Audio By Carbonatix
Dressed in platform leather combat boots and a red and black baby doll dress, nouveau songstress Fernanda Porto certainly played the part of a musician on the frontlines of modern Brazilian culture. Looking like a cross between a ruby-headed majorette and Star Trek‘s sexy Lt. Uhura, she defied expectations during her recent Miami Brazilian Film Festival concert at the Lincoln Theater, projecting a radically different image from what purists might expect of a Brazilian girl singer. Her songs were rooted in the breezy sway of bossa nova yet laced with the unexpected. Surrounding their familiar core were synthetic drum beats and programmed soundscapes that Porto created with her laptop computer and a mangle of synthesizer keyboards, distancing herself from what would be considered traditional Brazilian pop.
Near the end of the performance, Porto brought out her special guests: six drummers dramatically pounding huge Japanese taiko drums in synchronized thrusts. The thumping of the oversized barrels, one of which was almost the size of a compact car, sent a clear message to her audience: Contemporary Brazilian music is more than the graying sound of bossa nova, samba, and tropicalia. In fact her Portuguese lyrics may have been the only element many could recognize. At times, she lilted and cooed in a soprano with Astrud Gilberto inflections. But other moments found her shrieking passionately like Icelandic singer Björk.
After the concert, as the audience milled about in the theater lobby, some faces beamed with excitement from the performance they had just seen. Still others had a look of consternation. “I’m not sure I got it,” a woman was heard whispering to her companion.
It was a reaction that Porto might have expected.
Like many of her peers, Porto’s roots reach back to samba. With its playful syncopation that can build into an awe-inspiring wall of sound, samba is the heartbeat, the de facto genetic code ingrained in the DNA of all things Brazilian. The new wave of electronic beats emanating from Brazil is not immune to it.
Rooted in ancient African rhythms brought over and incubated by slaves, the samba originally emerged among the escola de samba (samba schools) during the Twenties at Carnaval. Today the cariocas (Rio de Janeiro’s residents) literally plan their lives around the yearly festival that marks the beginning of Lent.
By the Fifties the country was ready for a new sound. Bossa nova, which literally means “new wave,” was established when Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim slowed down the tempo of samba, infusing it with a breezy, laid-back texture relying heavily on acoustic guitar, soft drumming, and sensual and pensive singing. In recent years, performers like Celso Fonseca have kept the bossa nova sound alive, albeit modernized with cool ambient noises.
Earlier in the week, as Porto prepares for the Lincoln Theater show, she confesses to not knowing how her performance will be received. But she does say that challenging the concertgoers with diverse and unusual sounds, particularly the overwhelming sound of the Japanese drums, will be one of her objectives. “I always want to bring something new,” she says.
Porto notes that bossa nova and samba play huge roles in her musical career. But she also aspires to go beyond its trappings. Drum n’ bass, the U.K.-based style built on high-speed tempos and rollicking percussion, swept the São Paulo music scene in the late Nineties through influential DJs like Patife, Marky, and XRS and proved to be her way out. “I love rhythm, it’s the most important inspiration. All my music begins with rhythm,” she says.
“A lot of people thought I was a bossa nova girl,” Porto says of her first steps in the music industry. “But the drum n’ bass sound really did it for me. I was curious. I spent two years composing and hiding from DJs who told me to stick to MPB (música popular Brasileira). They thought that was my track.”
From the start of her career the rebellious Porto, a classically trained pianist and multi-instrumentalist who also plays drums, saxophone, and guitar and sings opera, has only been interested in forging her own way. After all, she studied composition and music theory with Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, professor to Jobim and Claudio Santoro.
Upon completing her studies, Porto began writing soundtrack music for people like documentary filmmaker Tony Venturi. Soon afterward, she found herself singing MPB standards in the club scene around São Paolo. While she proved adept at the ever-popular bossa nova and samba style, she hungered for more.
By 1997 she had hooked up with drum n’ bass DJ XRS, who helped her develop a demo. The tape found its way to DJ Patife, who later remixed one of her songs, “Sambassim,” in 2000. Included on Patife’s mix CD, Cool Steps: Drum “N” Bass Grooves, it became a dance hit in London. (She performed the song at Level during the 2001 Winter Music Conference.)
Last November Porto released her self-titled debut, writing and producing most of its songs and playing most of the instruments. The fourteen tracks show off Porto’s vocal range as well as her ability to master different song styles. Her delivery is notably cool. Though her soprano may reach passionate high points, she does not indulge in the emotive melisma found in American pop singers. She forges a hard-driving rock sound on “Outro Lugar Do Mundo,” then offers a more subtle delivery on the chillout ballad “O Amor Nao Cala.” On the upbeat “Sambassim,” she mixes a talking cuica drum whine and funky guitar scratches with a snappy, electro-driven groove. It’s a thoroughly fresh debut with an infectious feel. She attributes her recent success to going digital.
