Naná Vasconcelos (Foto © Einar Bangsund)
Audiophile vinyl reissue of Saudades by cosmopolitan percussionist Naná Vasconcelos (1944-2016)
The 1979 album Saudades by Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos presented the berimbau in an orchestral context for the first time, a long-held dream of the musician. The concert was recorded with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mladen Gutesha and produced by Manfred Eicher of ECM Records. Saudades is now reissued on vinyl with new liner notes and background information.
Naná Vasconcelos is the most creative percussionist Brazil has produced. He was a master of the berimbau, an originally single-stringed African instrument with a resonating gourd attached to a wooden bow at the bottom.
He never had any formal training. Naná Vasconcelos began his musical career at the age of 12 in the drumming band of his birthplace, Recife, on the coast of Brazil, and in nightclubs and cabarets, where he entertained prostitutes and their customers with dance music. “My culture is the culture of the street,” he once said in an interview I conducted with him.
After testing his musical ambitions in almost every possible context as a boy – first as a drummer, later as a percussionist – Naná moved to Rio de Janeiro. There he began to perform with one of Brazil’s most famous singers: Milton Nascimento. When the Argentinean tenor saxophonist Gato Barbieri was in Rio in 1970 and saw Vasconcelos playing, he invited him to join his band. A world tour followed. Among other places, they performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. The audience responded enthusiastically to Vasconcelos’ fabulous handling of the drums. He became the sensation of the festival. Records followed, as did a long collaboration with guitarist Egberto Gismonti.
In New York, Naná, now a true cosmopolitan, formed the band Codona with jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and sitar and tabla player Colin Walcott, with whom he recorded a series of albums that were surprising in every way.
“When I scream, it’s the scream of a wild animal”
“A percussionist is not so much a rhythm maker as someone who works with colours, with timbres,” he said. “When a drummer knows what percussion is, he plays differently. Jack DeJohnette, for example, is a fantastic pianist, which means he approaches his drums much more as an instrument. I don’t think of Jack as a drummer, I think of him as a musician who uses drums. Art Blakey was a drummer, Elvin Jones… I started out as a drummer. But when I play drums now, I work with what I need most as a percussionist: space. As a percussionist you have to be able to react to your feelings. Silence can be percussion. Percussion is being emotionally involved”.
He has worked on a number of projects with the New York (but Brazilian-born) avant-garde guitarist Arto Lindsay, and can be heard on records with an underground atmosphere, with heavy guitars and dark, distorted vocals. It was interesting to do, but not really his world. “But eventually I started to appreciate the way they work, the way they express themselves. It just took time for me to really become part of what they were involved in. I work with the instincts of the jungle, with primitive sounds. When I scream, it’s the scream of a wild animal. When Arto Lindsay screams, it’s the call of the urban jungle. He works much more abstractly, while what I do is poetic, of a Brazilian sensibility that has its roots both in Catholicism and in ancient voodoo rituals”.
Naná Vasconcelos was born on 2 August 1944 in Recife, in the north-east of Brazil, and died in the same city on 9 March 2016.
The reissue of Saudades is part of the Luminessence Series, ECM’s new series of audiophile vinyl releases.
Listen to Naná Vasconcelos: A Day In The Amazon / Um Dia No Amazonas
Dit artikel las je gratis. Vond je het de moeite waard? Dan kun je jouw waardering laten zien door een kleine bijdrage te doen. Zo help je CCRyder doorgaan.
Met iDEAL kun je via de beveiligde omgeving van je eigen bank CCRyder waarderen.
“Eyes on the road and hands upon the wheel”
