I don’t know. I’m not really sure what that word means. But I can’t say it’s my calling, because I’ve never felt resistance to doing it, and I never agonize over it.

My calling is music. I’m a composer, and yes, when I get an idea for a tune or a band arrangement in my head, I’ll grab any random piece of paper floating around and frantically try to get it down before I forget it. I used to walk around with a cassette recorder, and now I walk around with a digital one.

I’ve felt resistance to writing music, to getting started on something. Maybe it’s because I take it more seriously that I do with my writing. I knew it was my calling from the time I was 13 years old, and felt inklings in that direction from age 7. Oh, and I’ve also been known to sit around looking like I’m doing nothing, when I’m really deciding whether the low brass should come in before the trumpets, and whether the piece should begin with a percussion intro or not.

Once I actually sit down and start writing a piece, I am totally fixated. If you’ve read my book, you’ll remember how I used to sit up late every night writing arrangements for my band before I even had a band, and the next morning it was as if “I” hadn’t written them at all—it was as if little elves had stolen into my apartment in the middle of the night, done the work, and left the music stacked up on the piano. I imagined that I could almost see their tiny footprints on the piano top.

But now I have a book, too, so I know I have to treat that with respect. In the piece I wrote the other day about marketing, I said that I’d often felt that self-promotion was “tacky.” I think this is a carry-over from when I used to live in New York and had to go around to the jazz clubs trying to sell myself as a musician. If you didn’t have a manager (and hardly anyone did, except for the big shots), you had to do it yourself, and you were most often met with the cold assertion: “We’re booked through next year.” In spite of that, I persisted and managed to get some fairly good gigs when I lived there, so I know in my heart I can do the same thing with my book.

Here’s a bit of shameless self-promotion!

http://tinyurl.com/ab2rmqh

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/brasstacks

 

Is anything really lost to the past?

I think it may have started with the photos of old Rio. Someone posted a series of black and white photos from the 1890s to the 1970s, and I found myself looking at them with a dreamy kind of nostalgia, as if I’d been there and was missing it.

But of course I’d never been there. I was born in the USA and came to Rio for the first time in 1990. I think what I was longing for was a sense of tradition, something I’d actually had a taste of when I was involved as a percussionist in Rio’s famous Carnival for more than five years in the early 90s.

I soon discovered that what I’d been missing was a hands-on involvement in Brazilian musical culture. I stopped playing samba a number of years ago, and hadn’t really thought about it much—until now. So I found myself glued to YouTube for several days, watching videos of old-time samba players and wondering if all of that had been lost to me.

Then one evening I started watching what I thought was a video clip of my favorite samba singer, Paulinho da Viola, but which turned out to be a full-length documentary about him. In the film he repeated many times that there’s no reason for nostalgia or longing, because nothing is lost to the past—in fact, it isn’t really in the past at all. “If I take an old song and play it, then it’s now, it’s not in the past,” he said. In fact, the name of the documentary is “My Time is Now.”

With that thought in mind, I downloaded a bunch of sambas to my iPod and pulled out my dusty tamborim (small drum played with a stick) and tam-tam (a hand drum), and tried to play along with some of the tunes. I was amazed at how bad I sounded and how awkward I felt, but I knew it was just from neglect. I took Paulinho’s advice and brought something from my past that I thought was lost, into my present. And now there’s really nothing to stop me from improving it.

As I thought about this experience, I realized that I could apply it to other situations in my life as well. Can you think of a situation from your past that could be “rescued” by bringing it into the present?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-6SMDK-jCo

 

My record reviews

Here are some recent record reviews I wrote for Jazz History Online:

https://jazzhistoryonline.com/Piano-centric.html

 

 

 

 

https://jazzhistoryonline.com/Women_Instrumentalists.html

 

 

 

 

https://jazzhistoryonline.com/Women_Vocalists.html 

 

 

 

 

https://jazzhistoryonline.com/Toshiko_Akiyoshi.html

 

Pop music is awesome!

I’ve been a jazz musician for nearly 60 years. I used to be a “jazz snob” when I was younger, and wouldn’t listen to anything else. Or at least that’s what I told my friends.

But the fact is, back in high school, I secretly listened to the likes of Smokey Robinson, the Crewcuts, the Everly Brothers, and the Chordettes in the privacy of my bedroom.

And I never stopped liking pop music, although I kept that fact to myself until I was mature enough to admit it.

Jazz is all about sophistication, improvisation, hipness, coolness, and not appealing to the masses (at least after the demise of the big band era). Pop music is the opposite. A lot of pop tunes may be here today and gone tomorrow, but while they’re here, they have a tremendous impact, and people are drawn to them like a baby to cotton candy.

