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The Latest from Brazzil Magazine |
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Written by Bruce Gilman
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Wednesday, 05 October 2005 |
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 Daniela Mercury, the "Queen of Axé" broke into stardom at the beginning of the 90's rippling her petite body and wavy elbow-length, reddish-brown hair from the heights of the trios elétricos. Recently, with familiar purpose and with her sights on the ever-changing marketplace, Mercury released Carnaval Eletrônico, a collection of up-tempo electronic dance music.
Taking on an urban sound - heavily influenced by hip-hop, house, trance, and techno - the twelve tracks are dominated by drum and bass rhythms, but personalized by prominent Brazilian syncopations and polyrhythms.
The result is a very immediate and clear opposition between refinement and ferocity. On Saturday, October 15, Daniela Mercury brings her dynamic sound continuum to Los Angeles, electrifying UCLA's Royce Hall.
Often referred to as the "Queen of Salvador" and the "Queen of Samba-reggae," Mercury moved beyond these disposable labels and left the axé music ghetto for the international market in 1996 when she released Feijão com Arroz, a project that revealed a Daniela Mercury more attentive to the details of production.
The elaborate repertoire had been researched for over a year and a half by Mercury, collecting and scrutinizing hundreds of compositions that displayed an inventory of unique Brazilian rhythms.
Disassociating the fiery Daniela Mercury from the accentuated Bahian percussion that had vibrated throughout most of her music was hard for some fans, and listeners may experience a subtle tension upon hearing Carnaval Eletrônico, which moves absorbingly between turbulence and poetic reflection.
But like fellow Bahians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Mercury is a musical "cannibal" who never vacillates when absorbing diverse musical elements.
At a time when electronic dance music tends to have deliberately artificial, robotic, and repetitious drum beats mixed with sampled drum loops, for Carnaval Eletrônico, Mercury uses a highly respected pool of DJ/producers chiefly as providers of a sound palette.
Rather than just mimic arrangements playable by live musicians, the producers, in striving to achieve a listenable, dance floor-friendly balance, build layers of syncopated, rhythmic harmonies and mingle them together in an palette of compatible textures, bringing layers of sound in and out, and equalizing the effects to create ever-more hypnotic and propulsive combinations.
The project's strength derives from its extraordinary variety of textures, ranging from light washes of synthesized sound to muscular backdrops, against which Mercury delivers her lyrics with power and conviction.
The project, nominated for the Latin Grammy, opens with Carlinhos Brown's "Maimbê Dandá," a tune that swept the Best Song awards at Bahia's 2004 Carnaval and became one of the biggest hits in the history of Bahian Carnaval.
Its quixotic combinations continued to resonate throughout Brazil as one of the most performed songs during the 2005 Carnaval festivities. "Que Baque é Esse?" (What beat is this?) finds Mercury dovetailing well both with singer/songwriter Lenine and the tune's sharp-cornered arrangement.
Although her delivery can sometimes have the caged animal intensity found in "O Canto da Rainha" (The Singing of the Queen), this is contrasted by a rendition of Gilberto Gil's "Amor de Carnaval" (Carnival Love) where the lyrics are perfectly cushioned by the arrangement.
Rather than just adding a veneer, Mercury gets deeply into the wide range of Brazilian percussive and electronically-influenced grooves. Not an easy strategy, but Carnaval Eletrônico, as sensuous as it is complex, packs infectious energy. And Mercury, in sparkling form, opens a new chapter and captures a fresh space within Brazilian electronica, one that guarantees visibility and affirms her groundbreaking image.
From her early days, the fiery young singer seemed completely at home giving her interpretations the solid foundation needed to move freely, spontaneously, and, at critical moments, to take off. Her voice was full and her elasticity of phrasing and confident control of it remarkable.
Not surprisingly, concert promoters rushed in to engage this gifted singer, and record producers pricked up their ears. Her debut recording literally burst upon the musical world and was soon followed by her first contract recording for Sony.
Mercury's intensification of dynamic and rhythmic momentum remains one explanation. Performing every show as if it were her last, she injects her listeners with vitality. Her spontaneity and total commitment to the audience, something she first demonstrated aloft the trios elétricos, is magical and something that comes to her naturally. It is also part of the reason she got to the top and has managed to stay there.
Journalist, musician, and educator Bruce Gilman has served as music editor of Brazzil magazine, an international monthly publication based in Los Angeles, for close to a decade. During that time he has written scores of articles on the most influential Brazilian artists and genres, program notes for festivals in the United States and abroad, numerous CD liner notes, and an essay, "The Politics of Samba," that appeared in the Georgetown Journal.
He is the recipient of three government grants that allowed him to research traditional music in China, India, and Brazil. His articles on Brazilian music have been translated and published in Dutch, German, Portuguese, Serbian, and Spanish. You can reach him through his e-mail: cuica@interworld.net.
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Brazil received a huge boost in its international image with its selection as the host of the 2016 Olympics, but it was really just the cherry on top of the overall recognition of the country's ascension to the ranks of one of the world's most important countries. Now, as it finally takes its place on the world scene, there has been a great deal of concern about what kind of image Brazil hopes to project, now that the world is really paying attention. 
The only good thing to say about the visit to Brazil of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Monday November 23, is that it was mercifully short and lasted less than 24 hours. Ahmadinejad had his picture taken being hugged by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who gave him a warm welcome and said Iran had every right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. 
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose.