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Thirty Minutes with Seu Jorge
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L News, Thirty Minutes with Seu Jorge >>
The Brazilian singer and actor Seu Jorge begins our interview by spilling Coke all over my notebook. While his translator Leslie leaves the room in search of paper towels, Seu Jorge makes large and apologetic gesticulations, punctuating his movements with phrases of Portuguese. As I reassure him in English, throwing in some gesticulations of my own for good measure, I think about how it might be fun to do this interview without the translator, Seu Jorge waving his hands, me scrawling his strange words on Coke-sticky pages. The enigmatic performance art quality of this scenario suits Seu Jorge, who is smiling, gracious, and largely inscrutable.
For starters, Seu Jorge isn’t his real name (Jorge Mario da Silva is). Seu means “yours,” and Jorge is the person you always go to. It could be your repairman, your butcher, or, according to Marcela Yuka, a drummer friend in the band O-rappa who coined the nickname, your musician. You might see your butcher several times a week, but you probably don’t know if he has kids, or a wife he loves, or a passion for racecars. You know him, but you don’t know him. It’s the same for Seu Jorge.
Consider Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic, in which he pops up as the sailor Pelé dos Santos. Singing his interpretations of David Bowie songs in Portuguese, a jaunty red beanie cap covering his dreads, Seu Jorge is the film’s most elliptical character. He functions like a 21st-century Greek chorus, pausing the plot to provide much more psychic relief than one would expect from any Bowie tune, Portuguese notwithstanding. If The Life Aquatic raised any questions about Seu Jorge’s authenticity and allegiance to the music of Brazil, his full-length album Cru, released this fall by Wrasse Records, dispelled them. Cru is an album that feels broken-in the first time you listen to it. Seu Jorge’s voice dips, falters, and regains its balance against a percussive guitar and very little else. No one reviewing the album has failed to mention that Cru means raw, and most go on to equate raw with one or all of the following: Seu Jorge, the person; Seu Jorge, the voice; Seu Jorge, the formerly homeless favela dweller. These are convenient fictions, and since it’s unlikely I’ll be able to puncture them in 30 minutes of translated conversation, I’ve brought some music to discuss.
The first tracks I cue up are from the MIA/Diplo mixtape, Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1. Diplo’s name is pretty much synonymous with baile funk these days, and I’m curious to see if Seu Jorge knows his music. He doesn’t, and he’s not impressed. I watch him shake his head, expression slightly pained. “If he took things from Brazil, he did a very good job of hiding it.” I can hear the dismissal in the abruptness of his delivery before his words are translated: “I wouldn’t be able to dance to it.” He doesn’t say the words, “like I can to baile funk,” but they are palpable in the air.
Next up: ‘When God Created the Coffeebreak’, by Esbjorn Svensson Trio (EST), a Norwegian jazz trio opening for Seu Jorge in Vancouver later this spring. The quick piano and upright bass counterpoint provoke all the enthusiasm that was missing with MIA, a response on par with an earlier lengthy, energetic explanation of baile funk that began, “Everything started with Kraftwerk,” and ended with me more confused than enlightened. “I can talk about this,” he tells me as the piano races on, his hands tracing increasing concentric circles, always swooping back to his breastbone, as if he is guiding a plane in for an emergency landing on the runway of his chest. But mostly he remains quiet, save for occasional murmurs of approval, his chin lifted high in a pose that reveals a pair of alert eyes beneath those dark lengths of hair.
When I put on Bob Dylan’s ‘All I Really Want to Do’, from Another Side of Bob Dylan, Seu Jorge grins and talks, grins and talks. “Oh my God.” Clasping those large hands together: “I love him.” Dreads bobbing: “He sings from the heart.” Eyes closed: “I perceive his intentions.” His passion for Dylan is unusual for a Brazilian of his social background. He wasn’t popular in the favelas, he explains, so he didn’t hear him until he was 22. Before the internet, there was a five-year lag before a Dylan album that came out in the United States was released in Brazil.
It turns out that by listening to music with Seu Jorge, he and Brazil are both becoming a little less inscrutable. I wish I could ask him more about his affinity for Dylan, but we don’t have much time left, and I want him to hear ‘Ungudi Wele Wele’, from Konono No. 1’s album Congotronics. In a flash, Seu Jorge is beating polyrhythms on his thighs, humming along with his improvised percussion. He thinks this music is Brazilian, and asks for my confirmation. Learning that Konono No. 1 is a Congolese group that’s been around since the late 70s doesn’t deter him in the slightest. “Sounds like Brazil,” he states again. By now, I understand that for Seu Jorge, there is no higher form of musical praise.
04/12/06 >> go there
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