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Samba for the Masses
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Globe and Mail, Samba for the Masses >>
By Li Robbins
Seu Jorge says he "felt like Elvis," when he landed the role of Pelé dos Santos in Wes Anderson's 2004 movie, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
"Elvis," says Jorge, speaking by phone from Miami, "had similar luck in his first film." Relatively speaking this is true, although it's also fair to say that Jorge's idiosyncratic, Portuguese-language interpretations of David Bowie songs in The Life Aquatic are otherwise dissimilar from Elvis singing Love Me Tender, in the movie of the same name.
The Brazilian singer and actor fit easily into Anderson's acutely whimsical cinematic world as easily as he fit into Fernando Meirelles's 2002 critical smash, City of God, set in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Jorge, who played the good-guy-gone-bad character Knockout Ned, grew up in those very same slums (or favelas) and was homeless for a time on its notoriously mean streets.
He was born Jorge Mario da Silva. "Seu" came later, a telling nickname that's literally a pronoun meaning "Your" as in "Your Jorge." He feels it implies that he "belongs to the people," adding, "I try to make universal music." This concept is underscored by his own characterization of the music he creates -- in the context of Brazilian music, he prefers the description "blues from the favela."
For Jorge, music is the emotional counterweight to his work on the screen (most recently in The House of Sand, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival), which he approaches from a "technical and professional" standpoint, an attitude developed during studies in a Rio drama school. This training completely altered his perspective on his own life.
"Brazil is essentially a racist country, where you're very marked by the racism. Black people often don't believe they're really going to find a place for themselves, a successful place in society or in a profession they aspire to, but the theatre gave me that confidence. It was critical to break down certain complexes I might have had about where I come from." His music, on the other hand, comes from someplace other than the technical, or as he puts it, "My music is based on emotions, on living in the moment." He's not interested in performing in concert halls where people attend out of "social obligation" -- he wants an audience that's "hungering for something new, a new day, a new outlook."
On a more prosaic note, he enthusiastically declares, "I want my audience to sing and dance."
They do, as the capacity crowd at his U.S. debut last June at New York's S.O.B.'s, proved (reportedly Life Aquatic star Bill Murray among the receptive fans), and at more recent gigs in Japan, where samba festivals are curiously trendy. Jorge's music isn't the samba of parades and carnival, and yet samba is its insistent heartbeat -- musically, and psychologically.
"Samba is black music, it's music of the slums, which no one in their right minds would say ever had a chance to get beyond those confines, yet it has," Jorge says. "It's so powerful that it employs people, it creates a four-day vacation in Brazil. It attracts foreigners from all over. It's an opportunity to love, to kiss someone on the mouth -- an experience you must have. Samba is essential for people to experience their fundamental humanity."
Seu Jorge's new recording, Cru, (translating to "Raw" in English), released this month on Wrasse Records, is a kind of evocation of both samba's literal pulse and symbolic weight. On it he sings with an intimacy and rough-edged honesty that has drawn critical fire in the same breath as unabashed admiration. (Ben Ratliff, for example, writing in The New York Times, summed up the majority critical point of view by noting: "Mr. Jorge doesn't have the greatest voice," but his music is "impossibly likeable.")
On Cru there are, as might be expected, Brazilian compositions, but also two startling departures. One, an updated (Kurt Cobain gets a mention) version of Serge Gainsbourg's Chatterton, a song about suicide. Jorge's explanation of this choice becomes a convoluted tale of his mixed relationship to France, referencing the painful -- historic World Cup-playoff soccer defeats -- and the romantic -- at 13 he saw a film featuring Gainsbourg's singing, and the French singer-provocateur's vocals made an indelible impression.
But mostly he wanted to record Chatterton because the notion of choosing suicide seems so bizarre to him.
"In Brazil," he says, "People are too busy surviving to kill themselves."
The second, less political but also notable departure is by way of a small homage, through a sensual rendition of the Leiber and Stoller composition, Don't. A hit, in 1957, by one Elvis Presley.
Seu Jorge opens the fourth annual Small World Music Festival tonight at Toronto's Lula Lounge. 09/22/05 >> go there
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