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Global Hit (Audio)
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The World (Public Radio International), Global Hit (Audio) >>
Modern Brazil is a creation of the indigenous people, Indians, and Africans and the Portuguese colonizers. The Portuguese actually encouraged integration between the insiders and the outsiders. It's a simplistic way to look at 500 years of Brazilian history. But the cross-fertilization has led to a diverse culture. And that's reflected in Brazil's contemporary music. Brazilian musicians borrow elements from all over the globe. In today and tomorrow's Global Hit, The World's Marco Werman introduces us to two Brazilian artists who exemplify that tradition.
There's nothing unique about the concept. There are artists all over the world who incorporate sounds from other countries into their own music. But Brazilians have actually coined a word for this phenomenon: anthropophagi.
Mylene: In fact, anthropophagous is an Indian who eats meat of foreigners.
Mylene Auriopedes, or just Mylene, creates her music as if she's a cultural carnivore.
Mylene: Brazilian music, and not only music, but painting, theater, art, art in general here, is very very anthropophagous. We have here Indian and African and European blood. And because of that we are used to receiving cultural information from abroad and recycling it, transforming it.
This is how Mylene recycles Moorish percussion from Spain on her track, "48 Horas."
Mylene: These moorishian bongos, these Arabic tambourines, darboukas that my percussionist and producer plays, I think they are integrated to Brazilian sonority.
And that's the taste test, if you will, for Brazil's cultural carnivores. If sounds from abroad fit into the ever changing notion of what Brazilian sonority is, then the musicians fold it into their work. And for a tune like "48 Horas" with its Moorish percussion, Mylene believes the inspiration was a lot less distant than you might think.
Mylene: It is true that all sambas, all our melodies in general, and even including here bossa nova are influenced by the melancholy of Portuguese and Spanish people. Its drama, its sadness. It's in our blood. But it has been forgotten because of pop music.
And sometimes Anglo-American pop music can inspire that Brazilian sense of drama and sadness because it has its roots in those emotions as well.
Mylene: Eleanor Rigby melody is very Iberian. If you study it, you can hear this Iberian sonority, this Arabian sonority. And we Brazilians, when we listen to this music, we can hear this sonority. So I try to reinvent it as any Brazilian could do.
Well, not as any Brazilian could do. Stylistic borrowing may be a Brazilian tradition. But Mylene hears sounds from from abroad, and makes them her own.
For The World, I'm Marco Werman.
02/10/04 >> go there
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