A year ago, in an interview with the Herald, Galician piper Carlos Núñez anticipated that “my next album will include Brazilian music. I have been working on that for 10 years, creating that vision which doesn’t exist yet: there are links like the language and the European musical heritage, but nobody has told us that story in a mythological key yet. Creating that takes years: I work like a winemaster who creates blends and reserves which take years to mature.” As the Herald’s wine critic Dereck Foster would tell you, there is a considerable gap between thinking of a wine blend and making it a pleasant drinking experience. Núñez’ project sounded like a tall order indeed – there is Galician music, and a definite place for it in the wider universe of Celtic music, but the abyss between that universe and that of Brazilian music seemed much wider than the Atlantic Ocean between both countries.
But Galicians are renowned explorers, and Núñez came out of his seafaring with the extraordinary Alborada do Brasil, an album where he digs deep and broad into Brazil’s musical tradition to find Celtic roots (from Galicia by way of Portugal), bringing together the North East and the sertão and Bahia and Minas Gerais and all those corners of Brazilian music that rarely come together, and the contemporary urban beats of funk and loops and rap which Brazilian musicians incorporate with such gusto in their work.

The album also features extraordinary musicians from both sides of the Atlantic: Brazilian stars like Adriana Calcanhotto, Lenine, Carlinhos Brown, Jacques Morelenbaum, the escola do samba Beija Flor and Wilson das Neves; Irish legends The Chieftains; and Núñez’ own band, with the amazing fiddler and concertina player Niamh ní Charra, percussionist Xurxo Núñez and bouzouki prodigy Pancho Álvarez.

A CONTINENT-COUNTRY. The result is pure musical magic, but the origins of the album are steeped in legend too – in any case, in family myths. “We always knew my great-grandfather José María, also a musician, had migrated to Brazil at the turn of the 20th century, but after that all we had was a rumour that he had been murdered. I never quite believed that story, I though there was something fishy,” says Núñez to the Herald. That enigma provided the drive for the 10-year quest for a bridge between the Atlantic’s shores. “I realized that it was a huge country, a continent-country, and that I wasn’t ready for that adventure yet. For the next 10 years I walked that Way of St James until I thought I was prepared. I spent three years investigating in Brazil, and another year recording.”

As in all epic tales, everything started opening up when an auspicious guide crossed his path.“There’s a great guy called Elomar, who doesn’t allow people to photograph or interview him – the wizard of the sertão, the Paulo Coelho of sertão music. He invited me to his fazenda, and that was the beginning. Then I visited other regions, but the big lesson is that there is not one Brazil: there are many Brazils, many countries in there. The Brazil we know internationally is the seaside Brazil, connected with black culture and 20th century music. Inland Brazil, on the other hand, the sertão, is what the Celts call the finisterres (Land’s End), the peripheral areas away from power and cities. In the sertão  you find medieval music, and they keep playing European medieval instruments. And then there’s the North East, which was the area that first got colonized. Each part represents a different migration wave. This dark, secret side, that Brazilian treasure, is the Gallaecia that Brazil holds inside: Gallaecia was an ancient country in the North East of the Iberian Peninsula – below it was Al Andalus, Muslim land. Gallaecia split in two at one point, and the south of Portugal, Lusitania, conquered the Gallaecian north. When the Portuguese started exploring Brazil, it was a Galician-tinged Portugal that played the bagpipe, but then the richer Portugal of the king and Lisbon gained ground, Lusitania, the guitar. So there was a race in America: the bagpipes against the guitar, the Middle Ages against the Baroque Renaissance. Evidently, that new bourgeois Renaissance music, with major and minor chords played on the guitar, won in the seaside cities: fados, tango, samba. The amazing thing is that the medieval tradition is still alive in Brazil, that it has been mixing and blending for 500 years with indigenous scales, African rhythms. It’s a mighty music that grabs you with its melody, its harmony, its rhythm: it has everything,” says Núñez.

