Chris Stover

A long time coming... My Caetano Veloso Project’s first CD is finally almost here! We recorded in New York in 2015, with some of my very favorite musicians: Marty Ehrlich, Andy Milne, Matt Clohesy, and Mark Ferber. Life and the demands of academia took over, but in 2016 I edited everything in Rio de Janeiro with my good friend Pedro Millman, and now we’re finally mixing and moving forward! Much more to come soon, but here is a sneak preview of Caetano’s “Força estranha,” featuring another of my very favorite musicians, Joana Queiroz, on clarinet. And see below for my concert notes for our very first performance at the New School in 2011!

Concert Notes from our premiere performance at The New School, 2011:

My obsession with Brazilian music began over two decades ago in the usual manner of North American jazz musicians – digging into the Antonio Carlos Jobim songbook, marvelling at João Gilberto’s astonishing phrasing (but not quite “getting” Astrud at the time – happy to say that that has changed), falling in love with Elis, geeking out over Wayne’s collaborations with Milton Nascimento and Bill Laswell’s with Carlinhos Brown and Paul Simon’s with Olodum, grabbing a handful of records by Djavan, Gal, Ivan, Gil, and Caetano, lamenting the tough hurdle that the saccharine 80s production values put in front of me before finding the real magic in the music (again, happy to say that I changed my song on that too), and on and on – samba, Bethânia, Hermeto, more samba, Guinga, Tom Zé, Zé Keti, Os Mutantes, maracatú, João Bosco, Jackson do Pandeiro, Tribalistas, Chico Buarque, Chico Science, Chico Cesar! – the best Brazilian music has, for me, embodied an ideal combination of deep, vital grooviness, harmonic sophistication, sensual lyricism, and a seriously poetic way of telling a story.

Of all of those great Brazilian singers and songwriters, there has always been something about Caetano’s music that spoke to me in a particularly compelling way. Caetano, one of the architects of the groundbreaking Tropicália movement in late-1960s Brazil (he writes, in his usual self-effacing but elliptically erudite way, about his later attempt “to understand how I passed through tropicalismo, or how it passed through me: because we, it and I, were useful for a time and perhaps necessary to each other”), exiled by the right-wing government, obsessed with the Beatles and João Gilberto and Godard and Oswald de Andrade, infuser of pop culture into the avant garde, infuser of the avant garde into pop music, romantic balladeer, shrewd political commentator, neologician, surrealist poet, champion of the beauty and rich tradition of Brazil as well as one its most outspoken critics, pop superstar and introverted intellectual – Caetano represents most of the artistic and humanistic values that, as a curious and somewhat iconoclastic jazz musician, I hold most dear.

Much of the music we’ll be playing tonight will bear little resemblance to the way Caetano envisioned it. Because, as a lot of my students are probably sick of hearing, my other obsession has been with musical processes and exploring different ways that music “can go,” and so in a way I’m using Caetano’s songs as springboards for investigating my own musical concerns – process, development, directed energy, transformation, flow, and frameworks for improvisation. I hope Caetano approves!