José Mauro, anyone? Totgeglaubt, als 1995 bei Far Out das Album „Obnoxius“ wieder aufgelegt wurde, doch in Wahrheit quicklebendig – hatte halt bloss mal wieder niemanden interessiert. Jetzt kommt ein zweites Reissue:
Now, five years on, a second, even rarer collection of Mauro and Bahiana’s music, A Viagem Das Horos (The Journey of the Hours) is being reissued, this time with Mauro and Bahiana’s full cooperation. “It is unpleasant to live unacknowledged,” says Mauro. “[It was like] those 50 years were taken away from me.”
José Mauro was born into a family of eight on a farmstead in Jacarepaguá, in Rio’s west zone. When he was seven years old, his father bought him an accordion that he played until graduating to acoustic guitar at 15. He started composing a year later. “I went to a music school in Copacabana,” he says. “I also took additional classic guitar lessons at musical conservatories. Then I met Ana.”
“I was 17,” says Bahiana. “I’d just graduated high school and I was a real bookworm, reading, writing essays, short stories, articles, poetry … But I had a friend who said, I’ve just met this guy, he’s our age, he has this amazing music and he’s looking for lyrics.”
“I saw one of her lyrics being performed at a university festival,” says Mauro. “I enjoyed it a lot. And so I asked her to be my music partner. Our creative relationship was exceptional. We understood each other.”
At that time in Rio, as Bahiana explains, the dominant sound of bossa nova had become associated with the wealthy middle classes, which made it incredibly unfashionable among the new wave of young musicians. “I was a rebel,” says Bahiana, with a laugh. “I was anti-bossa nova and when I heard [José’s] music it just sounded right. He composed in a minor scale, very emotional, lyrical, deep and I thought, Yeah, I get it.”
The lyrics Bahiana began writing for Mauro were, as she puts it herself, “not love songs”. A rejection of the pair’s strict Catholic upbringing, they instead embraced the African Brazilian religion Candomble, where music has a direct connection to God, and where God is music.
“We both had huge, huge crises in our strict Catholic families,” she says, “Plus José was gay, and his father could not fathom that. We’d talk about philosophy and unrequited love and whether magic could happen.”
“Yes, I was and am a gay man,” says Mauro, “and there was a slight [easing of attitudes] at that time due to the hippie movement, but it had no bearing on my work. Ana and I debated at the seas of poetry and art.”
Bahiana’s lyrics are cryptic, dreamlike, poems of despair and hope that reference sea journeys, falling bodies and spiked crosses, words that seem inextricably linked to the pair’s lives but also the the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil at that time. “Brazil was horrible, terrible,” says Bahiana. “But we were a generation influenced by Joni Mitchell; Crosby, Stills and Nash. We were saying: horrible things are happening, so let’s try a different way. We were dreaming an alternative Brazil.”
The songs Bahiana and Mauro took into Rio’s Odeon Studio to record with Roberto Quartin were written for voice and 10-string Brazilian guitar. The transformation that happened in the studio was, in part, as a result of Quartin’s love of a 1967 album Frank Sinatra recorded with Brazilian bossa king Antônio Carlos Jobim and the German arranger Claus Ogerman. “Quartin played it over and over again and we got hooked on [Ogerman’s] orchestrations,” says Bahania. “Suddenly, we wanted voices, strings…”
Aided by the cream of Brazilian musicians and arrangements by the great Lindolfo Gaya, Mauro and Bahiana created a rich, dramatic and haunting sound that marked the shift from 1960s Tropicália – a style that blended samba and bossa rhythms with Beatles-influenced psychedelia – to the more cosmopolitan MPB (musica popular Brasileira), paving the way for such acknowledged classics as Chico Buarque’s Construção, Milton Nascimento’s 1972 Clube da Esquina and Edu Lobo’s self-titled 1975 masterpiece.
“To cut expenses we recorded 24 songs,” says Mauro. “Two albums in one session. Quartin picked the best for Obnoxius. And the remaining pieces for a second album, A Viagem Das Horos.” However, the second disc barely saw a release.
“Quartin got into a fight with EMI who didn’t promote Obnoxius,” explains Bahiana. “So he sold A Viagem to a nostalgia label, Tapecar. By that point it was 1972, I told José I’m going back to college. But I said, I’m still available to write lyrics. Just give me a call.”
Den ganzen Artikel von Andrew Male (what a name!) gibt es hier:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/jun/02/that-was-the-day-i-knew-i-had-died-jose-mauro-the-reborn-genius-of-bossa-nova
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