Sunday, December 14, 2008

Attention fellow Brazilian fanatics

As many of you know, I've been heavily into Brazilian music for the past few years, to the point of starting a trio to play my favourite tunes. More on this project to come in the next year. But this post is to share a link I just discovered, a fantastic site created by a team of Brazilian music fanatics (including Zecalouro, the force behind Loronix): Musicos do Brasil. At the moment, it's only in Portuguese (and mine isn't very good) but it seems to be easy enough to navigate.

Muito obrigado to everyone involved. We need more of this stuff. What's always impressed me about Brazilian music is how keen certain people are to preserve and disseminate it. At Upstairs, we premiered a new tune called "Keeper of the Flame," which I wrote as a tribute to Almir Chediak. He took on the project of collecting the music of the great bossa and MPB songwriters and putting them into accurate songbooks, working alongside them to make sure everything was correct. If only somebody would do that for Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon - all the stuff I've ever seen is full of errors.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Dear David,

As one of the people behind the project, I can only say thank you very much for your support.

This is just the tip of a much larger project that has been a couple of years in the works.

So far, we have about 3,000 musician pages, plus some 5,000 on dissertations and original essays, 15 hours of legal music (provided by the musicians themselves) and some 500 photos. Much more to come.

Certainly, putting it in English is part of our plan.

And your kind words just make us willing to accelerate it.

Best regards,

Fernando Barcellos Ximenes
fernando@musicosdobrasil.com.br

Ryshpan said...

Thanks for writing, Fernando. I look forward to exploring the site (the dissertations look fascinating; I just saw the one on Banda Black Rio) and will follow it closely.