On the radio, twenty years later...

Twenty years later, there I was, sitting in a comfortable couch inside a radio station, Australia's ABC (720AM Perth), for an interview about a new gig I am doing with a Brazilian singer/friend next Saturday. We were both a little nervous with the whole thing, but then, unlike 20 years ago when I'd get all fired up and tense like a wire during a live appearance, I started looking around, and just feeling lucky to be there once again. The views of leafless trees from the large studio windows, and how nice all people from production, technicians and the presenter, Geraldine Mellet, were being with us, all provided me a perfect setting to neutralize the hand-freezing effects of being there, live on the radio, twenty years later. Good to see time changes us for better in a few things, so I was just able to appreciate, and play as best as possible, and just feel good about it.

We played two songs from the repertoire of 15 we'll be playing on Saturday - Meu Erro (Paralamas do Sucesso) and Every Breath You Take (ThePolice). Both songs are from the rock/pop stream of music, but we reworked them onto a samba/bossa nova arrangement that sounds simply delicious for a voice and guitar duo. As a bass player, taking the classical guitar for this project has allowed me to focus on the rhythmic textures, taking advantage of the larger range of possibilities to throw in harmonic structures alongside the rhythmic thing. Of course, the singer loves it, as it gives her all the freedom and backing to float away in the melodic space that becomes all hers.

We are calling ourselves "So Brazil Duo", and everything has been fantastic about this experience.

The Music Prism - Sadness, Life and Being Happy

I’ve written, some time ago, on how music was an important door for enhancing the opportunities of communication with our autistic son. Music is actually a two-way chance door, with pros and cons moving in both directions, like any other connection in close relationships. Sometimes our older son is deeply connected with music, his curious eyes getting closer to whoever is singing, or to the instrument that is producing those amazing sounds. Sometimes he is distracted and disruptive, and his loud expression breaks any attempt to create a coherent or harmonic music structure, into sheer chaos.

This state of things unfolds from our music interactions to all other aspects of life. Sometimes dinner is peaceful and full of opportunities for learning new words, new foods, new sounds and new interactions. Sometimes it’s difficult. Sometimes when we visit friends, the interaction is almost musical. Sometimes it can become incredibly dissonant.

And by living this way, our family has fewer friends than other families. But what we lose in quantity, we gain in quality, as a central requirement for friends that want us to be their friends, is that they are as loving as we are, as able as we are to cope with changes, as compassionate as we have learned to be, and as tolerant and patient as we have joyfully become.

More than often, however, we bump into misunderstandings, which usually degenerate onto a situation where people are initially intolerant. Luckily enough, in most cases, when opportunity is given for talking about the way we live, what we expect from life, and what life allows us to expect from it, intolerance turns into acts of embracing, recognition, and those few but great friendships are born. Other times, we become unable to reciprocate some more demanding types of expectations. In such cases, intolerance breaks down further into lack of compassion towards us, and the blob of prejudice leads to a situation where there is not much we can do. In such cases, our family as a whole mimics our older son’s disability, as it becomes impossible to communicate who we are or what we feel to those who do not want to understand. Such occasions, which thankfully have become less and less frequent, still make us very sad.

Interesting it is to see how sadness pushes us into those states of deep reflection. Also interesting is the fact that I have, recently, found again in music a deep, wide channel where the long-keeled boat of reflection can make its slow, large maneuvers. This is a consequence of my recent opportunity to take up playing the classical guitar, for rehearsing in a duo project centered in Brazilian popular music. Since I was a youngster, I have found the acoustic guitar was the perfect vessel for my most reflective moments. And I was, since such early days, surprised to see how music, made from my playing the guitar, acted as a prism to clearly separate what I was feeling.

