Communing with a Brazilian Music Legend

The Salon21 series yesterday evening was terrific.  See Soundstreams.ca.  Renown Brazilian musician, Egberto Gismonti is in town and he engaged us in a communal feeling with his words, and did things with his guitar that were unheard of before.  

He was born in Beirut to an Italian mother who was steeped in what he called the "aristocratic, piano-based tradition of Europe."

He said that when he was 21 and living in Brazil in 1973 a leading actor picked him to write the score for a movie.  This took him to Montreal and other cultural centres where he sat, talked and played with some of jazz's musical greats.  

Back in Brazil he was invited to join groups of musicians that encouraged him in his art.  Based on his talent he was invited to stay at the homes of one master musician after another, for periods of two weeks or more.  

So he drank up all that was offered and that he could learn about music and life from his elders.  Gradually he felt encouraged to go further than he ever imagined.  

Eventually he went to stay in the rainforest for forty days with a tribe of some of the two-million indigenous people of what is now called Brazil.  He felt excluded initially because there was the problem of not having a shared language.  

But each night the villagers gathered around an 8 foot bonfire, partly to keep insects away and partly to talk and play flute music.  He stood outside the circle.  

After a few nights he talked about his family and where he was from.  Even though no-one had the means to understand what he was saying the local people opened the circle and welcomed him in.

Towards the end of the SoundStream session an audience member asked Gismonti how he would characterize the importance of Brazilian composers, Los Lobos.  His answer intrigued me. 

Gismonti explained that Los Lobos obviously were not creating in a vacuum.  Everyone was part of a collaboration of musicians that stretches across Brazil.  Half of Brazilians are dancers, and half of Brazilians play guitar (because guitars are cheap to buy) unless you are indigenous in which case you play flute.  This is the social and cultural ecology.

Gismonti said that a researcher and musicologist gave Los Lobos a compilation of the music theory of many forms of indigenous music.  This body of knowledge informed everything that Los Lobos achieved after that.  It influenced the writing, and the connection the music made to the soul of the land.  Los Lobos became extremely popular and a very significant influence on others.

Now Gismonti is 64 and tours around the world.  When he talks with students in Brazil, Gismonti encourages them to devote their lives to music.  "Music will be good to you."  

He has become an elder who talks from experience.  Imagine the social, cultural, and even economic benefits of learning, teaching and playing music in such a musical country.

I could not help but think of how we are counseled in North America.  Can putting so much emphasis on being a rugged individualist and self-made man or woman really be a hangover from the frontier days?  Maybe not.  

How could you survive in the long harsh winters without coming together and cooperating to put up a house, replace a barn, or generally get anything done? 

I believe the ideas we are taught about individualism are a product of the values someone else thought they should be instilling into younger generations.  As a society that sees itself as an economic engine, why would we need music and dance and creative collaboration?  

We are currently the output and product of institutionalized schooling.  We are still taught to become good cogs ready and able to fit in the workings of the wheels of industry. 

As a society of people that advertisers have relentlessly conditioned to long for retirement, which literally means shutting ourselves away from the day-to-day goings-on, why would we open up our homes to young people to soak up all they can from us?  

We have actively deprived society of it's elders if we relied on state-hired teachers to deliver the standardized curriculum on which we base all that there is to know.  And if we feel dry, alienated, and out of place, wrapped up in our layers of conformity, we won;t feel like we have much to offer future generations.  If we believe 'the state' is the authority on education, what can the next generations soak up from us?

I believe that as North Americans we can end the denial and connect deeply with the abundance that exists, and the soul of the land.  Has progress been about what we are taught it is about?  Does progress really depend on what we are taught, and what we are teaching?

I remember Gismonti saying, "In Brazilian music we value the question, not the answer."  

A question becomes a point of departure from which all kinds of possibilities can arise.  

There are things about life, and our lives in today's society, that we do not have the means to understand.  Yet we can see the circle is open and we are welcome in.