Brazil is found in the coming together of different elements, and the open mind that makes it all possible. “In the early 20th century, when my great grandfather came to Brazil, the new Brazilian music, maxixe, samba, was developing, and it was a combination of European melodies with African rhythms: the descendants of slaves and European migrants, lower classes – I suspect that every time there has been a musical revolution, it started with the lower classes. In Brazil they call all fair-haired people gallegos, and they are the opposite of negros. Negros (blacks) are funny, they dance with their pelvis, they play syncopated music; whereas gallegos are the opposite: rhythm on the beat, no fun, restrained dancing like the Irish... Brazil has given priority to the national discourse of bossa nova and samba, and everything that smelled of gallego has been hidden in the background, in that medieval side that only someone who comes from Celtic music can identify.”

Medieval is the operative word here, explains the piper. “In Brazil, that sense of magic and ancient associated with the Celtic is occupied by the notion of ‘medieval,’ as exploited for instance by Paulo Coelho – I even found left-wing Brazilians who confessed to me that they were monarchists, that they had saudade for a king. That unknown part which is not the Brazil of samba and bossa, that Brazil that is unknown abroad, I think we can call that the Celtic music of Brazil. It’s a secret dialogue between music and power: all the successful musicians live in Rio de Janeiro, next to O Globo, even if they are from Bahia or Minas Gerais. This project is about bringing back the pride of all those peripheral areas which are punished by the image of the national.”
Where do you find those influences? We can start from something close to Núñez’ heart: small but significant transpositions in the names of instruments. “In southern Brazil, the accordion is called gaita: the first European instrument that got to Brazil, brought by the Portuguese, was the bagpipes, but then music went tonal and the accordion filled that place. You find more Galician names, but on different instruments: in the North, they call accordions zanfona (Spanish for hurdy gurdy); berimbao is the Galician name for a Jew’s harp; the pandeiro is a percussion instrument (but the Brazilian pandeiro is what in Galicia we call pandereta). There’s always this recycling.”

Another element is the tradition of troubadours, which Núñez says is very much alive in Brazil and Latin America. “One of the most moving things for me was discovering that they have troubadours, in the Medieval Europe sense of the word, that lost European tradition, that joint work of music and poetry. So, when I showed Brazilian musicians Rosalía de Castro’s Alborada, an ancient bagpipe tune on which Rosalía de Castro wrote a poem, as it is a fast melody with lyrics they said ’this sounds like repente ( a popular form of improvisation)’, and they connected that with rap, rhythm and poetry. They bring everything to their tradition, so you can go from a bagpipe tune on which a poem was written, and they turn it into a rap, and you play it with a black Brazilian DJ sung by Fernanda Takai, an indie pop singer from Minas Gerais with Japanese features. That’s Brazil.”

I SEE BRAZIL. And that’s Alborada de Rosalía, the opening track to Núñez’ Alborada do Brasil. The repetition of the alborada is not by chance, and Núñez ellaborates on that when describing the process that led to Brazilian singer Wilson das Neves singing the song Alvorada by Cartola, one of samba’s founding fathers. “I met Wilson at a bar one night. I had been looking for a year for a way to record Cartola’s alborada, to see which form Brazilian musicians gave to the feeling of the alborada, which is central here in Galicia, to see how they shaped it into a samba – and also for someone who could better Cartola’s original version. As soon as I heard this guy I said to myself ‘eureka!,’ and when I talked to him he told me ‘I played with Cartola in the 50s‘... enough said!”
The inclusion of Adriana Calcanhotto’s heavenly voice on the 1930s pre-bossa Brazilian song Gaita comes from another fortuitous encounter, if such things ever exist. “I met Adriana Calcanhotto at a glamorous dinner party in Sao Paulo -Brazilians have a sense of a cultural elite, of a dinner with a musician and a poet and so on whereas in Spain nobody who’s anybody would want to hang out with a poet because they’re all poor. We were introduced by a niece of Vinicius de Moraes’. We started talking and she told me she was a big fan of Martin Codax’s medieval Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo. I couldn’t believe this incredibly learned person telling me about that, such a great singer with her own style who shows at the same time that she’s a true heiress to the tradition of troubadours.”

But one of the most joyous celebrations of this Celtic-Brazilian marriage is Y-Brazil, a North-Eastern forró by “king of the baião” Luiz Gonzaga played as a dyed-in-the-wool, epic hornpipe by nothing less than The Chieftains with a surprising cello backdrop by Jacques Morelenbaum, known among many other things as the arranger of Caetano Veloso’s band for many years. “The curious thing is that hornpipes are Irish or Scottish pieces, but this is a forró! The Chieftains couldn’t believe it, they kept saying they had a joyous feeling playing this tune, that this music had joy within. Morelenbaum, whom I had always seen playing bossa, suddenly turned that cello into a Medieval rabeca and started growling drones. The easiest thing would have been to ask him to play a nice little bossa nova, some gentle sound, but he was delighted because he felt this connection with the Chieftains and Celtic music.” And the Chieftains felt it too, for they follow up with Milton Nascimento’s Ponta de Areia played as an Irish air.
The contemporary touches come courtesy of two stars of Brazilian rock, Lenine and Carlinhos Brown. Carlinhos Brown makes Padaria Elétrica da Barra an electronic, percussion-driven, funked-up celebration that is one of the CD’s most forward-looking moments, a new shape of music that has recognizable features from all corners of the Brazilian and Celtic universe but is an ultimately contemporary affair.

In the hypnotic Nau Bretoa, Brazil’s North East and Brittany come together courtesy of Lenine’s singing, Núñez’ blowing and a pan-Brazilian gathering of drumming that is a first-ever. “Brazilian musicians knew that Scottish pipers use drums, so the drums of an escola do samba sounded alike and they were moved when they heard the results. In that song you can hear Lenine singing an aboio, a cow-herding song: a rock and roll star who sings a traditional sertão song, and makes it cool and modern! Brazilians can reinvent and pick things up from their traditions. Spain lives in a continuous state of destruction, you would never catch a rock star singing a herding song, that’s for sure. It’s the first time an escola de samba plays not the rhythms of samba but those of North Eastern music, and they are playing along with the percussion system of Pernambuco’s maracatu and its big skin drums, and Bahia’s percussion. In that song you have escolas from Rio, maracatus from the North East, the northeastern percussion of forró and Bahian percussion: that would never have happened in a Brazilian record.”

the celtic showman. Carlos Núñez on stage is charismatic, energetic and joyful, with a flair for telling the story behind each song. Tomorrow, he will have guests from Brazil and Argentina. “We will play with Argentine pipers from SAPA (South American Piper Association) and percussion group La Chilinga, merging both worlds: bagpipes and Brazilian percussion. There will also be many guest singers.” He keeps the names up on his sleeve, but if it’s anything like the CD’s lineup then the audience is in for a real treat.
The Alborada do Brasil project is not over, though. “We’ll try to launch a documentary in 2010: during the work in Brazil we had a director who recorded over 100 hours of video, and we’re editing that. We think we have found my great grandfather – we have photos, and we’re dealing right now with pretty morbid stuff like DNA tests and digging out corpses and doing forensic tests, I have a feeling we got him.”

where &
when

Tomorrow at 8.30pm at Teatro Coliseo  (Marcelo T de Alvear 1125). Tickets from $90 at the Coliseo or www.ticketek.com.ar

a nose for success

In last year’s BA show, Núñez told the story of how he and the Chieftains travelled to Cuba looking for musical connections and ended up ‘inspiring’ Ry Cooder’s Buena Vista Social Club.  How so? “I was in Cuba 15 years ago: I travelled with the Chieftains, looking for Galicia’s connection with Cuba with all the émigrees and so on. The Chieftains brought Ry Cooder along. We, like Quixotes, started digging for the Celtic elements of bagpipe in Cuba, recording with Compay Segundo and the like – Ry Cooder went straight for The Best of Cuban music, wrapped it in a nice package and to Hell with it, he had a hit! Why bother looking for weird connections?”

the jesuit dna lab

“Argentine accordionist Chango Spasiuk is a great friend of mine. We travelled across Latin America together, comparing things like the rhythm of chacarera, the use of Asturian bagpipes in Venezuela, some Cuban rhythms, and we realized that the same rhythms exist across Latin America with different names - the musicians don’t know about each other, because nationalism is so strong that a Mexican would never admit that his terceras are the same triplets of Celtic music, of the muiñeiras. I am convinced the Jesuits did some kind of musical DNA manipulation, that in order to export such alien things as Christmas and Christmas carols to America they had to make a collective work letting Americans do their thing and assimilating it into their stuff. I’m sure we will in the future find out more about this fantastic and unknown genetic manipulation. ”