The prism of music allows me to distill my frustration during those moments where my family is misunderstood, or is seen by the eyes of prejudice, as I mentioned above, and gives me a chance to understand that my sadness in such situations comes from realizing how desolate those people can be in their own inner worlds, and hidden lives. On the other hand, the reflective music prism can distill my own sadness, even the strongest ones, so that I can see them from the larger perspective of life, and the many chances for happiness life provides. One such chance is having in my family a disabled son, who gives us the opportunity of fully exercising our love, of recongnizing our failures, and, in the end, of becoming better persons each day.

Music: magical window to the autistic soul

In the last few years, I've discovered still another magical side of music, through the relationship with my 8-year old autistic son. While practicing the bass, I could notice how his attention would shift from whatever he would be doing, drawn by my plucking of the strings, and the simultaneous sound this would produce through the speakers of my little practice amplifier. I'd then lay the bass on the bed, so that he could explore the sounds, plucking gently the strings, showing some surprise with the connection between his touching the strings, and a matching sound being produced. Throughout the years, he has consistently shown a higher level of interest in our musical exploration sessions than he would typically demonstrate in other activities.

More recently, I started rehearsing Brazilian jazz and popular music with a singer. Once a week we go through a repertoire spanning many different aspects of the sounds of Brazil. The coupling of her sweet voice and the markedly rhythmic guitar arrangements that I have been putting together, have again cast a spell on Ricky. Most times, when he is in the living room with us, he finds in our practice sessions a soothing time where he quiets down, observing attentively, showing sometimes awe, sometimes puzzlement, on how we can make match the textures of the rhythmic guitar chords with sung melodies in such a sweet way.

These experiences have made me more attentive to the fact that, always, when at bedtime myself or my wife, we sing songs or variations of songs that he has heard a few times before, say, a Brazilian nursery rhyme or child's song, he quiets down to listen, looking deeply into our eyes, and sometimes singing along a few scattered words. We have enjoyed these moments together, providing him a sense of safeness and connection that has also been very rewarding to ourselves. Slowly, through the years, we've been able to develop with him a repertoire of a handful of songs which he can actually sing most of the words, either prompted with the first two or three words of the song, or with the first word or two of each verse. He now can sing along a small number of songs, mostly in Portuguese, and gradually more in English, as well.

Based on our experience, it was not surprising to find out that results published this year from a recent study conducted by Dr. Ami Klin, of the Yale Child Study Center, have confirmed that the synchronous nature of sound and movement captures consistently the attention of autistic children, more than any other form of interaction with objects or people (such as eye contact, touch, or movement and sounds in isolation). In a recent interview, Klin said:

"I and colleagues looked at a way [...] 2-year-olds with autism would look at adult care givers, [...] and those children spend less time looking at people's eyes and more time looking at people's mouth [...] And that was puzzling because the eyes are really the window for the soul, they are the way that we experience people, their emotions and their intentions. And so we are puzzled by the fact that they showed increased attention to the mouth. With [...] the new insights, we raised the hypothesis that the reason why they were looking at mouth is because the mouth is the part of the face that contains the greatest audio-visual synchrony, lip movements and speech sounds co-occurring."

Our experience with music, which is a generalization of this synchronicity between movement and sound, provides, in our minds, a further confirmation of the results published by Dr. Ami Klin and his colleagues at Yale. His new insights provide further, scientific proof, to why music therapy programs, such as the few we have contacted here in Australia to strengthen the basis of our daily interactions with our son, are so successful, providing not eyes, but music as a window to the souls of autistic children.

Paving future's slopes with spray paint

After a short bushwalk in Bold Park with my older son, I crossed ways with these young spray-paint artists, who were redecorating the slopes of the Perry Lakes skate facilities. While enjoying the last few summer-like days of Perth’s Autumn, they were following some general sketches from a few pieces of paper here and there, but pretty much pushing each other towards improvising most of the colorful images that sprouted up and down the slopes of the skate bowl.

