Moreno Veloso, singer-songwriter: “I think we are missing reading poetry” | News from Catalonia | EUROtoday

It is feasible to acknowledge a laboratory by some key parts: compounds, formulation being examined and mixtures that generate distinctive, generally unrepeatable outcomes, resembling the brand new live performance by Brazilians Moreno Veloso (Bahía, 53 years outdated) and Domenico Lancellotti (Rio de Janeiro, 53 years outdated), introduced this final weekend in Spain. The analogy is just not unintentional. A physicist by coaching, Caetano Veloso’s son transfers that experimental look to the repertoire and the present. The two lifelong mates, Moreno and Domenico, alternate between devices and on a regular basis objects, their compounds, which purchase a second sonic life and, relying on how they’re mixed, new timbres seem. On the boards there are extra devices than musicians, together with using the plate and the knife, an surprising sound for unaccustomed ears. Veloso and Lancellotti, a musical researcher tailor-made to feed sonic curiosity, introduced their model of Brazilian widespread music throughout the 21 Districts program, in Madrid, and on the Jamboree room, in Barcelona. “Bold,” summed up a spectator as she left, a praise that, on the subject of the musical universe of the Veloso, is a part of a well-known vocabulary.

Veloso and Lancellotti have recognized one another since they had been youngsters and the concord of that friendship is perceived on stage. They alternate between guitars, percussion and on a regular basis objects that move from hand at hand. They will be the tambourine the guitar; these beforehand talked about plate and knife; a bottle of water or only a set of keys. “It’s like a theater,” explains Veloso. “You look for something specific, delicate, for that moment. You build it and see if you get to that place or not.” This place, ideally, away from the hustle and bustle of at the moment. “It is an important space for pleasure, beauty and well-being. And we really need this space. More and more in recent weeks. I think we are missing reading poetry,” he feedback.

The stage sport is a part of the logic of the present and in addition of the repertoire, which ranges from songs linked to youngsters’s theater to extra full of life sambas. “Almost any object can produce sound,” says Veloso.

Improvisation, nonetheless, doesn’t come from nowhere. Behind these seemingly spontaneous gestures there’s a lengthy strategy of research. “People think everything is improvised,” says Lancellotti. “But they are years of study and research,” completes his comrade. Even the physique is a part of the sport of experimentation. Veloso performs the guitar right-handed, however turns to his left hand when he switches to percussion, whereas Lancellotti, at one other level within the live performance, stands on a chair to launch a brief operatic passage. “If I had the voice of a lyrical singer I would do it on my knees, but I have to invent something,” he jokes. “In Portugal it happened to me that Carminho was sitting in front and I thought I had to do something different.”

Anyone who believes that the live performance revolves across the determine of Veloso, because of the weight of his surname, is in for a shock. Lancellotti steals the scene in one of many hits from the repertoire: The Little Lionthe track that Caetano Veloso devoted to his son—and that Moreno typically describes as a self-portrait of his father himself. The percussionist collects 13 historic keys, fastidiously chosen and tuned, and drops them on a stone to construct a small sound scale. Each one produces a distinct vibration and the musician selects them in actual time. “There are 13 keys, like the thirteen notes of the scale,” explains Lancellotti. “There is an improvisation in the moment, but before that there was already a direction,” says Veloso.

Of all of the objects which have appeared at live shows, the plate and the knife are those that arouse probably the most curiosity among the many viewers. The family utensil, transformed right into a percussion instrument, is a part of the samba de roda very current within the area of Santo Amaro da Purificação (Bahia), the hometown of the Veloso household. Moreno remembers seeing his grandmother, neighbors and musicians from the area play like this since he was a baby. “In Santo Amaro it is something normal, it appears at parties, in patios, at any gathering. This is directly from my mother’s house,” he explains.

Outside of that context, nonetheless, the sound stays uncommon. During the pandemic, when Veloso used the plate and knife in a broadcast together with his father, a critic for the journal Rolling Stone He interpreted the gesture as a home improvisation because of the lack of devices. “The journalist said that there was no instrument and that I went to the kitchen to get the utensils. But there are records in newspapers from the 19th century of people playing plate and knife,” says Veloso.

Throughout the live performance, the 2 artists play with the musical naturalness of Brazil, the place any object will be able to producing good music. Although the continental nation formally shares a single language, Portuguese, the types and accents in the way in which of taking part in the identical instrument change from one area to a different. “Each place has its own form. Samba is like that, five kilometers away it already has a different accent,” explains Veloso. The musician himself remembers having verified this distinction when assembly Paulinho da Viola, one of many nice samba gamers of Rio de Janeiro. “I was with the plate and the knife and I discovered that he also touched it. But he did it in his own way, completely different from mine,” he feedback.

On stage, each in Madrid and Barcelona, ​​the intersection of lifelong musical references and reminiscences seems transformed into sound. “I grew up surrounded by figures like Milton Nascimento or Chico Buarque. I’m a big fan of those people. It’s also hard for me to believe they exist,” says Veloso, laughing. Among all these influences, Veloso additionally remembers the influence that the group of African descendants Ilê Aiyê had on his childhood, based within the seventies in Salvador de Bahía and thought of one of many symbols of black cultural affirmation in Brazil: “The Ilê is an aesthetic, spiritual and political force at the same time.” The bloco parade, made up solely of black folks, grew to become for many years a gesture of affirmation in a metropolis deeply marked by its Afro-descendant heritage. “When you see that you understand that there is something more than music,” says Veloso, who emphasizes: “There is history, there is beauty, there is a collective affirmation.”

Between the echoes of various Brazilian traditions and lifelong influences, Veloso and Lancellotti play on stage and wish to create, for a couple of moments, a Parallel World, title that additionally provides title to their newest album. At a time marked by worldwide political pressure, the target of artwork is refuge. “If we do not cure our monsters with culture, dance, music and poetry, the result is what we are seeing,” displays Veloso.