Shopping on Avenida São João

Building `gallery` shopping centres in the European style was championed in São Paulo from the early 1960s, during the initial `verticalisation` of the city, by Italian architect Ermanno Siffredi.  Others followed suit, and the character of these elegant buildings still holds sway in São Paulo Centro. São Paulo already had a considerable and elegant built heritage.

Foyer of the São Pãulo Teatro Municipal opera house. Ramos de Azevedo, 1911.

But the shopping gallery projects did not import materials and craftsmen and women wholesale from Europe, as did the Teatro (1903 – 1911) and the Gothic Revival Catedral da Sé (1913 – 1954). The galleries were not stone but ferro-concrete constructions, and some designs were the outcome of architectural competitions. With striking results.

Façade of Grandes Galerias, Avenida São João 439, São Paulo. Siffredi & Bardelli, 1962

Boldly modern in its sweep and style, the Shopping Center Grandes Galerias nonetheless combines curves and straight lines to good effect, just as the eclectic Art Nouveau Teatro does. The Grandes Galerias were designed by the Italian practice of Ermanno Siffredi and Maria Bardelli, business and personal partners. Since their qualifications were not recognised in Brazil, they were not always named as architects. Brazilian Alfredo Mathias also had a hand in the design – he went on to design the Portal residential complex in Morumbi.

Their effects are achieved with simple devices – linear placement of ordinary light fittings, pale curved facade floors which draw the eye away from the darker faceted standard plate glass windows, the safe yet open galleries which invite a casual shopper to linger on the railing and enjoy the view. And there are more visual delights inside.

A vantage point for vigilant security

The curves of the façade are carried through into the arcade walk in both horizontal and in ascending vertical planes. The wooden battens  – a favoured decorative element in Brazil – of the façade shop fronts wrap around the mezzanine, spacious despite the intrusive fire system piping.

Each floor has a distinct pattern for its tiled floor. The demands of commercial advertising may intrude – what IS that on the underside of the elevator ? – and the character of the design may or may not be strong enough to overcome them.

A visual Babel

The lifts are a case in point. The floor tiles, and the dark facings and stainless steel doors interpolated in the curve of wooden battens, are matched in colour, and contrasted in form. But the ceramic mural of shoppers and their consumer durables above is somewhat lost in the noise of the commercial environment. Let’s take a closer look.

Fashionable furnishing at its height

Decorative ceramics, household furniture, light fittings and wall coverings are all advertised in a rather more subtle way than today’s retail items. Today the building is known as the Galeria do Rock, and sells skater fashions, T-shirts, tattoos and sports goods, and serves as a commercial music venue for tribute bands. Urban sub-cultures thrive here.

Sloping access to lower ground floor, original lettering

What we see here under the commercial noise and frankly, the startling poverty of São Paulo Centro today, is the elegance and the real optimism of an earlier age. Today Avenida São João is inhabited by the urban poor and small retailers.

The facade on Avenida São João from the inside looking out

Hard to believe that in 1978, Brazilian music star Caetano Veloso wrote a song to honour São Paulo – “Sampa” – which has the corner of Avenida São João and Ipiranga at its heart, where Bar Brahma was “a favorite of intellectuals, musicians & politicians in the ’50s & ’60s, with beer, snacks & music”, if Google Maps is to be believed.

 

Modernist composition, ground floor, looking up

Under the glitz and the grinding poverty, the architecture of the Shopping Center Grandes Galerias is a fading though glamorous echo of that time.

Architecture Salvaged

Stained glass panel for a ceiling light

You may have seen a number of my previous posts on Montevideo’s architecture – its old city centre https://theproverbial.org/2012/12/22/montevideo-ciudad-vieja/

and its cemeteries https://theproverbial.org/2014/09/11/the-british-cemetery-of-montevideo/

On Tuesday I visited an architectural salvage firm in the Aguada area of Montevideo http://www.CarraraDemoliciones.com.uy  where the affecting sight of the city’s architectural heritage in pieces made clear how much of the old city is being torn down to make way for new apartments, but also that people value – and are prepared to pay for – preserving some small elements of that heritage.

Entrance on the busy Avenida General Flores

Even purely utilitarian pieces – cast iron pipe, security grilles, window frames, iron shutters – have something of the visual character of the old city about them.

Behind the miscellany at the front is a dark warehouse full of salvaged floorboards. As in other parts of the world, tradesmen here tell you that the old wood is of much better quality than new flooring – properly dried, free from knots, broad and thick – though it will cost more to lay than modern system-build wooden flooring which clicks together without nails or screws. Even this old, it looks, feels and smells like real wood.

Functional and decorative

But it’s the decorative items – breath-taking in their variety, profusion and grandeur – which drive the message home. This city was once much more prosperous, vying with European capitals for elegance, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, judging by the style of the ornament.

Turn-of-the century ironwork

One lighting bracket still sports its glassware

Railings for steps to grand front doors

Not one but two cast-iron fountains, in pieces

Fewer fragile items survive – stained glass, painted panels, ceramic tiles – but these too suggest wealth and elegance, less on show now in Uruguay, even in the playground of the rich which is Punta del Este.

Accomplished stained glass work

Job lots of the azulejos or blue and white tiles favoured in Latin America

When you ask, you are told that Latin America grew rich on feeding and clothing the combatants of the Second World War with beef and wool, and when it stopped, so did the riches.

Industrious putti in field and factory – painted plaster panels

But agricultural wealth continues to support the rich families of Latin America – what else intervened to stop the rise of prosperity? The echo of the time of the dictatorships is much fainter, but it can be chilling – the sight, for example, of one of the hated army trucks which brought soldiers onto the neighbourhood streets at night to arrest and take away suspected dissidents, elicits fear and loathing still. It is not only prosperity which needs salvaging. Talk in Europe and the US of impending civil war seems a little wild against that cultural backdrop.

Exhausted by his labours

Early Teddy Wilson Vocalists

When she started out, Billie Holiday was simply the vocalist for Teddy Wilson’s band. The rise of juke box technology, coinciding with her debut, catapulted her to success for the struggling Brunswick label, ensuring its commercial survival and success, and helping to make Teddy Wilson’s name too. These early numbers (still) deserve a wider audience.

But there are other, less-well-known vocalists who also sang with Wilson then. We know the ‘hits’ we hear now from the first few bars, but if you search YouTube, do you find The Hour of Parting? With the vocalist credited?

Who was Boots Castle, who sang The Hour of Parting with Wilson? A beautiful song written by Spoliansky, who fled Germany for London in 1933.

 

And who was Jean Eldridge, who sang Moonray with Wilson? Was she related to Roy Eldridge, jazz trumpeter?

 

Original Guitar Hero

Who knows or has even heard of Lonnie Johnson? “I was old enough to have felt first-hand the old country blues … And I got to see how those blues were modified and modernized by artists like Lonnie Johnson.” Thus BB King.

Alonzo Johnson (1899 – 1970) played guitar and violin, and sang too. He’s known as a blues player, but his experience ranges wider, from touring blues shows with Victoria Spivey and Bessie Smith, through work with jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, stride pianist James P Johnson –

Lonnie Johnson (left) Chicago, April 1941, with Andrew Harris bass, Dan Dixon rhythm (FSA photo Russell Lee – http://www.keeponliving.at/artist/lonnie_johnson.html)

– and UK skiffle artist Tony Donegan – who changed his name to Lonnie in 1952.

His influence on others extends to Elvis Presley (on 1954’s “Tomorrow Night” he imitates Lonnie’s 1948 hit vocals) and early Bob Dylan (listen to “Corrina Corrina”). You can hear why “in the 1920s and 1930s, Johnson was best known as a sophisticated and urbane singer rather than an instrumentalist.”