In a constructive initiative sponsored by the Cambridge Youth Centre, these young, creative people were literally paving the way for dozens of other youngsters, from all younger and older age groups, who would be criss-crossing the skate bowl throughout the next few months to come. Fueled by something that sounded like The Kills, shouting off a portable hi-fi, and by the pleasant warmth of a quiet Tuesday morning, they were creating a mosaic of images and ideas that would certainly keep future users of the facility motivated, and more than likely in a positive state of mind that will unfold the fun these young artists were having this morning, into the near future.

Photos (C) JH Alves.

I Pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday

I've spent the last couple of years trying to find my way back into music, after a voluntary leave, consequence of deciding to bring together, and set the foundations of a family. The effort paid off, in the sense that now my younger one, who turns three in two months, has decided he wants to pick up an ukelele I bought on a recent trip to Hawaii, every time I get my guitar or bass to practice a little. Also, our older son, who is autistic, also quiets down or comes and sits beside me, plucking interestedly some strings, particularly when I plug in the bass for a practice session. (I don't really want more proof of a healthy/happy family than a three-year old so enthusiastic about music, and an autistic boy that interacts so nicely when music is in the air!)

The fact is that, despite some rather random but fulfilling episodes of practice, the stream of musicianship, which seemed to flow so easily in past years of my life, had apparently left me. The mental image that I usually cultivated, to cheer up whenever I felt lost the musical flow from sight, was that of some Dr. Evil commanding Fat Bastard to extract the mojo from a frozen Austin Powers. I eventually decided that my Dr. Evil, mojo sucker, was the lack of a local community of amateur musicians in Perth that I could join in a musical journey, like I so pleasantly had done before, a few years back, in Washington, DC.

A change of airs suddenly happened, as serendipity kicked in, a few weeks back. A few friends invited me and my wife to a concert where a new Brazilian jazz band would be playing, featuring a singer from Sao Paulo who had recently moved to Perth with her family. At the gig, we met the singer, and spoke a little. A week later, she came to our house with the whole family for lunch, and while the kids engaged quickly in a bi-lingual play in the backyard, I picked up my nylon-string guitar, and we had a go at a few songs. The connection was all there, and I suddenly felt things were flowing again.

A few phone calls and we decided we would try to set up a repertoire for a duo, with an eye at later bringing into scene a percussionist as well. So far we've arranged some 30 songs, and found out the shared pleasure of mixing Brazilian rhythms and songs with pop hits, as we did last night in a medley conecting The Police's "Every breath you take" with Jorge Benjor's "Ive Brussel". Maybe soon I'll post a recording to intensify and spread this new, liberating flow of music that we have discovered in Perth.

For the last two weeks, I've been reliving the same liberating feelings I had when, at 13, I was taught how to play the guitar in military school by a friend, now bassist of Rio de Janeiro's Farofa Carioca. The flow has suddenly risen from the undergrounds of my soul, to reach higher peaks of creativity. Perhaps this is a consequence of still another dimension of music's connecting power, as I now feel I am once more a small, but intense, part of a stream of musicians, present and past, who have lived and sung the liberating and reassuring powers of playing the acoustic guitar, which I rediscovered, is one of man's best friend.

While thinking about writing this post last night, serendipity once again made me bump into a video that translates much of the feelings I describe above, of how liberating and pleasant an instrument as simple/humble as an acoustic guitar can be. In the video, young and unbelievably energetic Brazilian singer Ana Cañas playfully sings while Liminha, the great Brazilian producer and one of my favorite and inspiring musicians of all times, gets loose on the guitar, liberating a lot of interesting creatures and micro universes via his live interactivity with Ana (check, at the end of the video, a great version for Gilberto Gil's "Chuckberry fields forever").

Thoughts lead to a multitude of other thoughts and memories. Here are some other things that came to mind, connecting my rediscovering the guitar with other musicians and their instruments, and to the flow out there:

• A guitar outsourcing reassurance and power to a shy man.
• BB King's Lucille.
• I pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday.
  