Pop songs are really brilliant, when you stop to think about it. I’m a composer, but I have to confess that I am incapable of writing a pop tune. Pop tunes have hooks. They have catchy choruses that stick in your mind for days, for better or worse. I don’t know how to write a hook. Nor am I capable of writing one of those catchy choruses. I can write an arrangement for my band, Brass Tacks, or a nice tune for a jazz trio, or even a standard-type song with lyrics, but writing a pop tune is completely beyond my ken.

Maybe that’s why I admire pop music so much. It’s a big mystery to me—the unknown and unreachable. I have nothing but admiration for the people who write pop songs and put together arrangements and videos for them. And I’m not immune to going along with the crowd, either. I can get stuck on a top 40 tune just as much as the next guy.

Does the fact that some pop tunes don’t last long mean that they’re no good? Not necessarily. People just like to move on to something new, that’s all. Catchy hooks don’t need to last—there’s always a shiny new one around the corner. You might say no, no, for music to be valuable and significant, it has to last. Well, that might be true for certain kinds of music, but does it have to be true for all kinds? What difference does it make, after all? I’m sure that every kid or adult who is totally hung up on the latest pop tune thinks that it’s valuable and significant for them—right now.

Anyway, I know I’ll never be a pop music composer, and that’s all right. We all have to find our niche, and that’s not mine. But I’m still in awe of it all the same.

Manhattan Samba

Here’s a little history of the samba band I co-founded in New York in 1990, written by Jeff Zeth. Not sure I’d describe myself as a “big American band leader,” though. 

You can see the whole story here:

http://brazilianmusicblog.blogspot.com.br/2012/08/manhattan-samba.html#comment-form

In the grand manner of Rio samba schools — though on a much smaller scale — Manhattan Samba is a band, a learning environment, and a social club all in one. Founder and director Ivo Araújo is known for bringing in people with virtually no musical experience and having them learn how to play traditional samba to be able to perform with the band within a short time. On the other hand, Ivo and Manhattan Samba (the two cannot be separated) have also collaborated with many established, professional musicians such as Paul Winder, Wyclef Jean, Gogol Bordello, Jimmy Cliff and Carlinhos Brown, and the band has been the inspiration for many other Brazilian music projects and baterias in New York City. Ivo has a knack for integrating samba rhythms seamlessly into the music of his collaborators; at the same time, the band’s own shows throb with energy and passion in a way that no other samba show in New York City does.

Ivo started Manhattan Samba in 1990 with pianist, composer, and big American band leader Amy Duncan at a time when there was very little live Brazilian carnaval music in New York. “Manhattan Samba was the first big group, together with Empire Loisaida, long gone,” he says.  He’d already been in the U.S. for ten years, playing as a percussionist for American jazz bands and directing his own Brazilian music projects; Ivo’s first Casa Grande e Senzala band after Kilombo dos Palmares once opened for Tito Puente. At first, he didn’t think many New Yorkers would be interested in learning batucada.  But after seeing him perform live, Amy urged him to gather students. “She encouraged me to play and teach.” Their first batucada show at S.O.B.’s was an instant success. Ivo showed up to play with 35 people — most bands playing there at the time had no more than six — and “for the first time I blasted S.O.B.’s.”  The group was so loud that a subway train conductor came up from the nearby #1 train station to investigate. “What kind of band was that?” he said.  For fifteen years after that, until around 2005, the band closed the weekly Saturday night samba show at the club, with a late-night act that the Village Voice called “the best way to wind up a Saturday night club crawl”.

Now in 2012, Manhattan Samba (known in Portuguese as the “União da Ilha de Manhattan”) remains the longest running Rio traditional-style carnaval band in New York, with a long list of successful live projects and an even longer list of current and former band members who were inspired to begin their own Brazilian music projects. Members have gone on to teach samba in high schools, start their own bands, create documentary films, and get advanced degrees in music. Every year, the band’s signature red and white can be seen in some of the great parades of New York City, including the Halloween Parade and the Gay Pride Parade, and the band still sometimes makes appearances at S.O.B.’s, thrilling audiences with late-night batucada that always brings the house down.

Brazilian music fans sometimes wonder why the school wears red and white, when the colors of the Brazilian flag are green, yellow, blue and white.  It’s because of Ivo’s connection with União da Ilha do Governador, the samba school in Rio with which Ivo has the closest connection.  Their colors are red, white and blue.  ”It shows respect for União, which is my original samba school, together with Portela.”  Portela’s influence is seen in the image of the eagle holding a drum; the eagle was once part of that group’s symbolism.