“Of the forty ads for his records that appeared in the ‘Chicago Defender’ between 1926 and 1931, not one even mentioned that he played guitar.” (Elijah Wald,  Escaping the Delta : Robert Johnson and the invention of the blues, 2004) So why a guitar hero? Johnson was responsible for bringing the instrument out of the rhythm section – where it had superseded the banjo in the jazz line-up – to the front as a solo instrument, with single-string picking, bending the notes and ‘voicing’ it like the violin he had played before. You can draw a straight line from there to rock ‘n’ roll and the modern guitar ‘hero’.

Coinciding with electrification of the instrument – around the same time as the violin – was of course influential, as was the style of other players like white guitarist Eddie Lang. But to hear how well he plays, and how fresh he still sounds, try this 1928 recording with Don Redman – Fletcher Henderson’s arranger – the Dorsey brothers and Jack Teagarden.

Paducah (Redman)  New York October 10th 1928. Johnson 1:28 – 2:15

This was the band which became the Chocolate Dandies.

Compare with guitarist Eddie Lang, alias Blind Willie Dunn and the Gin Bottle Four, Hoagy Carmichael scatting. An all-star group that also included King Oliver, the Gin Bottle Four was one of the first interracial jazz bands to record, cutting classic tunes “Blue Guitars,” “A Handful of Riffs,” “Midnight Call Blues,” and “Hot Fingers.” And this one, “Jet Black Blues”, which you may know from the game MAFIA …

Boom Town Baroque

Motoring back from the Litoral Norte of the state of São Paulo is an entertaining and scenic drive from Ubatuba along a steep and winding road up the escarpment. It’s difficult to stop, but glimpses of the view down to the coast are especially striking early in the morning.

View of the bay of Ubatuba from the SP125

Be careful to keep your eyes on the road though – it’s so steep and winding that the narrow verges are littered with the hubcaps of cars that must turn in sharply. Driving towards Taubaté, you pass a turn-off for the historic town of São Luiz do Paraitinga. It’s set on a bend in the river for which it’s named.

from the Tupi parahytinga, clear water

Founded in the eighteenth century, São Luis is a pretty little Baroque town which quickly became one of the largest in Imperial Brazil. Its prosperity was built on farming coffee and wheat.

Facade of the recently restored Igreja São Luiz de Tolosa

The imposing façade of the main church evokes the town’s wealth and status, though its recent history reflects a more modest reality – destroyed by floods in 2010, the church was restored and rebuilt using government funds available to sites declared a part of Brazil’s patrimônio cultural nacional. These days, the local economy depends as much on tourism, especially during carnaval, as on agriculture.

Mannerist arcade

During carnaval, the townpeople’s fondness for the music of marchinas, for larger-than-life puppets and for folk dancing comes to the fore. The São Luis celebrations are well-known in Brazil.

View from nineteenth century …

Perhaps less well-known is its religious life. São Luis is home to a congada and moçambique tradition, dance displays with an Afro-Brazilian syncretist religious background. It’s clear from a stroll around the historic centre during the Easter break that religion is a large part of life here. Church architecture is prominent.

… neo-Gothic Rosário …

Amid the colourful folkloric displays of painted houses …

… on the Largo do Teatro

… and the street theatre of carnavaI – 

Celebrating the town’s theatrical traditions – puppets, music, marching, maypoles

– there’s a more serious note. Displayed in the windows of what I took to be three religious establishments – presumably working convents or monasteries, judging by their well-preserved state –

Ecclesiastical blue and purple for the end of Lent on Easter Sunday

– there were blue and purple banners, some gold-fringed or with appliquéd crosses, to remind us both of the festive and of the solemn Christian religious aspects of Easter.

House of a religious order founded in Calabria

More usual on the altar in a church, in São Luis they were displayed even in the windows of modest private houses as well as in religious settings.

Burning blue in the sunlight – with Lenten purple at the windows

In São Luis, everyday life seems to become theatrically spectacular.

Rockin’ Duke

Listening to early Duke Ellington on a long journey by car, I remind myself of how good his sides for OKeh are. You always hear something new.

This time I hear what sounds mighty like rock ‘n’ roll ‘avant la lettre’. Listen to this Ellington blues composition, Lazy Duke, from 1929, the opening reminiscent of Frankie and Johnnie. At about 1:18, the chorus is taken by Barney Bigard on clarinet – the piano figure underneath is almost where boogie and blues would go thirty years later.

The two wailing reeds take an effective combined solo, and the percussive acoustic bass drives at an insistently steady rhythm.

Here’s the original 78 “Fox Trot”, credited to The Harlem Footwarmers, one of Ellington’s many aliases on OKeh.

Seaside Brazilian Baroque

Parati is a historic town set on the edge of the Mata Atlantica, the Atlantic rain forest, on the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro. First settled by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, it became the port for shipping gold and diamonds from the interior to Rio and on to Portugal. Miners, supplies and slaves travelled by mule train into the state of Minas Gerais (MG, `General Mines`) by the same route, the Caminho do Ouro, running along an indigenous path. Parati offered a break in the escarpment of the 1,500 kilometre Serra do Mar, and a natural harbour.

Gracious living in Parati

The town grew into a substantial settlement, with a good number of churches, and forts to protect it – the gold-laden ships were a target for pirates operating from the many nearby islands and beaches.

British and Portuguese cannon, Forte Defensor Perpétuo

Parati’s economic fortunes have risen and fallen, its relative isolation preserving the Baroque architecture which underpins its revival as a tourist destination.

Entrance to hotel Casa Turquesa

Baroque luxury raises an echo in Parati’s restaurants and antique shops, and modern luxury is also in evidence.

Restaurante Refugio

Its cobbled streets are hard going on foot, and motor vehicles are allowed only on Wednesdays, for deliveries. Horse-drawn carts carry supplies and tourists over the cobbles.

Cobbled streets, at a leisurely pace

You could be back in the eighteenth century, though many of the town houses are now shops, restaurants and business premises.

Working tourist town

Like Ouro Preto, the much larger Baroque town at the other end of the Caminho do Ouro, Parati allows you to see domestic Baroque architecture in operation. White-washed walls are thick – some with sandstone mouldings – decorated with stucco and paint, roofs of clay pantiles, and wooden floors above the ground floor flagstones.

Baroque air conditioner

Only the churches are higher than two stories. Rooms are high-ceilinged, window-frames painted in powder blue or grey.

Tidal canal

Parati is set just below sea level in a river delta, with breaks in the sea wall which allow high tides to flood some streets. Flooding was once the only form of sanitation, and given the horses, it’s still a good thing, though it doesn’t smell entirely clean.

Rio Perequê-Açu canalised

The river to the north of the historic town centre provides a cool corridor against the January heat.

Capela de Santa Rita, completed 1722

Parati is undergoing renovation – two of its four historic churches are closed, and the SESC cultural centre is being refurbished. The elaborate Santa Rita church was built for the Portuguese and for freed slaves.

Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosário e São Benedito, 1725

The Rosário, built for the slave population, has a much simpler facade, and its corner mouldings are of painted stucco, not sandstone.

Capela de Nossa Senhora das Dores, 1800

Nossa Senhora das Dores – Our Lady of Sorrows – is an elegant little building on the Rua Fresca sea front. It was used by society ladies, and renovated in 1900. Behind the church is a walled church yard. The church was closed when we were there, with no sign of when it opens.

Igreja Matriz Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, completed 1873

Nossa Senhora dos Remédios is large and central, with a tree-lined square in front, and a campanile for its clock. It’s structurally simple, a series of lean-tos, and the interior is modest by Brazilian standards. 

Largest church in Parati

Painted marble-effect mouldings and painted walls – which look like wallpaper – saints in glassed-in niches, and sober monochrome floor tiles all make for a subdued interior.

Painted chancel walls

This looks a middle-class church, presumably built on the coffee trade which replaced the gold shipments.

St Michael, a Brazilian favourite

Another active trade in Parati was the cachaça industry. A few small producers are still distilling this spirit from sugar cane – Parati was well-known for it. These days the best cachaça is said to come from the state of Minas Gerais, though it is still actively retailed to tourists in Parati. Proving the point, we found a large retailer whose display included a collection of old bottles from Parati …

Cachaça museum

… and a collection of miniatures – a smart way to sell to the souvenir market – which were overwhelmingly Mineiro.

Minas Gerias miniatures, with seductive labels

Parati understandably promotes and preserves its former glory, but there’s a faint echo of other sentiments.

The land on which the historic centre is built was donated by a Senhora Maria Jácome de Melo on condition that a church dedicated to Nossa Senhora dos Remédios was built … and that the local indigenous Guaianá were unharmed.

Santa Rita is said to be haunted by the ghost of a young 19th-century bride found dead on her wedding morning. The groom reportedly went mad, having begged for the coffin to be opened. When years later the coffin was actually opened, the corpse was face down, a punishment meant to prevent the soul leaving the body through the mouth.

A smaller church in Parati, the Capela da Generosa, was funded by a local woman in memory of a Teodoro who is said to have drowned in the Rio Perequê-Açu while impiously fishing on Good Friday.

Looking towards Rua Fresca

Standing on the Rua Fresca and recalling that it was the rich who enjoyed the sea breeze, that the streets were awash with sewage, that a slave who tried to escape could only could take the heavily-patrolled Caminho do Ouro through the rainforest or the sea road controlled by cannon and pirates, that the indigenous people were subject to the Europeans, that even Christian salvation was markedly stratfied, you sense a less pretty view of the Baroque town, driven by the greed for gold, by violence and military rule, by slavery and oppression.

It seems fitting that a vampire wedding – from the Twilight saga – can be filmed here. And this week in Parati, a shooting amid Carnaval celebrations …  http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/carnival-suspended-paraty-brazil-deadly-shooting-28988156

Choro in Cambuci

Cambuci is a neighbourhood south of Sao Paulo’s centro, in the area named for its park, Parque Aclimação. Low-rise housing predominates, though prices mean that the developers are moving in. For the moment it retains some of the older character of Sao Paulo – single-storey houses with small gardens, friendly, less anonymous architecture which only survives in pockets or in back streeets in more developed areas like Itaim and Higienópolis. There, vila houses are at a premium – here they are the norm. The side streets are quiet, the pace relaxed.

The bar on the corner

On an airy corner of the Rua Gama Cerqueira a bar stands wide open. Red awnings stretch over the pavement, with high stools and tables for the clientele, French doors flung wide, and hurrah! – plenty of room to park. This is not Vila Madalena.

A welcome sight

The ambience shows the Mediterranean influence of the district’s people, here since the beginning of last century. Welcome to the Bar e Armazém Cambuci.

Armazém, bar, boteco …

A high ceiling and the open doors keep the room cool.

Bebidas – a  wide range

The shelves behind the bar sport an enormous array of bottles, the walls are covered with mirrors, cartoons, posters, household objects and memorabilia. The clientele is a mix of families and couples, friends, larger parties, locals and music lovers come to hear tonight’s attraction, Trio Cambuci. They play choro here every Tuesday. It’s a natural home for Brazil’s oldest style of popular instrumental music.

Guest vocalist Valeriah Soares and guest cavaquinho

The choro crowd, musicians and audience, are welcoming. Everyone knows everyone, and if not, they soon do, smiling at each other and nodding in time to the music played by virtuoso Stanley Carvalho on clarinet, Cidão 7 Cordas on the seven-string guitar which takes bass line and rhythm, and Artur Bernardo on Brazil’s answer to the tambourine, the pandeiro. Stanley bears a more-than-passing resemblance to British comedian Ronnie Barker, and is just as affable.

British comedian Ronnie Barker – looks like him, não é?

The trio plays tonight with guest John Berman on clarinet too, a beguiling combination which produces exquisite harmonies. Here’s the Trio in action in the bar, captured on YouTube.

And as always, there are singers in the audience …

– Celso Miguel, a star of MPB (Música Popular Brasileira), who made his name in the 1960s, was a regular singer at the long-gone boteco (“boate“) Baiúca on the Praça Roosevelt near Rua Consolação in Sao Paulo’s centro, and still has a voice of velvet …

– Valeriah Soares, a rising Brazilian chanteuse who I’ve seen in other choro bars in Sao Paulo

Stanley encourages, nay demands that the crowd sing along, and calls more guest vocalists to the microphone. One lady, moved to tears by the beauty of a choro by Jacobo do Bandolim, recites the verses of a song while her compagnonne sings the chorus. Here in the warm heart of Brazilian popular culture, there’s room for tears and laughter.

http://www.barearmazemcambuci.com/

P.S. The sad news is that Bar Cambuci has closed. Irreconcilable differences between the business partners are cited. Looking for the next venue …

Réveillon in Sao Paulo

Sao Paulo in the holiday season from mid-December until the end of January is like France in July and August – deserted. Restaurants shut, shops close early, staff on holiday in a distant corner of this huge country … They go to the beach to jump seven waves to see in the New Year, or to the mountains to escape the heat and to believe they are in Switzerland, or home to the north-east or to the interior.

On the street, only the security staff – porteiros for the apartment buildings, segurança privada at their posts in green fibreglass cabins for the wealthier suburbs – are in evidence. With mirrored windows, sometimes you can only tell cabins are manned by the whisper of the inevitable television.

Zona oeste, Sao Paulo – the segurança wondered why I took this

The more extravagant Christmas lights have been turned off, houses and apartments locked up, plants watered. Dogs sprawl disconsolately on the driveways, or growl and sniff under the iron gates. A gecko darts across the footpath and up a tree trunk. They come into the buildings to escape the heat.

Street people are in evidence, collecting drink cans for recycling, or settling for the night under black plastic or under their hand-carts. They feel emboldened to shout their thoughts down the echoing streets.

Traffic is unusually light, party-goers in Lurex and perfume. The sky darkens, threatening rain without coolness. And beneath it all, under the brash diminuendo of aeroplanes overhead and the premature rattle and boom of fireworks, an unaccustomed Sao Paulo sound – quiet.

P.S and now the rolling thunder of fireworks, shouting, cheering, whistles, chanting and noise that is the countdown to midnight, predictably early. Feliz Ano Novo from Sao Paulo!

Christmas market, Benedito Calixto

The vintage and antiques market at Praça Benedito Calixto in Sao Paulo on a Saturday is pretty lively. Under the tarpaulins, spread out on trestle tables or displayed in the traders’ booths, there’s a huge variety of goods for sale. It’s been a landmark destination for more than fifteen years. http://www.pracabeneditocalixto.com.br/

Silver and shadows

The market is set up in the square among the trees and benches from 9:00 a.m. Praça Benedito Calixto is home to restaurants and shops, cafes and offices. It’s just off the busy Rua Henrique Schaumann, the continuation of Avenida Brasil in the Zona Oeste of Sao Paulo.

Market safeguards

Parking is an issue, as in all Sao Paulo, though the locals are only too happy to help for a small fee. Around the stalls it’s a crush which doesn’t subside until after 4 p.m.

You can take the kids

Markets like these are open-air museums of the material culture of Brazil, and a great place for buying gifts. You could say that they are a more successful version of the modern museum or gallery with its coffee and shop – you can handle and buy the exhibits.

Gift shopping for …

Calixto has more of the vintage than the antique, and some stalls verge on the junk shop end of the market, but there are also high quality items, old and new. I once bought a rococo bronze torchère there which had come from a propserous fazenda in the interior.