• Geraldo Vandre harnessing the powers of the masses with his guitar.
• Sergio Ricardo using his guitar to liberate his frustration.
• Jimmy's kiss, then sacrifice.
  

B B King: Secrets of a Bluesman's Longevity

Throughout the years, I've seen B. B. King performing live mostly through either television shows or, in the more recent years, footage of live concerts diffused via Internet. I could gradually see him transitioning from playing mostly standing, to sometimes sitting, then finally to sitting most of the time, as he slowly conceded to the demands of his fight against diabetes and, as a boy from 1925, to those of his age. A few features of his appearances, however, never changed: the sweetness of his guitar riffs and solos, the intense spark of joy emanated from his charismatic stage attitude and the power of his inspiration over his public.

I always admired that B. B. King was still that active and inspiring after so many years on the road. This week, I was finally able to unveil some of the secrets behind the longevity of this man and his music. The insight came after watching another documentary from a series about The Blues, organized by Martin Scorsese. This time, in the film "The Road to Memphis", director Richard Pearce reconstructs the life threads of "second-generation" Bluesmen B. B. King, Rosco Gordon, Ike Turner, Bobby Rush and others, using as a focal point for their lives a concert they gave in Memphis for the Handy Awards, in 2002.

Pearce interweaves the individual threads of the Bluesmen onto a fabric that he unfolds to reveal several layers of musical history, which is also shown to reflect the history of American society itself. But the human dimension that the director is able to extract from his main characters, and their life on the road from town to town, and, finally, back to Memphis where thing all began, is to me what stands out most from the film. And that is where the secrets are revealed about the incredible longevity shared by all these Bluesmen at the time of footage (sadly, Rosco Gordon and Ike Turner are now deceased).

First, Pearce shows how these men grew out of poverty and oblivion to become immortalized through their music, because of their determination to change their world without having to sell their souls to the devil, like their predecessor founding fathers of The Blues -- many of whom died quite young -- were forced to do, due to the circumstances of the cotton fields. This determination, and persistence in not letting a light at the end of a very dark tunnel be extinguished, gave them a deep meaning to life.

Second, through the Blues, B. B. King and his mates were given the opportunity to form a fraternity, which opened a huge umbrella for all Black Americans to "freely" exercise their culture. Pearce's film shows that his main characters were on the center of this fraternity, which resonated loudly throughout the entire community. In between the lines, the film suggests that one of the main foundations of their "movement" was a strong camaraderie, and a generally non-violent kindness which reflected the attitude of their main source of inspiration and leading voice, Martin Luther King. Such ethos centered on camaraderie gave these men a deep sense of engagement.

Finally, BB King and his mates found in the Blues music the perfect environment to have fun. Fun which the film pictures as a contagious pleasure that the Bluesmen have had and shared selflessly with the public since starting their musical careers, some five decades ago.

At the end of the film, I was amazed to see how much its narrative unveiled, through the lives and achievements of B. B. King's "fraternity", some of the more fundamental concepts underlying recent scientific inquiries on the factors that make people believe their life is worth living. In fact, meaning, engagement and pleasure, which form the strongest threads of Pearce's narrative line, are also the three strongest indicators of the perception a person has of its own well-being. The interplay of such indicators, and their consequences to a person's mental health, satisfaction with personal and professional lives, and even longevity, are explored in works such as the paper "Three Ways to Happiness: Pleasure, Engagement and Meaning", in books such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow", Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning", and, more generally, in some of the fundamental paradigms of the recent science of Positive Psychology.

The high levels of meaning, engagement and pleasure achieved the Bluesmen in Pearce's "The Road to Memphis", are consistent with those achieved by other, "ordinary" people like us, who were not only very successful, but also inspiring to their peers, and able to live very long and healthy lives. Such cases are vastly reported in compilations gathering recent Positive Psychology investigations.

