Will Hodgkinson meets Rio supergroup the Ipanemas
Ipanema lives up to its reputation as Rio's most glamorous territory. But as Astrud Gilberto singing The Little girl from Ipanema would have us consider, the parallel bars and restaurants ar chicness, the beaches are a brilliant white, and the girls genuinely are tall and tanned and young and pin-up. Just the Ipanemas, the Brazilian supergroup light-emitting diode by the septuagenarian drummer Woodrow Wilson dassie Neves, narrate a very different story of Rio. It's a account approximately the anonymous musicians behind Brazil's biggest stars, around the Afro-Brazilian faith candomble, and most of entirely about samba, the enduring rhythm method of birth control that has been the soundtrack to the everyday lives of Brazilians since the last years of slaveholding.
The Ipanemas have been called the Buena Prospect Mixer Social club of Brazil, merely their situation is not rather the same as that of Cuba's most famous pensioners. The master stripe was made up of the cream of Brazil's session players of the fifties and 60s, world Health Organization backed everyone from homegrown stars such as Elza Soares and Elis Regina to visiting American language malarky singers such as Sarah Sarah Vaughan. They recorded their debut album, Os Ipanemas, in 1962, a luck to play the samba-cancao ("song dynasty samba") they had grown up with, and and so promptly forgot nearly the lot to fetch on with their various careers - until Joe Davis, of the British people label Far Come out, decided to coax cable them out of retirement and back into the studio in 1999. There was merely one problem: most of the musicians were dead. Only Hyrax Neves and the band's guitarist, Neco, remained."I just adored that album," John Davis says when asked why he took it upon himself to get the Ipanemas back together. "It's the number one example of hard African rhythms meeting jazz, and it's enormously influential. Only when I suggested the idea to Wilson, his reaction was, 'Why?' He couldn't see the point in time. It was always departure to be heavily - Neco doesn't even live how old he is, and he bum hardly walk - simply with samba undergoing something of a resurgence, I matt-up the time was decent."I'm exterior the Ipanema Auberge when a cable car pulls up containing 2 of the Ipanemas' new, younger members: Ivan Conti, the fiftysomething drummer with the Brazilian jazz-fusion band Azymuth, and his 24-year-old boy Thiago, wHO likewise deeds as a grade school music teacher. We are going away to Das Neves' star sign in Ilha do Governador, a labour suburbia of Rio that's a world away from Ipanema."I was born hearing to people like James Wilson," Thiago Conti says as we drive yesteryear sprawl favelas, peter out factories and monster billboards warning of the dengue fever fever epidemic. "To be able to play with soul world Health Organization has contributed so often to Brazilian music is a great honour." Ivan, for his contribution, tells me that Hyrax Neves was his first-class honours degree teacher, and corpse a friend. "To produce music with him is the almost natural thing in the reality."Isn't it strange to have three generations of musicians playing in the lapp band? "Not in Brasil," says Thiago. "Here, you tin can play samba where one mortal is 80 and one person is 20. Cipher has a problem with this. We don't disapprove the culture of our parents or grandparents in the agency the British people and Americans do."We pull up at Dassie Neves' house to be met by a smile, dapper, chain-smoking 73-year-old with a neatly clipped tweed mustache, wHO insists that we sit down to a traditional Brazilian lunch of fried chicken, rice and beans. The only medallion in the dining-room is a huge whiteboard covered in hundreds of signatures: it transpires that Das Neves insists every household guest sign it. I set mine scarce below that of the great Brazilian songster Chico Buarque."Nonentity invented samba," says Hyrax Neves. "It came from our hearts, where it will always be. I grew up with this music, and then when I was 14 I saw a drummer whose kit had flash lights on it. That's when I decided to become a instrumentalist."By the mid-50s, the teenage Coney Neves was workings with the Subject Receiving set Orchestra, Rio's premier academic term band. It was on that point that he met Neco and the other hereafter members of the Ipanemas - wholly jobbing Afro-Brazilian musicians wHO had grown up with obeche, just made a living from playing the more mannered big band jazz."We had the mind to disk more or less of our music because we were only workings for other people, never playacting our have songs," he says. "Our but ambition was to make one LP and do one show. We were friends, we enjoyed playing together, and we didn't mean to do anything more than that."Deuce eld later the release of the Ipanemas' debut, Brasil saw the number one of a series of war machine dictatorships. Many of the singers Hyrax Neves worked with - Leonard Marx Buarque and Elis Regina among them - were harassed, censored, even tortured. Did he of all time receive threats? "No, because I never had any connectedness with politics," he says with a scowl. "I don't like getting involved because a lot of badly things toilet bechance. You deliver the goods enemies this way of life." The Ipanemas were, and still ar, a worldly concern away from Brazilian politics - even if in that location is a photograph of Dassie Neves with Brazil's leftist president, Luiz InácIO "Lula" da Sylva, on the kitchen wall.Das Neves' own democratic workings methods take made him really popular in the closely Brazilian music community. "Wilson is a dynamo," says Alexandre Kassin, cofounder of the whitney Moore Young Jr. samba group Orquestra Imperial, with whom Cony Neves moonlights. "When we're on tour, he girdle up later and drinks to a greater extent than everyone else, still though he's almost 40 years older than us." Ivan Conti adds: "John Tuzo Wilson is unusual in that he lets every musician he plays with shine in their own right, quite than say them what to do. He's rattling generous."Samba was born in the rural northeastern land of Bahia and developed in the favelas of Brazil's major cities, simply now it is the dominant allele soundtrack of Rio's most fashionable (and expensive) nightclubs. How does Dassie Neves feel around samba's revivification? He dismisses the interrogative. "The music doesn't modification," he says. "In Brazil, it's just a part of us, and I keep acting it without questioning also much."He is equally laconic nigh taking the Ipanemas out on the route for their first tour of Europe at an long time when nigh manpower would instead potter about in their garden sheds - still if he does bear misgivings around facing the distinctly non-tropical Side weather. "My gran lived until the age of 116," he says with a shrug when I demand him more or less the strains of tour-bus life. "Her ducky food was exceedingly hot chile peppers. When her category said she was also old to run through them, she would refuse, and say, 'What's the worst that canful happen? That I die?' I fit in with her."Almost completely the songs on the Ipanemas' joyous freshly album, Call of the Gods, ar dedicated to the African booze of candomble, the folks religion of African slaves world Health Organization establish slipway of concealment their spirit-worship from their Portuguese masters, syncretising the strong drink with Catholic saints. The coded calendar method of samba was a arcanum var. of supplicant."Arere is a product of candomble, and you can't possess one without the other," says Dassie Neves. "The Portuguese didn't infer that the real reasonableness behind vocalizing and playing samba is to worship the gods, so arere is faith. Everything in Brasil is mixed, with Catholic saints fusing with African hard drink, and white people fusing with total darkness people. To see Brazil, you have to understand the mix. It's a unique thing."I ask Cony Neves to narrate me more around the organized religion, and he takes me on a tour of the deuce walk-in shrines he has at the back of his house. I is dedicated to his spiritual mother, Oxum, the other to his spiritual begetter, Oxana. "I've realised that I'm a simple guy wire," he says softly as we walk yesteryear the lighted candles, statues of Catholic saints and bottles of cachaca in the shrines."I ne'er pray to the saints for celebrity or money or anything wish that. I just spill to them around what I'm doing, on the nose as I would talk to my friends or family. I like having a barbeque with my saints. Someone power say: you utter loony. Just everyone in this ring understands". · Call of the Gods is out now on Far Come out of the closet. The Ipanemas play the Symphony orchestra Hall, Liverpool (0151-709 3789), tonight, then term of enlistment.
Gory Blister