My hero Fred Hersch

Fred Hersch is my undisputed hero.

For those of you who may not know him, Fred is a jazz pianist living in New York. I met him back in the 1980s, when I recorded a couple of demos at his small recording studio in SoHo. After that we lost touch, and then I moved to Rio de Janeiro in the 90s.

Right around that time, Fred discovered that he was HIV positive and decided to make it public, along with the fact that he is gay. As far as I know, he may have been the first jazz musician to tell the world he was gay—no easy feat in the macho world of jazz at that time or any time.

Before long, Fred became seriously ill with AIDS, and in 2008, he developed AIDS-related dementia. Many times, it seemed he was close to death. Eventually he fell into a coma and remained unconscious for two months. When he finally came out of the coma he had lost almost all the motor function in his hands—a pianist’s worst nightmare.

But Fred hung in there. He went through months of rehabilitation and therapy, and today, at age 56, he has a new live double album recorded at the Village Vanguard and a string of tour dates into 2013.

These things alone could have made Fred my hero, but the real reason he’s my hero is because of his refusal to accept the dire verdicts about his life and career—his refusal to let anything deter or distract him from his goal of making beautiful, individual, eloquent music. In his own words, referring to the disease that tried to bury him:

“I am not going to acknowledge that it has the power to mess with me.”

Good for him—and good for us, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Becoming who we are

“Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

                                    – Steven Pressfield, from The War of Art.

Some of you may have read between the lines here and figured out that a guiding theme in my upcoming book, “Getting Down to Brass Tacks,” is the awakening to how I could have found my heart’s desire without making so many detours, how I could have done things differently, perhaps lived in a more expansive way, developing my talents better, recognizing them more clearly and appreciating and honoring them more.

It was a subtle thing, but I actually reached a point in my life where I thought that mediocrity would keep me safe. I hope you never reach that point. It won’t keep you safe, and it’ll just try to take you further down if you believe that it will. Even if that does happen, though, sooner or later your wonderful self won’t settle for being trapped in such a strait jacket.

So, can you really just become who you are and let everything else fall into place, or do you have to make special efforts to validate yourself by “putting yourself out there?”

Jazz pianist Bill Evans, in the documentary video “The Universal Mind of Bill Evans, said that he once wondered how he could get his career started as a jazz musician. He said, “Ultimately I came to the conclusion that all I must do is take care of the music, even if I do it in a closet. And if I really do that, somebody’s going to come and open the door of the closet and say, ‘Hey, we’re looking for you.’”

Even though everyone I know seems to be promoting what they do in the social media (including myself), I take Bill’s words to heart, because I’ve found it all too easy to be tempted to put myself out there before I’ve really taken care of the music.

Shameless self promotion day!

CD Baby is giving 100% of download revenue to its artists from today (July 30) to August 3rd! So if you’re thinking of buying my music, now’s the time to do it! ONLY CD Baby…not Amazon, iTunes, etc. These are mp3 downloads, not physical CDs.

Here are the links:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/brasstacks

This is my first CD with my 10-piece band, Brass Tacks. I wrote and arranged all the music, and play piano and some Brazilian percussion in the band. This band is unusual, because it has not only a tuba, but two (count ‘em) euphoniums, which, if you’re not familiar with them, look sort of like baby tubas.

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/amyduncan13

This is a demo I recorded in 1983 with drummer Keith Bailey and bassist Marc Johnson, who played with pianist Bill Evans right at the end of his life. Some of the tunes are mine, and others are standards and jazz tunes.

Enjoy!

Thanks, everyone!

Feeling grateful today for everyone who has liked, commented on or decided to follow my blog. It actual fills me with wonder to think that there are people around the globe who read what I’ve written.

Since I’m pretty busy most of the time and more people seem to be reading my blog, I want to apologize in advance if I don’t get to your blog and acknowledge it after you’ve read min. So far I’ve been able to check out the blogs of every person who has shown an interest in mine, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to every one in the future. If that happens, it certainly won’t be for lack of interest. I’ve found some really wonderful things and have often wished I had all day just to sit and read them.

But as you know, if you’ve been reading me regularly, I’m finishing up my autobiography, as well as making a major life transition with my work in general. This takes up a lot of my time. So another request I’d like to make is not to be chosen for any awards. I did get picked for one, and was duly flattered, but after a good fifteen minutes of trying to figure out how to reply to it and everything else I was supposed to do after winning it, I finally gave up!

Anyway, to show my appreciation for all of you, here’s a little music from my band, Brass Tacks:

http://soundcloud.com/jazzrascal/01-passarinho-do-mato 

http://soundcloud.com/jazzrascal/02-fadood