“I think you need to know about electronic instruments,” she says. “With electronica you can create a lot of different sounds and textures that are not natural. And Brazilian music is open to many things — electronica can be a good thing.”
Porto is among a breed of musicians who are forging a new Brazilian sound. They include Zuco 103, Bossacucanova, Cibelle, and Joao Gilberto’s daughter Bebel. Last year Bebel released a remix version of her acclaimed worldwide hit album, Tanto Tempo. On it, her sultry voice is fused with a mesmerizing electronica soundscape that, simply stated, works.
Brazilian pop queen Daniela Mercury also pumps up her new music with drum n’ bass touches, though combining it with more of a driving pop-rock foundation than Bebel’s. Mercury says she decided to pursue this new direction in order to remain current and show her fans that she is capable of producing a variety of sounds. In fact her current CD makes obvious reference to the Brazilian soundclash in its title, Eletrodomestico, and its relentless diva-pop sound.
Mercury first broke into the Brazilian pop charts in the late Eighties with a hybrid of reggae and samba known as axé. The mix proved so effective it immediately spawned a tidal wave that swamped the pop charts. She instantly became famous and has continued to score chart hits ever since.
Although she is currently embracing heavy drum beats and ambient sounds, Mercury is still very much a fan of old-school MPB, funky soul, and even disco. She says a lot of the new electronic sound is repetitive and lifeless. “Much of the electronic music may be interesting for a moment,” she says. “It has a dangerous tension that I like. But at the same time it’s a bit cold and without melody.”
The onetime queen of axé, which also became known as “butt music” for the voluptuous, hip-and-butt-oriented dance phenomenon that accompanied it, Mercury cannot drown herself in the digitized world the way Porto has. Her energetic shows and elaborately staged dance numbers require a substantial amount of human inspiration that a beat box will not provide. As she ponders future musical directions, Mercury suggests that she may go acoustic. “I think I’d like to step back in the other direction a little bit, so as not to lose myself,” she notes. “I’m not sure which way I will go.”
Another important Brazilian innovator, Chico Science (also known as Francisco de Assis Franca), introduced the mangue, a fusion of funk, hip-hop, Brit-pop, and samba with the ritualistic rhythms of maracatu, an Afro-Brazilian style first used in regional coronation ceremonies. Science and his band Nação Zumbi spawned not only a musical style but a social youth movement, complete with a manifesto that simultaneously embraced synth-pop plasticity and Brazilian roots culture. According to the manifesto, the mangue aimed to connect “the good vibes from the mangroves with the world net of pop concept circulation.” Science was a bona fide leader set to influence Brazilian pop before he was killed in a car wreck in 1997. Though many thought that mangue had died with him, its hyper-techno textures and traditional folk twists remain vital in northeast Brazil and São Paolo.
Today, one of the leading mangue bands is DJ Dolores y Orchestra Santa Massa, who played here at the TransAtlantic Festival in May alongside New York Afro-Cuban funksters Yerba Buena. During their performance, Santa Massa’s scratchy guitars and frenzied singing brought forth a haunting and almost childlike sound. On his record label’s Website, bandleader Helder Aragao, a.k.a. DJ Dolores, describes himself with the same word he used for the group’s first album: Contraditorio. Though part of him prefers organic and acoustic roots music, another screams for the plastic.
“I confess myself the most contradictory of men,” he says. “I am sensible to the value of the traditions, but the experimental ecstasies seduce me as the sirens of the old sailors.”
In Brazil, independent record labels like Lona Records, Candeeiro Records, and Trama Records are rapidly spreading the new sound within the country and around the world. This year Trama, the label Porto works with, will launch itself in the U.S.
Roberto “Beco” Dranoff has become one of the scene’s leaders through his production work and his label, Ziriguiboom (distributed by Six Degrees Records in the U.S.). Dranoff and the late Serbian producer Mitar “Suba” Subotic helped shape Bebel Gilberto’s dynamic Tanto Tempo. Dranoff also worked on Celso Fonseca’s international hit, Natural.
“Brazilian music and culture in general is in a constant state of change and transformation,” Dranoff explains. He points to the tropicalia movement of the Sixties with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil as the true innovators. They introduced futuristic electronic effects into the Brazilian tradition with Veloso’s hit “Alegria Alegria” and Gil’s “Domingo No Parque.” Both songs became objects of scorn among many bossa nova fans because they signaled the arrival of rock n’ roll and electric guitars.
The emergence of drum n’ bass and house music in the Nineties, though less controversial, helped the music evolve, too. “They are extremely groove-oriented styles of music and Brazilians can certainly relate to that,” Dranoff says. “I think [the styles] are connected to the big sounds of the samba schools and can also create a trancelike state of freedom and happiness propelled by the beats.
“Brazilians are very curious and open to what is happening around the world,” he adds. “They are great at absorbing information from all over and making it Brazilian again. The new sounds are the perfect reflection of this.”