All this seems a strong enough call to get out there now and do something constructive for our lives. Perhaps such an attitude would lead us not only to the secrets of B. B. King's longevity, but also to those of a life better worth living.

The cashew tree: Blues, maracatus and self-similarity

After watching, earlier this week, Martin Scorsese's documentary "The Blues: Feels Like Going Home", a multiplicity of images and thoughts came to mind bonding the film, to my memories and experiences as a musician. The documentary was first released in 2003 by American PBS TV, as part of a series of seven films portraying the Blues through the eyes of seven famous directors (Scorsese, Charles Burnett, Clint Eastwood, Mike Figgis, Marc Levin, Richard Pearce and Wim Wenders), and is now being revisited by Australia's ABC Blues Festival Project through its iView website

Prompted by the immediate recognition that one of the first clips of Scorsese's documentary, showing the Fife & Drum Music of the Mississipi, had a very similar musical "feel" to that of the Brazilian Bandas de Pifano and some of its maracatus, I was immediately taken back a few years, to a memory of visiting one of the most amazing sites in the world: Pirangi's cashew tree, today one of the biggest tourist attractions in the NE Region of Brazil. In my vision, Pirangi's cashew tree and the subject of Scorsese's documentary -- the Blues and, more generally, modern western popular music -- suggested some sort of self-similarity in both their genesis and geometries.

After being planted in 1888, Pirangi's tree suffered from two genetic mutations. First, the branches grew sideways, instead of upwards like other sister cashew trees planted in nearby patches of soil. Then, the sideways branches became so heavy, they touched down and grew into the ground. At that stage, buried branches suffered a second mutation, its trunk cells changing into root cells, which originated "new" trees, growing initially upwards, then again sideways, into the ground and so on, so forth. Now, more than 80 interconnected tree "units" cover an area of about 8,500 m2, with a perimeter of some 500m, altogether forming the biggest cashew tree in the world.

In terms of genesis, both Pirangi's cashew tree and the African musical origins of modern western music have initially suffered influences from degenerative-type "disorders", which blossomed into something that became not only generative, but inspiring and unique. In the Blues' case, the imposed "mutation" was provoked by the crime of slavery committed against African families, and the slave trade routes which ripped Africans from their homeland and culture centuries ago. After being transported in horrific conditions to several parts of the "New World", African slaves were forced into new soil. They then suffered cultural transformations that were responsible for the appearance of the Blues, and ultimately grew in all directions, to resurface as several different styles adding up to a substantial chunk of what is generally called today modern western popular music.

The amazing unifying vision that appeared in my mind's telly, while riding my bicycle to work the next day, was that of a "musical" tree, reflecting Pirangi's, but growing out of Africa, dipping its branches in the Atlantic Ocean, resurfacing near the coasts of North and South Americas, and the Caribbean, then dipping into the fertile soils of the Mississipi Delta, of the states of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, and the islands of Barbados, Trindad and Cuba. In these new places, they grew roots, new trees, and then branches that expanded and dipped back into the soils of virtually every country on earth today, where new roots, trees and branches continue to grow further, without losing their link to the original tree in Africa.

What a bike ride! Lucky Perth's traffic isn't anything like my hometown Rio de Janeiro, so my daydreaming wasn't a problem, and I did finally arrive safely at work.

After going back home and surfing a little more the net, I figured that such contagious expansion process, that I visualized in my "dangerous" bike ride, explains, according to musicologists, much of how most modern musical genres and styles have developed from their classical western, African or Indian, folk, sacred/canonical and pop musical ancestors. At every new stage of evolution of a "mother" genre or style, some parts of the genetic code of the ancestor is kept, in a way that some degree of self-similarity is held throughout the development process. So much that the Pirangi cashew tree now became, for me at least, an analogy for music and its evolution process throughout human history.

(Image: Celtic Tree of Life, borrowed from Welsh artist Jen Delyth ©1990: kelticdesigns.com)