Sao Paulo’s contemporary artists gather together on this spectacular recording. I know it’s lame, but Amazon.com’s description tells the tale better than I can. All I have to say is buy it, and listen, listen, listen. If you haven’t had a taste of contemporary Brazilian music, particularily the phenomenal creations coming out of Sao Paulo, this collection will get you hooked.
From Amazon.com:
As Brazil celebrates its 50th anniversary of bossa nova music in 2008, there continues to be a streaming output of new talent and innovation from this rich musical country. A perfect example is Sonantes , a São Paolo based musical collective featuring the vocal talents of CéU in collaboration with members of Brazilian groups Nação Zumbi and Instituto. Guest stars include Siba, Lucio Maia, Beto Villares, Apollo 9, and more.
In between touring the world in support of her debut album, CéU continued to work with local musicians and friends to create a new album and project called Sonantes. For this project, she needed to look no further than her own back yard: her neighborhood, São Paolo’s Perdizes quarter, home to brothers Gui Amabis (an accomplished composer and producer of film music, including the scores to Andrew Niccols’ Lord of War and James Foley’s Perfect Stranger) and Rica Amabis (a member of the São Paolo band Instituto and an acclaimed soundtrack composer in his own right), as well as the duo Denge and Pupillo (bassist and drummer, respectively, for Nação Zumbi, Brazil’s most popular rock band). Only in Brazil is one likely to find this kind of talent in this small an area, and it is difficult to imagine any country other than Brazil giving rise to a sound like what was created when this group of friends began making music together.
That sound began to be born when CéU was invited to sing on one track of a recording project by 3 Na Massa, an electro-bossa-nova trio consisting of Amabis, Denge and Pupillo. The chemistry was so promising that they decided to keep on working together and, in Amabis’s words, “see what happened.” Says Amabis, “we are very similar musically, and like all the same stuff.” His brother Gui (“a great composer,” according to Rica) was invited in to contribute music as well.
For CéU, this collaboration was a chance to get outside of herself, musically. She characterizes her debut album like “a personal diary,” whereas with Sonantes she says that she “wanted to make sounds that were different, that didn’t just come from my own point of view.” It was also an opportunity for her to take some musical chances. As she puts it, “I have a great deal of admiration for artists who have conducted their careers by taking risks without losing their identity.” Recording with a band for the first time, she found an opportunity to surrender some of the musical control to “people that I’ve always listened to, always wanted to be close to. The idea [for this project] was for each of us to leave control to the others, without losing our own identities – that is, all of us added our own ideas to the process.”
Given the trust and musical openness expressed by all involved, it should come as no surprise that the group’s compositional process has tended to be relaxed and unpredictable. “Whenever someone has a song, everyone works on it,” Amabis says. “The whole thing started in our apartment, where we have a home studio. Whenever someone feels like working on it, they go to the apartment and turn on the computer – we didn’t go to a big studio to record the album; almost everything was done at home.”
The result is spectacular. As fresh and exciting as CéU’s debut was, the Sonantes album is even more varied in tone and style. Here the delicacy and smoothness of CéU’s debut are still present and audible, but are layered with something a bit more crunchy and experimental: notice, for one example, the staggered rhythm on “Miopia,” and notice also that the slightly abrasive tone of that track’s guitar solo would sound perfectly at home on a Tom Waits record.
Sonantes is a Sao Paulo based musical collective featuring the vocal talents of Grammy nominated Céu in collaboration with members of Brazilian groups Nação Zumbi and Instituto as well as Brazilian guest stars Siba, Lucio Maia, Beto Villares, Apollo 9 and others.
