Hermeto Pascoal – Lagoa Da Canoa
Long time ago i’ve bought a cheap double album called “Airto & Friends”. It was double album and very cheap; a ‘cut-out’ album meaning it was a LP made for the american market but for some reason they shipped large quantities of that album to sell for low prices in Europe. But to prevent they would came back to the american market there was a cut made in the cover of the album…
The music on that album was magnificent. The percussion of Airto, the beautiful voice of his wife Flora Purim and Ron Carter on Bass! But the most surprising sound came from Sivuca and Hermeto: two strange looking man with an extra-ordinairy sound.
Hermeto often makes music with unconventional objects such as teapots, children’s toys, and animals, as well as keyboards, button accordion, melodica, saxophone, guitar, flute, voice, various brass and folkloric instruments. He learned the accordion from his father and practiced for hours indoors as, being albino, he was incapable of working in the fields with the rest of his family.
Hermeto could make everything sound okay; the YouTube clips where he plays on his beard, or where he improvises on the speech of french actor Yves Montand are classics. Perhaps because he grew up in the countryside, he uses nature as a basis for his compositions, as in his Música da Lagoa
Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival, 1979. The long “Lagoa Da Canoa” jam kicks off with a tenor sax solo by Cacau (Claudio Araujo de Queiroz). Other members are Nivaldo Ornelas (soprano sax), Jovino Santos Neto (keyboards), Itiberê Zwarg (bass), Nenê (drums), Pernambuco (percussions) and Zabelé (vocal / percussions).
Hermeto has also developed the Sound of the Aura concept, in which music is developed out of people’s speech, traffic noise, and out of every possible source of sound. That didn’t impede him from conquering the admiration of world-class musicians such as Miles Davis, for whom he recorded as instrumentalist and composer.
