All in the family, part one

Elis Regina & Tom Jobim, Elis & Tom: Águas de Março
Maria Rita, Maria Rita: A Festa

This week I'm kicking off a periodic segment that explores the royal families of Brazilian music, of which there are surprisingly many. I don't know what it is, perhaps a huge combination of factors, but Brazil pumps out talented musicians by the generation. In this case, the focus is on the late Elis Regina and her daughter Maria Rita, the new diva of Brazilian popular music.

Both women attract comparisons to some notable, female, American contemporaries, but as is often the case with these comparisons, it ends up reducing their talent to a foreign language translation of the "original," (whatever that means) which isn't fair to anyone.

Regina, often compared to Janis Joplin both musically and in terms of her lifestyle, spanned many different genres and styles, expanding the palette for Brazilian female vocalists beyond what had become the well-established stylings of bossa nova, without forgetting those roots. I highly recommend any of her music that you can get your hands on.

Regina's daughter, Maria Rita, is poised to become the next Brazilian female phenomenon in the U.S. Her album graces world music Top 10's all over the coutnry, right up there with Bebel Gilberto, also of Brazilian musical offspring fame. Rita, an NYU graduate, fell backwards into a musical career but hasn't looked back since. The jazz influence garners comparisons to Norah Jones, but we'll refrain from those here. Enjoy.

change of pace (and bpm's)

DJ Marky, XRS, Jorge Ben Jor and Toquinho, Audio Architecture 2: Carolina Carol Bela

I'm a big fan of the DJ Marky story... You decide you want to bring a relatively obscure genre of electronic music from another country to your homeland where homegrown artists reign supreme and electronics have been relegated mainly to the background. You try it out, but it doesn't happen so much for you, so you move to England after some British guys hear you at a club one night. You get popular there and become a pioneer of the drums & bass movement as it moves to the foreground, and return to your native Brazil.

Only now, drums & bass is huge in Brazil, and you become ridiculously popular at home as well as abroad. Such is the story of DJ Marky...

This track is a remix of a Jorge Ben Jor tune and a Toquinho tune. Jorge Ben Jor (originally Jorge Ben, which I will explain below) is a pioneer in Brazil's samba-funk/soul/r&b movement. Managing to remain clear of the many movements that have paralleled his long, prolific career, Ben Jor has remained an important fixture and influence on the Brazilian music scene.

As for the Ben Jor part, supposedly the story is that Jorge Ben Jor grew tired of being consfused with Miles Davis-bandmate-turned-cheesewagon jazz guitarist George Benson (Jorge being George in Portuguese). Ben Jor through a "Jor" at the end of his name, and has been known by that name for the last twenty years or so.

Sorry for the lag in posting... I'm working on it.

Creative Commons Brazil

Creative Commons Team, Brazil (.mpg File)

Well, I'm doing a different kind of plug for this post... Many of you out there are already pretty familiar with the Creative Commons system, and for those of you, this post will only slightly be of interest. But to the rest of the world, this post will hopefully tune you into an amazing worldwide project that could potentially change the way the arts do business.

The Creative Commons is a system of licencing designed to give control over the rights to works back to the artist. Basically, with a Creative Commons licence, an artist can reserve as few or as many rights as they so desire, enabling artists to allow their music to be downloaded, distributed, sampled, and whatever else can be done. Obviously the potential for this is infinite.

In the U.S., the Creative Commons licence has had trouble catching on for a multitude of obvious reasons, and hasn't really spread beyond a limited world of people that know what it is. For that reason, the Creative Commons team has targeted a group of nations around the world where its reception would be kinder, and are procuring these nations to adopt the system.

In Brazil, Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil has expressed a great deal of interest in the project, lending his star-power to the project for visibility. Gil's song, Oslodum, has been made available to the public, free of charge, and kickstarted the movement in Brazil. Ostensibly, you can use the Gil track in whatever manner you choose, as long as you don't profit from it.

Brazil seems like an ideal experiment, for many reasons. Of course, anyone that frequents this page is aware of the rich culture that lies in the land of order and progress. But the extremely unequal distribution of wealth has created a culture that is far less centered around profit margins than the U.S., so it will be interesting to see if it catches on. Already, a number of similar projects are underway, such as Trama Virtual, created by Trama Records to showcase independent talents, and sort of a Brazilian version of the now-deceased www.mp3.com (the old version where independent bands could market themselves free of charge).

As one of the members of the Creative Commons team said, "If the Blues had been copyrighted while it was being created, we wouldn't have any of the music we have today." How true it is. This project is quite impressive, and deserves all the support it can get. Check out the video up top, and for more information, check out Wired Magazine's article on the experiement for a brief summary of their work in Brazil.

Maria Bethânia, Ao Vivo 1970: Samba de Roda/Marinheiro Só

Wow, I'm really sorry for the lag experienced this week... I'm back now, and I'll be back to the two songs a week pace that I had been good at keeping to up until recently. It's been an exciting bit of time for the blog, as it was mentioned in O-Dub's Soul Sides a couple of weeks ago, and as a result traffic has gone up. Just a month ago I was touting the 100th visitor to the site. Now it stands at over 2000, so keep it up...

As for this week's pick, I bring you a track from Caetano's little sister, Maria Bethânia, a legendary songstress who's rise came in the late 1960's, paralelling the Tropicalia movement that Veloso, Gilberto Gil and other colleagues were engaged in, but that Bethânia refused to join out of a desire to avoid the political sphere (for more information, definitely check out Christopher Dunn's Brutality Garden, probably the best English book on the Tropicalia movement around).

This week's tracks come from a great live album from 1970. Bethânia's voice has changed quite a bit as her stylistic tastes have changed as well, but certainly her almost contralto timbre and pitch make her voice as distinct as anyone's around. Here, in her early work, you can hear the more youthful, more effeminite delivery and tone and her career transitions reflect that of of Joni Mitchell's career (though not quite so dramatic).

Now, by request, some information about the song itself:

Samba de Roda is a style of samba particular to the Northeast, specifically Bahia. It is a slower, more relaxed version of samba, though it is not exactly reflected in the song. My guess is that the song is an updated version of an old samba tune, reinterpreted by her and the band. Marinheiro So simply means "Lone Sailor," though I'm not exactly sure about the lyrics themselves.

Thanks to everyone who has been posting comments. Check out the links in the blog roll, and tell you friends!