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Afro-Brazilian Pop Music
Carlinhos Brown
| Brasilien
Booking-Agent:
Frank Abraham
+49 30 261032920
fa@f-cat.de
(Leider kein deutscher Text vorhanden)
The state of Bahia, in Brazil, has beyond doubt yielded incredible musicians who have conquered the world with their talent. In the mid 1960s, a new generation of Bahian artists were in the process of shaping a musical movement entitled “Tropicalismo”, meanwhile at Candeal Pequeno, a small neighbourhood located in the Brotas district of Salvador, a young couple, Renato and Madalena, were following the first steps of their son. The expectations for this child were that he would become a good man and learn a trade. The name given to the little boy on his birth certificate was Antonio Carlos Santos de Freitas and his destiny was music.
As an adolescent, Antonio Carlos came to be known as Carlinhos Brown, inspired by H. Rap Brown, militant of the Black Panther movement. Carlinhos Brown became a singer, songwriter and instrumentalist of international fame. Without a doubt one of the most creative of the new generation of Brazilian artists and connected with the world movement of contemporary music, Carlinhos' fundamental merit is to research what was until recently traditional Afro-Brazilian rhythms and restore them as pop music.
The retired driver Osvaldo Alves da Silva, known as Mestre Pintado do Bongô (Bongo Drums Master), was the one who introduced Carlinhos Brown to the musical universe. Everything the Master knew, he gave to his disciple. Carlinhos started with the tambourine, progressed to a small drum and then to the reco-reco (a percussion instrument consisting of a piece of wood interspersed with small dents; the sound is produced by sliding a stick over those dents). From the reco-reco, all of a sudden, Carlinhos was mastering all the instruments that Mestre Pintado knew how to play. Now more independent, Brown started to develop new musical experiences thus beginning to find his place in the world of music.
At the beginning of the 1980's, Carlinhos began working at the WR Studios in Bahia where he gained knowledge not only about recording and production techniques but also about instruments until then unknown to him. It was during this time that he and various musicians worked on codifying all the rhythms disseminated throughout Bahia.
By 1985 Carlinhos has his first hit composition "Visão do Cíclope" (Cyclopic Vision) recorded by Luiz Caldas. By the end of the year, there were 26 of Carlinhos´ compositions on the radio stations playlists and he also won the most important award for Bahian music, the Troféu Caymmi (Caymmi Trophy).
A year later, Caetano Veloso, one of the icons of Bahian and Brazilian music, asked Carlinhos to join his band and transformed him into the trump card of his concerts. Caetano's next album Estrangeiro (Foreigner) features the talents of Brown on several songs as a musician and composer. Soon a larger public, along with producers and other Brazilian artists, discovered Carlinhos Brown and became aware of his potential. He toured internationally with João Gilberto, João Bosco and Djavan, Carlinhos was making music for the world.
Nowadays the list of musicians that have recorded Carlinhos´ compositions or recorded with him are as varied as Maria Bethânia, Gal Costa, Nando Reis, Daniela Mercury, Arnaldo Antunes, Marisa Monte to the heavy metal band Selpultura.
Carnival in Bahia has always played an important part in Carlinhos´ life. He was one of the first musicians to take the timbau drum, one that is played in the candomblé religious ceremonies, on to the streets for carnival. His trio electrico, the large open top trucks that carry the sound systems through the streets, always has thousands of followers.
Carlinhos Brown also applies his insights and his boldness to collective musical projects and from the hurricane that is carnival emerged the percussion band Timbalada. Adolescents and adult instrumentalists, singers and composers from Candeal Pequeno and from other boroughs of Salvador, form the group. They have already recorded eight albums, each of which has been produced by Carlinhos.
Another project is Lactomia, a percussion band formed by children and adolescents from Candeal or from the nearby neighborhoods who age from 7 to 23. They play solely on instruments recycled by themselves made from cans, water bottles and other surprising material and Carlinhos´ intention of the project is to develop the musical perception of these children and adolescents.
In November 2002, Carlinhos Brown was awarded the UNESCO Youth Prize, an award to a public or private institution that fights for the reduction in social inequalities. Carlinhos was awarded this prize because he is founder of the Associação Pracatum Ação Social, (APAS), in his neighbourhood of Candeal Pequeno, historically one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Salvador de Bahia.
It was the APAS who in February 2001, with the support of the Bahia State Government, initiated the Tá Rebocao programme with Brown’s idea of “ Que o Brasil se organize, que organize sua rua” (Let Brazil organise itself, let it organise its streets). The Tá Rebocado community programmes (amongst many other examples) include the improvement of housing in the neighbourhood, employment, sewage control and treatment, public lighting, the environment, free dental treatment for children between the ages of 0-6 years, computer courses, English classes, literacy for adults, theatre... The nucleus of this association is the Música Pracatum School, the only school in Brazil to teach popular music.
As for his solo career, Carlinhos Brown has always surprised everyone with his high technical standard, which is present on all his productions. Each song is treated with care and love, with the aim to show the multi cultural influences that always feature these transformations. His first solo album ´Alfagamabetizado´ was released to critical acclaim in 1996. In 1998 he followed up with ´Omelete Man´ that saw a change in style from the axé sound, there were string arrangements and Carlinhos sang a number of tracks in English. Three years later ´Bahia do Mundo, Mito e Verdade´ hit the stores. It was quoted as an encounter between Brazil and Africa, between rock and jazz, between pop and contemporary music.
For his latest solo CD, ´Carlinhos Brown es Carlito Marrón´ (SonyBMG), this magician who has experimented with so many different sounds, tries the Latin vein. He recently said, “Carlito Marrón is a process of ´relatinisation´. This process comes from the heart, it hasn’t been researched in books, nor studied, it is an oral process, it’s everything that I’ve learnt from my neighbours, with my friends, listening to music from the entire world and principally from my family...What I wanted to do was not just re-record music, but re-create a new sound within the Latin scene, using flavours that weren’t just Cuban, Puerto Rican or from Miami or New York. I wanted to say the following, ´Brazil is Latin!´”.
To help him on this journey, Carlinhos invited the Cuban musicians percussionist Miguel Angá Diaz and the tres player Papi Oviedo to his studio in Salvador and their Afro-Cuban influence can be heard throughout the album. Also present on the albums are two duets, one with the Spanish flamenco singer Rosario and the other with his fellow Brazilian, Bebel Gilberto.
It is a contagious CD because of its special sound. It makes the body move due to its innovated ancestral sounds that are formed within the Latin musicality. These rhythms go beyond the Caribbean; they pass through Europe and reach as far as the Middle East. In 2004 this record won the Latin Grammy for Best Contemporary Brazilian Pop Album, Carlinhos’ second Latin Grammy, he received his first the previous year for the groundbreaking Tribalistas album.
The album ‘Carlito Marrón’ has received critical and public acclaim, and during the past few years Carlinhos has toured extensively in Spain, Europe and North America, playing at some of the most prestigious festivals: La Villette in Paris, Nice Jazz, Cartagena’s Mar de Músicas, the San Fermines festival in Pamplona, Rosilde in Denmark, Festival de Jazz de San Sebastian, Lincoln Center in New York and the Barbican Centre in London.
In May 2004 the Forum de les Cultures in Barcelona, asked Carlinhos to re-created a Bahian Carnival as one of its inaugural acts. The event took place on the famous Paseo de Gracia in the city centre and included Carlinhos’ trio electrico, the Camarote Andante, as well as over 35 musicians. It was the first time that a Brazilian carnival took place in the streets of Barcelona and it was an outstanding success; over 400,000 people joined the carnival celebrations.
One of the summer hits in Spain in 2004 was a track performed at the carnival by Carlinhos and DJ Dero. ‘Mariacaipirnha’ is a song taken from their joint album ‘Candyall Beat’ which was released in May 2004. This project is a collective work where percussion supports dance music and therefore fusing the primitive past with the universal future. The unforgettable video of ‘Mariacaipirinha’ features the crowds from carnival in Barcelona, dancing the night away.
The Oscar winning Spanish director Fernando Trueba was in Salvador during the first couple of months of 2004. From his stay in Bahia, Trueba produced the musical documentary, ‘El milagro de Candeal’ (The Miracle of Candeal). This film was inspired by the wish of the Cuban pianist, Bebo Valdés, to visit Salvador de Bahia before he dies. Through Bebo, we gain an insight to the city and in particular to the neighbourhood of Candeal Pequeno. We see the community projects that have been established, the Pracatum School, the neighbours and the children, and their efforts to improve their surroundings through education, solidarity and music. The film’s score features Carlinhos, Bebo Valdés, the musicians of the Camarote Andante Band, Sr Mateus – an authority on Afro Bahian music, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Marisa Monte. The film has won two Premios Goya, the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars, for Best Documentary and also Best Original Song for Zambie Mameto, which was composed by Carlinhos.
In 2005, one of Spain’s main mobile phone operators, Movistar, revamped their logo. Having seen the success of the previous year’s carnival in Barcelona and wanting to celebrate this new phase in the company’s development, they asked Carlinhos to participate in five carnivals across Spain and this time with two trios. Brown was asked to invite some fellow musicians from Salvador to join in the fun.
The first carnival took place in Bilbao, where more than 250,000 people joined in the festivities. A week later, the trios and musicians were in Barcelona and like the year before some 400,000 danced away for more than four hours. A couple of weeks late in Madrid’s Paseo de la Castellana, over one million people descended on one of the city’s main boulevards. In Seville, the crowd rose to some 200,000 and the carnival in Valencia attracted some 250,000. In total, more than two million people participated in this summers’ carnivals, an incredible amount by all standards.
As well as the carnivals, Carlinhos and his band also toured Europe during summer 2005, performing some 40 shows in Spain, France, Portugal and Italy. After a well-earned rest, Brown released in 2007 his new studio album A gente nao sonhou. The album release was followed again by a large tour in Spain and in Europe. In September 2006 A gente nao sonhou was nominated as Best Contemporary Brazilian Pop album for the Latin Grammies.