Torchère

It’s a cornucopia of vintage advertising, vintage cameras, ‘Persian’ carpets of all kinds, ceramics, crockery,

… sunglasses …

crystal chandeliers and their individual ‘drops’, all kinds of clothes for men, women and children, old and new,

… sticks …

silver cutlery, vintage film lighting, smaller items of furniture, old and new, old and new glass ware,

… stools …

graphic art, hats, vintage household goods of all kinds, incense, jewellery of all kinds, knives,

… silver …

leather ware, linen, masks, contemporary paintings and sculpture, picture books, puppets,

… CDs and vinyl …

vintage radios and record players, hand-made shoes, spectacle frames, old tools and machinery, vintage toys …

Colourful communication

A food court in the centre of the Praça sells Brazilian food and drink, and in the middle of it, this expert group of musicians plays chorinho.

Genuine chorinho, every Saturday until after 6 p.m.

The seven-string guitar, cavaquinho and pandeiro are the mainstays, but like the stall holders and their goods, it’s a changing line-up. Yesterday the guests were an accomplished second cava (bottom left) and an energetic young woodwind player (left, on clarinet). 

Espaço Cultural Alberico Rodrigues with literary busts

The Praça is also home to a pocket theatre, upstairs in the café / bookshop / gallery / publishing house run by the writer Alberico Rodrigues.

Literary café

It’s a pleasant place to take a break from the crush, at the foot of a wall display of literary giants.

Banca Praça Benedito Calixto

The carefully constructed cultural eco-system in which market traders do business alongside writers, antique and repro rub shoulders cheerfully, excellent carpets hang alongside copies of copies of graphic art, and chorinho can be enjoyed within earshot of jump blues, is a delight.

Decorative market, and customers

As are the customers themselves – did I mention it’s a great place for people-watching? Not just at Christmas, but all year round.

Jump blues on the street

Gold and Slaves

Visiting the Baroque Brazilian city of Ouro Preto – built on the wealth of the gold found locally with iron oxide (‘black gold’ or ouro preto) – you may be directed to one of the museums, the 1784 Casa dos Contos. It’s a museum of coinage and the gold cycle, serving at various times as private residence and tax office, barracks and prison, Government mint and gold foundry, post office and savings bank, and town hall. The building has played a major role in the history of the city.

Substantial Baroque building – with Niemeyer’s Grande Hotel behind

Ouro Preto – first named Vila Rica or ‘rich village’ – was in its heyday at the end of the eighteenth century the largest city in Brazil, with 100,000 inhabitants. The Casa dos Contos is an imposing building, with some unusual features. The large set of chimneys visible at the rear was installed to drive the fires required for high-temperature gold smelting. Zoom in on the image and you see between the third and fourth windows from the left two large holes made in the wall for ventilation.

Wide enough for a dozen armed mounted men

Security was of course tight. One reason for the gold to be smelted and exported under government control was to discourage theft, but it also meant that the Crown could claim its 20% before the smelted hallmarked bars were escorted under armed guard to the coast.

View from the balcony

It’s an impressive building inside too – wide stone stairs with beautifully carved jacaranda balustrades, and large airy rooms on the first floor overlooking the street, complete with period furniture, decorated ceilings, and bookcases for the Museum archive.

Gracious living on the piano nobile

But the most remarkable part of the Museum’s collection is in the cellar. The Casa is built, like other Ouro Preto baroque residences, to withstand sudden heavy rainfall on the cobbled hills. Massive freestone pillars support the level upper stories, and the cellar floor is finished likewise in hard local freestone, roughly set edgeways. It was hard going even with trainers on. It slopes away markedly towards the watercourse alongside.

Displayed in the niches of the freestone walls and between the pillars is a collection of eighteenth and nineteenth century household goods – kitchen implements, building tools, farm and workshop repair and maintenance contraptions. The collection was made by a local man who worked as a shoe repairer, developing over years his interest in Baroque daily life. Displayed casually among the household items are branding irons, manacles, wooden stocks, and a large evil-looking mantrap for runaway slaves. In the quietest, most effective way, these objects make clear how Brazil’s wealth was built on slavery, why in this cellar where they lived and worked in the kitchen they also washed their clothes in a crude stone-built laundry, why the ventilation holes in the first floor foundry are narrower than a man. And why a young Ouro Pretan on the street greets his fellow African Brazilian with the words “O, escravo!”

Tudo pela grandesa e tradição de Ouro Preto

On holiday in Ouro Preto in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, walking its cobbled streets in the early evening, I heard the ragged syncopation of an amateur band coming from a basement room, and went down the neon-lit stairs to hear more. A large, bare, half empty room greeted me, and at a set of orchestra benches, a score of musicians playing the wind instruments of a brass band – clarinet, flute, saxophone, trumpet, trombone and Sousaphone, plus drums – with earnest and admirable concentration.

Sociedade Musical Senhor Bom Jesus de Matosinhos

Not wanting to intrude on their efforts, I listened while I looked at the posters and photographs displayed on the walls of the band rehearsal room. This musical society’s history goes back many decades, in an honourable tradition of going on excursions and taking part in competitions in the four corners of Brazil.

Celebration concert

Formed in 1932, the musical society looks back to Portugal – Matsinhos is a city on the edge of Porto in the old country – but it has the glory of its New World in its sights.

In the arms of its patron

Its efforts are declared “all for the greatness and tradition of Ouro Preto”. Its supporters were in evidence, keeping an appreciative eye on the work. A unique and impressive piece of local musical culture in this most musical of countries.

World-class Jazz in Sao Paulo Centro

JazzB is an intimate jazz venue in downtown Sao Paulo. The area is better known for its sex industry workers and drug users than for cosy music venues, but it doesn’t feel unsafe. Of course there are exceptions, but the taxi driver says it’s fine, and it doesn’t seem threatening. It’s lively, with lots of folk on the streets, and plenty of neighbourhood bars. JazzB is in the Rua General Jardim, which runs west from the Praça da República in the area known as Vila Buarque. 

View of the street from your table

The bar seats around 100, and divides into two areas, to accommodate two types of customers. At the front behind large plate glass windows are tables and chairs at which couples and friends out for the evening sample the bar food and the wide range of bottled beers.

Beer bar

The bands play in the corner of the L-shaped space, facing a set of tiered seats which rise to the ceiling in studio theatre style. Here jazz aficionados can appreciate the music without too much interference from the chat of those who come to talk against a jazz background.

Jazz fans have a good view

Not long open, JazzB is already a landmark venue for the adventurous tourist – my fellow guests included a young Japanese man who perused his guidebook as he waited for the band.

Picturesque setting, though the Steinway needs tuning

On Saturday we were favoured with an evening of improvisation from the Jorginho Neto Quinteto. Jorginho is a virtuoso trombonist, who has played at festivals in Brazil and in New York. An alumnus of the Orquestra Jovem (Youth Orchestra) Tom Jobim, he plays with the highly regarded Banda Mantiqueira jazz ensemble and other Brazilian jazz groups. On Saturday evening, he played with Daniel D’Alcântara (trumpet and fugel horn), José Luiz Martins on piano, Bruno Migotto (bass), and Edu Ribeiro guesting on drums.

Musical brasswork

D’Alcântara is another stalwart of the Brazilian jazz scene, playing with the Orquestra Jazz Sinfônica de São Paulo and teaching at Sao Paulo’s premier jazz music school, Souza Lima. The two brass players had great fun passing phrases back and forth as they led, alternately and together.

Jorginho Neto, slide trombone

Daniel D’Alcântara, trumpet

Both players also stood back to let the trio of younger musicians have their way. Edu is a fine and energetic drummer, taking some inventive solos, occasionally accompanied by percussion on his acoustic bass from Bruno Migotto. (That explains the wear marks!) Migotto handles his instrument with enthusiasm and infectious enjoyment. The raised eyebrows were saved for explosions of invention from Martins at express train speed, which Neto brought back to walking pace with masterful finesse. These players would be at home on any stage, truly world class. Here’s their version of jazz standard The Nearness of You.

See http://jazzb.net/ for JazzB’s current programming.

P.S. If you sit on the stadium seating rather than at tables on ground level, AVOID the top tier, especially near the noisy service lift. You’ll be bumped repeatedly by clumsy serving staff, and distracted by noisy staff and customers at the downstairs bar below.

The British Cemetery of Montevideo

One of the oldest cemeteries in Latin America, the Cementerio Británico Montevideo was first sited on a piece of land known as the Cementerio de los Ingleses – during the British Invasions of 1807 a battle took place there, and several British soldiers were killed. Their comrades buried their bodies on the land on which they had fallen. In 1828 the British Consul in Montevideo bought the land for the British government, and the British Cemetery became more formally recognised. In 1885 this original central city site was closed, and the cemetery transferred to its current location next to the Buceo Cemetery.

In honour of “Victoria, Queen and Mother of her People”

The 1902 obelisk at its entrance in honour of Queen Victoria was funded and constructed in 18 months. It’s a reminder of how prosperous and patriotic was the British community in Montevideo.

A strong portrait in fine statuary marble

The portrait bust is impressive, the inscription V . R . I (for Victoria Regina Imperatrix) an echo from the past. The monument dates and celebrates her accession and long reign.

An empire on which the sun never set

The site’s occupants remind us of the character of the British – they are from all parts of the United Kingdom, and they include sailors, soldiers and ordinary people as well as the great and good.

An obelisk for the Consul

An elaborate Irish family grave with Masonic hourglass

Some who died here were commemorated by friends and shipmates …

A merchant seaman from the shires who died young

… others by their émigré families now established in the New World.

Geordie emigrants

Established as a Protestant cemetery to accommodate those who couldn’t be buried elsewhere, the Jesuit symbol on this gravestone makes good the cemetery’s claim to have no restrictions regarding religion …

Emigrant from Eccles near Manchester, another from the Falklands

… and there are many examples of non-British nationality.

A Germany dynasty

Grave of a young American merchant seaman, still remembered

Viennese Jewish family grave

Those commemorated may have died in parts unknown.

French Jewish memorial

Others have left home and family so far behind that little more than their names are known.

Grave of an Irish woman

A deceased wife is the subject of a fulsome eulogy from her spouse.

Memorial from a loving husband

Some recount the lives of their occupants in old and adopted cultures.

One of the early RAF airmen, later a civilian instructor

German-Uruguyan family grave, with street market behind

There is a German community here too. The German Patients’ Union (Deutscher Krankenverein) saw to it that those who died in Uruguay received a decent burial. Some of the crew of the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee were buried nearby following the 1939 Battle of the River Plate.

Post-war burials continue

Earlier European history is also visible.

Cavalry officer serving Franz Josef I, Austro-Hungarian Emperor during World War I

The old world’s institutions take vigorous root in the New.

The cemetery has long been associated with Masonic families

Grave with tribute by fellow Rotarians

With differences – bankers are not held in such regard in the old world.

Employee of the state-owned Banco (BCO) Republica Uruguay

The cemetery is still in use. At first glance it appears like the cemetery of a prosperous British city – perhaps the statuary is a little florid.

Italian surname, Spanish inscription, English-speaking neighbour

But the graves are eloquent testimony to the turbulent history of this part of Latin America, on a large and on a small scale. One of the most striking monuments still cries for justice from beyond the grave. These stones truly do speak.

Among the casualties of war and industry, a personal drama

 

Zumbi dos Palmares

November 20th, Dia da Consciência Negra or Zumbi dos Palmares Day has been a holiday in the populous states of Rio and Sao Paulo since the 1960s, though not everywhere in Brazil. Public holidays are declared by federal, state and municipal legislatures – the 1932 Paulista Revolution, for example, is a holiday in the state of São Paulo only.

A fine statue of Zumbi dos Palmares in the centre of Salvador da Bahia

Black Consciousness Day marks the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, a 17th century military leader of the African and mixed-race slaves who had escaped to the settlements known as quilombos – or smaller mocamabos (huts or hide-outs), ladeiras (slopes) or magotes (heaps, piles) – in the interior.

In the same way that Jesuit priests had established viable settlements or missões in the interior, the quilombos practised agriculture, while also using less ethical means to survive. And like expeditions against the missões, military expeditions were mounted to punish and destroy the settlements, which included poor white Brazilians. As an incentive, captured quilombolas became the property of their captors.

Bust of Zumbi in the capital Brasilia

In such turbulent times it’s easy to imagine that raid, theft, extortion, enslavement and violence were practiced on all sides. It’s an unclear and loaded history in which the academic authority seems to be Stuart B Schwartz, a Yale historian and Portuguese speaker. He has made new primary sources more accessible through translations into English.

A film about Zumbi’s predecessor, his uncle Ganazumba (‘great lord’ in Angolan Bantu) made in 1963 by Carlos ‘Cacá’ Diegues was not released until 1972, after the military dictatorship in Brazil had ended. He also made “Quilombo” in 1984 – its scenario overlaps with the 1965 theatre piece by Augusto Boal which Boal considered “the biggest artistic and popular success of the Teatro de Arena of São Paulo.”

Zumbi continued to be a favorite in Arena’s repertoire during the 1960s and early 1970s. Produced also in the 1970s in Nancy in France and in New York, last week this piece was revived at the SESC Pompeia theatre in Sao Paulo.  Arena Conta Zumbi is part of an extended programme at SESC Pompeia celebrating the contribution of Boal to Brazilian theatre.

The SESC Pompeia programme about Augusto Boal’s work

http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/programa_new/busca.cfm?conjunto_id=10390

Avenida Pompeia is a Sao Paulo thoroughfare which rises steadily north east from the Vila Madalena metro station to the crest of a hill, then descends the slope in one long straight line as far as the Marginal which runs along the Tietê River. Vila Pompeia is a gentrifying suburb with a growing number of restaurants and small businesses, and abundant street art, extending even to the pavements. The Avenida trees in the central reservation lit up for Christmas are a fetching sight.

Avenida Pompeia descending towards Vila Pompeia

Down in Vila Pompeia proper, the buildings are lit for Christmas too. Headlights of ascending and descending cars play on the undersides of the car park carriageways as if in concert with the decorations. A far cry from the landscape of the quilombos. 

Vila Pompeia by night

P.S. Don’t know why I didn’t publish this when I wrote it in November 2012 …

Little Richard Again

Richard Penniman has had his ups and downs, in his reputation and in his personal life. Some observers of the music scene find his fall from the charts a sad spectacle – “Richard’s wildness just seemed flaky” says Langdon Winner about his 1970s albums in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. Others sing his praises as the uncrowned King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, for example blogger Red Kelly:

http://redkelly.blogspot.com.br/2007/04/little-richard-i-dont-know-what-youve.html

Little Richard and the Upsetters

Or (with this snap) blogger Dan Phillips:

http://homeofthegroove.blogspot.com.br/2004/12/real-upsetters.html

But some facts speak for themselves – the Upsetters went on to back James Brown after Richard left the tour for the ministry in 1957. Jimi Hendrix had an ambition – “to do with the guitar what Little Richard does with his voice.” The Beatles spent a lot of time with him on his come-back tour of the UK …

Most of all, the man’s voice speaks for itself. Others pretenders to the throne have their falls from grace and their flaky phases, but no-one sounds like Richard Penniman, even in obscure disguise. While he was contemplating his return to rock ‘n’ roll, he recorded with the Upsetters incognito, to avoid compromising his Christian image, but his stand-out voice is instantly recognisable. Here he is covering Fats Domino’ s 1956 hit I’m in Love Again, and demonstrating again how he transcends the R&B roots of the original to create quintessential rock ‘n’ roll.

From The Upsetters La Cienega LACGA 702.

 

Ska in Sao Paulo

Went to see Sao Paulo Ska Jazz at popular venue Jazz nos Fundos (Jazz at the Back). It’s behind an unpromising-looking car park near a flyover which is home to a recycling depot used by Sao Paulo catadores, collecting metal, cardboard and wood on man-sized handcarts. The venue reflects its location in the decor – the look is industrial salvage with musical overtones.

http://theproverbial.org/2013/04/28/jazz-orkestra/

Front line brass

Sao Paulo Ska Jazz (SPSJ) revisits pop and Brazilian classics – Oasis, Tom Jobim – with a ska or a reggae rhythm and a hard-driving brass section supported by electric bass, drums, piano and electric lead guitar. The music may recycle other styles, but it’s definitely not rubbish.

Big band

Though the sound can lack balance, the musicians are a tight-knit unit, with the quick understanding and appreciation of each other’s talents which comes from working hard together.

Watchful Musical Director

The eight-piece band is fronted by sax player Marcelo Pereira, who also plays with La Orkestra K. Playing the guitarra (electric lead guitar) at the core of the band is MD Aquiles Faneco, directing with an eagle eye and taking his solo spots with aplomb and sometimes abandon.

Piano solo from Sidney Ferraz

The players listen closely to each other, backing up solos, introducing or returning to the melody, as the focus shifts from one to another.

Baritone and tenor saxes, trumpet and muted slide trombone

The band has been together for close on five years. How refreshing that they can nevertheless still surprise one another with what they do!

A muted performance!

Look at the expression on the face of trumpet-player Diego Garbin as trombonist Douglas ‘Tigrinho’ takes his solo. The noise this band makes is a joy! From the Jazz nos Fundos archives, here they are in full swing.

http://jazznosfundos.net/#!10391

Old Amsterdam

Back in Amsterdam in the New Year, after a long time away. It looks much more prosperous, and clean – few graffiti, little sign of poverty on the streets, buildings in good order, and many development projects have come to fruition. I’m slightly uncomfortable about how relentlessly middle-class the centre is – one of the traditional  strengths of the Dutch culture has been the narrow gap between rich and poor. I couldn’t tell, since I saw none but well-to-do folk. It wasn’t always so, both in the Centrum and elsewhere.

I was reminded of how visually acute Dutch culture is – window displays as works of art, well-cared-for architecture, active support for the old and the new in architecture and the arts – so I was prompted to take lots of pictures.

Much of the architectural heritage of Amsterdam’s Centrum dates from the period 1890 to 1910 or so. The Neo-Renaissance style is greatly in evidence, in reddish brick with limestone accent and ornament.

1889 Centraal Station

Whether you come in by car or by other means, you will probably pass through the Centraal Station, or at least the open space in front of it – it’s at the centre of the horse-shoe-shaped series of concentric canals which define the shape of the old city. The entrance to the Metro in the foreground is a more recent addition.

40-metre clock tower of the Beurs van Berlage 

The 1903 Amsterdam commodity exchange of architect Hendrik Berlage, down the Damrak from the 1889 station, shows the cleaner lines of Art Déco. These days it’s an arts and events venue.

http://www.beursvanberlage.nl/

As you move out of the centre through the Oud-Zuid residential district, Art Nouveau makes an elegant appearance.

Art Nouveau entrance Jan Luijkenstraat

At the end of the Damrak you come to de Dam, the open space in front of the town hall, and on the opposite side, in front of the Krasnapolsky Hotel, the 1956 Nationaal Monument to the casualties of the Second World War.

In front of the Nationaal Monument at de Dam

Twice restored since it was built, the monument’s sculpted elements are in travertine. The lions rampant on the Dutch coat of arms appear as a pair of lions flanking the central pillar, alert and roaring, tails lashing. Sculpted by John Rädecker,

http://explore.rkd.nl/en/artists/65412

and after his death by sons Han and Jan Willem, they make good use of the porous stone to suggest the manes and skins of their subjects. That this national monument, a combination of private and public initiative, commemorates the dead of the Second World War confirms how significant that history is for the country, just as much as the old joke with which the Dutch still tease the Germans: “When you go back home, will you send my bicycle back?”

“The Black Page”

The symbolism can be applied to today’s concerns. Here’s a neat inversion of its triumphalism, for an exhibition at the naval Scheepvaartmuseum marking the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands.

Stadsschouwburg 

The theatre on the Leideseplein is another famous Amsterdam landmark. Run by an independent foundation with a broad group of sponsors including the Amsterdam municipal council, the current Stadsschouwburg dates from 1894. Its Renaissance Revival facade presents a grandly ornamented spectacle to the Leideseplein. In previous generations, the lower foyer was reserved for gentlemen smokers, complete with numbered racks for unfinished cigars. Meanwhile the ladies would retire to the upstairs foyer and balcony, with a panoramic view of the plein below. And just as in the New World

http://theproverbial.org/2013/09/08/teatro-colon-buenos-aires/ 

separate entrances to the different levels of the theatre were organised strictly by class, with the upper balcony for the cheapest (woooden) seats and their rowdy occupants. Queen Wilhelmina (“the world’s first female billionaire”, and, according to Winston Churchill, “the only real man among the governments-in-exile in London”) did away with the royal box-and-toilet.

Café and foyer of the Stadsschouwburg

Today the foyer hosts the Stanislavski restaurant, serving decent food and drink for theatre-goers and for the general public. There’s also a well-stocked bookshop. The theatre focuses on Dutch repertoire.

Holland Casino, with Christmas candles

The Christmas lights were up in Amsterdam – inventive, not excessive. The windows of the Holland Casino were lit by candles. As in much of Europe, this state concession has the legal monopoly on gambling, with fourteen casinos. Profits go directly to the Dutch treasury.

Christmas lights on the PC Hooftstraat

In the PC Hooftstraat, where designer boutiques jostle for space with chic small hotels and book-lined residential front rooms – the Dutch don’t hide behind curtains – the Christmas lights were these rather grand and festive chandeliers.

The old and the new

Low-rise new buildings blend easily with more historic structures – nothing in het Centrum seems to be higher than five storeys. Everything is on a human scale, walkable, and pedestrianised without excluding cars, which mix easily with the famous bicycles and mopeds and the new rolling stock of the electric trams.

The American Hotel

The American Hotel on the Leidseplein attracts a steady trade at all times of the day and week, and it is THE place to go for Sunday brunch. They serve a very decent coffee and excellent cake – try the apple tart, something of a Dutch speciality.

Looking back to the entrance of the American Café

Despite the name, the hotel’s exterior is not in as extreme a style as American Art Déco, more in the continental Jugendstil, but the interior is more exuberant, with Nouveau and Déco in an exhilarating mix.

Art Nouveau figures over what is now a dance floor

The stained glass over the bar has a more Art Déco style

A working building with original features – lighting, brickwork, furniture

The red light district or Rosse Buurt (‘pink neighbourhood’) is as popular and probably more famous an Amsterdam attraction than the American Hotel. Walking through it at three in the morning, you would suffer nothing worse than being solicited, and it’s more tightly controlled now.

Only in one or two side streets do you now see the famous mostly-naked ladies in display windows, all the more startling for being unexpected. They work for themselves, paying the landlord for space like any other retail business in the surrounding streets. The women are protected by legislation and organise themselves into trade bodies. There’s even a museum which explains the details of their working lives. Tourist buses make it a regular part of their itinerary.

Like the rest of het Centrum, it’s cleaner, more genteel than before and, my impression was, occupying a smaller area. Maybe it’s reduced as higher property prices make sale a more attractive option than trade.

The famous Amsterdam coffee shops were also less in evidence. Marijuana and hashish are still on sale, but strictly for personal use, and not being smoked on the street – you can smell more ganja on the streets of Sao Paulo than here.

Shop window in the Rosse Buurt

Some windows included signs expressly forbidding photography, while at others, the door was opened to invite you in as you walk by, even in the January chill. Related businesses in the surrounding streets also used their display space to advantage.

A different kind of shop window on the Jodenbreestraat … 

There’s a different kind of shop around the corner on the main street. A branch of a Los Angeles charity, this vintage clothes shop has a unique additional service. It´s telling that it’s in Amsterdam, both an indication of the problems of permissiveness and an admirable response.

Further along the Zeedijk in the Rosse Buurt, there’s a discreet little bar and restaurant run in tandem with a circus. The Casablanca Variété has bar and dining space, an upstairs theatre seating 30 and a downstairs meeting room.

… and another kind of display again

Next door is a live music venue, Casablanca Muziek, which also welcomes karaoke singers. The eye-catching front window displays the costume of a famous Dutch clown, with text alongside – speaking in the persona of the costume – explaining its history. “When we began working with Circus Boltini in the Netherlands, even Princess Beatrix and Claus came to see me, with little Willem Alexander. Whatever happened to him?”

Casablanca Variété Amsterdam

Instructional text with a moral is a characteristically Dutch phenomenon. The carved gable stone from the orphanage on the site of today’s Amsterdam Museum, with entrances in the Kalverstraat and in the Sint Luciënsteeg, has a piece of text in neat rhyming couplets about its erstwhile inhabitants, something like:

“There will always be more of us, and more costs to bear.

Don’t go without helping, or the change you can spare.”

At Sint Luciënsteeg 27 the work of Joost Janszoon

The Dutch like a museum. The building which houses the Amsterdam Museum was built in the seventeenth century, serving as the Amsterdam Orphanage for the next 400 years. The collection includes a permanent exhibition on Amsterdam’s history, a reconstruction of the orphanage, and a programme of exhibitions based on works on loan – currently the portrait of his wife Saskia by Rembrandt – and on ground-breaking research into art history – from March 15th, the work of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (1470 – 1533), the earliest named Amsterdam artist.

http://amsterdammuseum.nl/en/van-oostsanen-unknown-dutch-master

Modern Delft blue ceramic by Maxim Velčovský

The Dutch continue to appreciate both old and new. The origin of Delft blue pottery was the drive to copy Chinese porcelain when supply dried up after 1620. Though they did not manage to recreate porcelain, the use of white tin glazes and cobalt decoration to give the characteristic colours became widespread. This modern ceramic on a hotel counter neatly integrates the Delft tradition with Soviet-era public statuary, with a nod in the direction of the modern mania for tattooing.

Footbridge to the NEMO science museum

Public building continues to be commissioned on a large scale. The recently-reopened Stedelijk Museum has a large and sometime controversial modern extension which nevertheless works very well. The Rijksmuseum has also been extensively refurbished.

http://brasilart.org/2014/01/13/stedelijk-amsterdam-restored-extended/

The NEMO Science Museum sits alongside the Centraal Station, low in the water like an exotic ship, with a footbridge echoing naval architecture. It makes good use of its surroundings, and perhaps also refers to …

The engine of prosperity

… the eighteenth century ship anchored alongside the  Scheepvaartmuseum or naval museum close by. Here’s how the wealth of the Golden Age was generated and brought in, using a revolutionary design for a buis or tube, a merchant ship with substantial capacity and demanding fewer men to crew it. The Dutch gift for design has deep roots. It comes to the fore in the newly refurbished city from which those ships set sail.

A winter Christmas

The Christmas lights snake along the bare branches of winter trees. Street decorations – chandeliers, leaping angels, candles, foliage – are traditional and generally monochrome. The restrained yet striking style of today’s city Centrum might have appealed to the man whose actions started it all, Willem de Zwijger (William the Silent), the ancestor of today’s King Willem Alexander.

At Schiphol Airport, a busy, clean and efficient facility, there’s an outpost of the Rijksmuseum with some good oil paintings on show, if you need to while away an hour before your flight. This portrait of him in sober dress by Dirck Barendz and his circle captures a sceptical wisdom missing from better-known portraits.

The Germanic nobleman who started it all

Leading figure in the Dutch Revolt against Habsburg Spain which began the Eighty Years’ War, the story of his ‘Silent’ epithet suggests both restraint and passionate feeling. Raised a Lutheran and educated as a Roman Catholic, his resolve to oppose Philip II of Spain’s policies began in June 1559.

William and the Duke of Alva had been sent to France as hostages to secure fulfillment of a treaty following the Hispano-French war. During a hunting trip to the Bois de Vincennes with Henry II of France, William and Alva openly discussed a secret understanding between King Philip and King Henry aimed at exterminating Protestants in both France and the Netherlands. William kept silent at that time, but decided that he would not allow the slaughter of so many innocent subjects. The Dutch national anthem still swears loyalty to him today. It seems apt in a country still fiercely determined to be fair.

Saturday in the Park

It was a public holiday in Sao Paulo last Saturday – the 460th anniversary of the founding of Sao Paulo.

http://theproverbial.org/2013/07/23/where-sao-paulo-began/

The holiday fell on a Saturday, so no time off work, but nevertheless, with a sunny weekend beckoning, there was a holiday mood. A good day for a walk. Avenida Paulista, where a street celebration was promised, or Ibiripuera Park, with weekend crowds and shaded walks?

Corner of Rua Inglaterra and Rua Groenlandia, Jardims

I walk up to Ibiripuera Park, the largest in Sao Paulo, through steady traffic. Vendors man their pitch at the lights, selling cut-price flowers, gadgets, and in his usual spot, a man who sells brooms. Sitting beside the road, I thought he had an exotic Brazilian animal on his lap, but it was only his stock of feather dusters.

Sao Paulo is well supplied with public sculpture, perhaps aspiring to the European tradition of bronze soldiers and statesmen, but it’s generally on a more intimate scale, celebrating more modest Brazilians – journalists, tennis players, civic leaders.

http://theproverbial.org/2012/07/31/public-sculpture-brasil/

Cora Coralina, leading Brazilian poet

On an approach to a side entrance of the park there’s a bust of celebrated writer Cora Coralina (1889 – 1985), not published in book form until her mid-seventies, though she had been writing since her teens. Living in Sao Paulo for much of her life, she was a modest and popular writer, born in the interior of Brazil in  – and returning at the age of 67 to – the town of Goiás Velho which was the source of much of her subject matter. After her husband’s death she earned a living by making and selling sausages and cakes, selling books, and also writing stories, poems and children’s literature for the newspapers.

The park is bustling with the Saturday crowd – cyclists, joggers, skaters and skateboarders, families with pushchairs, friends out power-walking as they talk – and here too there are vendors, of agua de coco, ice-cream, refrigerantes or soft drinks, and bicycles for hire. On the grassed areas there are the practitioners of capoeira – a Brazilian dance and martial art form – people singing and playing the guitar, pairs of lovers, tight-rope walkers practicing, people in hammocks, religious groups praying in public …  Most people don’t have gardens, so the park offers them welcome space, fresh air and natural surroundings. During the week the park’s population reflects the affluent suburbs close by – they come to exercise – but on Saturdays they stay away.

Porco Ensebado (Greased Pig) by Ricardo Cipicchia

We walk along the shaded asphalt paths, a leisurely stroll, with all kinds of people walking in both directions, skaters weaving through the pedestrians, cyclists in their lanes, and every imaginable kind of casual dress and undress. Children play around the water fountain, a circle of youths and girls bat a volleyball from hand to hand, someone strings up a hammock. The sun is quite fierce, but an avenue of giant bamboo is quiet and fresh. A large plastic cup of cool agua de coco is welcome. The park is full, but not crowded. A park employee stands at a pathway junction with a whistle, warning skaters to stay in their lanes as they speed down the hill.

Statues appear scattered throughout the park, chosen for popular appeal. The bucolic game with a greased pig is clearly a favourite – its back and neck have been burnished by many hands. The sculptor Ricardo Cipicchia also has a piece on the esplanade in Santos, a fisherman casting his net into a boiling sea.

http://theproverbial.org/2013/04/25/saturday-in-santos/

Here in Ibiripuera everything is peaceful. So much so that the park police have an easy Sunday. Who could imagine that down on Avenida Paulista the street party included a demonstration, which turned into a riot, complete with special police and property damage?

Policing the park

From that perspective, you understand that one of the functions of public art is to define a national character, a model for citizens to follow. The gentle, innocent country people and poets are acceptable, desirable, but urban rioting seems to be just under the surface this summer. Both are cultural expressions, posited as opposing tendencies, and the function of public sculpture in this is clear.

In the days of the military Junta the radical arts group 3Nos3 performed “baggings” of public sculptures – covering the heads of various dignitaries and mythological characters with plastic or cloth bags to demonstrate the ostrich-like blindness of the country’s political class to the state of the nation and the abuses of power. (Thanks to Simon Lewandowski.) And perhaps a reference to some more sinister practices too. More at

http://www.mac.usp.br/mac/conteudo/cursoseventos/mac_encontra/2011_2/ramiro.asp

Mario Ramiro bagging a public statue

Old World Christmas & New Year

In England for the festive season. Travelled across two counties today, Worcestershire and Warwickshire, to steady rain. Rivers, brooks and streams almost bursting their banks, plenty of standing water on the roads and in the fields. Most people are inside out of the rain – only a few solitary dog-walkers, and an intrepid group of hikers, to be seen.

Welcome to the UK, Birmingham International Airport

The UK is not an effusive culture, but it prides itself on being fair.

Wudu: washing, to prepare for formal Islamic prayers

Especially at Christmas and Easter, you may hear the ringing of changes on a peal of church bells.

Bell tower St Mathias Malvern Link

A kingdom of two countries, a principality and a province, the United Kingdom has long known how to create consensus.

England from the Welsh borders

Gentleman farmer in Landrover Tdi 90

The country landscape is dominated by rivers, setting the course of rail and road, the character of counties, and marking the landscape as heavily as do Roman roads and military camps. (Castrum, camp (Latin); on the sites of the many towns with ‘cester’ or ‘chester’ in their names.)

At Shrewsbury, two views of the River Severn …

… revered as the goddess Sabrina by the Romans

Paddington Station, London …

… a Victorian cathedral of the railway

Enamel sign for newsagent WHSmith

Although not as numerous as they were, some towns still host a garrison.

1878 Copthorne Barracks, Shrewsbury

http://www.themountshrewsbury.com/barracks/index.php

Just as important in creating the national character is the material culture – a pint of bitter ale in a country pub (“public house”), or at this time of year, a slice of rich dark fragrant Christmas cake, with a mantle of almond marzipan and lemon and sugar icing.

1900 Hop Market, ex-hotel and -bank, Worcester, where hops are still grown for beer

http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-489167-the-hop-market-worcestershire

Lift, 1931 ex-Tetley brewery offices, now an art gallery, Leeds

Snug by the fire in the Nag’s Head public house, Malvern Link

http://thetetley.org/

Holly and pine cones symbolise new and eternal life

Its history is ever present, but England wears it lightly now.

Morris Minor, predecessor of the British Mini

1721 Worcester Guild Hall, with statues of Charles I and II and of Queen Anne, top

http://www.worcester.gov.uk/index.php?id=guildhall

The FIDELIS in the Worcester city motto recalls the English Civil War

http://www.ngw.nl/heraldrywiki/index.php?title=Worcester_(England)

Bárbaro

I’ve written before about Bárbaro, an Uruguyan assado or barbecue restaurant in Vila Olimpia in Sao Paulo.

http://theproverbial.org/2012/06/17/tango-platense/

It’s more than a year since my last visit, and business is good. The property has expanded to include more space – it’s the width of three residential plots now, boasting a terrace, a sala de festa and an outdoor space at the back. The dining rooms at the front and the back continue to host a good tango show, with a three-piece band, a statuesque singer and an excellent pair of light-footed tango dancers.

Urugyan tango band with guest singer

The carnivorous menu is good – the morcilla salgado or savoury black pudding is a great starter – and a jug of clericot, otherwise known as white sangria, accompanies the barbecue very well.

The bandoneonista is a virtuoso, the keyboard player has a sense of humour, and the bass / guitar / singer / musical director is very accomplished. After the show, the bandoneoinista engages in spirited discussion about the nationality of tango musicians. He finishes the conversation with a friendly bear hug (um abraço) but it’s an Uruguyan, not a Brazilian hug, as it’s followed by a rough kiss on the cheek. Uruguyan men are uninhibited kissers of their own gender, while Brazilian men shy away in horror, proffering a theatrical Roman handshake instead. It’s not just the music which varies by country in Latin America. Here’s a famous tango which you’ll recognise, La Cumparsita, an Uruguyan composition.

Restaurante Almodovar Rua Pinheiros Sao Paulo

No, not the outré Spanish film-maker, but a good tapas restaurant. The décor bears more than a passing resemblance to his film aesthetic, and your bill is presented in a fine red ladies´stiletto, but in the interest of avoiding copyright infringement, that´s as far as it goes.

Original artwork …

The architect-designed interior is stylish and comfortable – Spanish roccoco meets cocktail lounge – and the service is charming and attentive. Upstairs is an intimate function room seating 20 or so, and affording you a view of the industrious kitchen. Spanish chef Tomàs Peñafiel and his Argentinian team turn out tasty tapas and other Spanish classics – paella, bacalao, and churrros, among others – and the jamón serrano is good.

… with live jazz

They´ve been open about a year now, and have recently begun to offer a live jazz quartet on Wednesday evenings from about 7 pm. With a repertoire from Spanish boleros through Brazilian choro to funk and jazz classics, the music matches the food for fusion and appeal.

Jazz en plein air and in full flight

And the wine list is also appetising. Spanish and New World, cava and sangria, and if that´s not to your taste, ask for your cocktail of choice. This is a venue whose watchword is good quality, in food, in wine and in music. What more could you want?

http://www.restaurantealmodovar.com/index.html

Avenida Paulista CBD Sao Paulo

Avenida Paulista is the main thoroughfare in the older business district of Sao Paulo, in the city’s Centro. These days, the offices throng Avenida Faria Lima and the wealthy live in quiet low-rise suburbs like the Jardims, but once the mansions of the coffee barons lined Paulista in impressive displays of wealth. A few relics remain from its time as a grand address.

Catedral Nossa Senhora do Paraíso

But being Brazil, nothing is quite as it seems. This cathedral building dates from 1952, and is the seat of the largest community of Melkite Greek Roman Catholic Christians in the world. They trace their ancestry to Antioch at the time of the apostles, following the Byzantine rite, in full communion with Rome. Services are conducted in Arabic …

Turn-of-the-century relict

This quiet beauty remains stubbornly anonymous. Government building?

Corner site – listed building?

Brazil has a system for listing buildings of historical and architectural interest – a listing is somewhat ominously called a tombamento – and the fate of such buildings seems to be government ownership or as in the case of the site above, business premises for consultancies and similar. Since 1991 there have been tax concessions for (regulated) conservation and restoration work on listed buildings, indeed the law applies to all kinds of material cultural heritage.

http://www.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/cidade/secretarias/cultura/patrimonio_historico/preservacao/index.php?p=430

That may be seen as very little and very late in the case of Avenida Paulista, when you look back to how it was.

Avenida Paulista 1902

From http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Paulo_(cidade)

And down near Avenida Faria Lima, where the public infrastructure – Metro station and now roadworks and bus station – is gradually catching up with rapid commercial development, a quick solution is still popular. It’s November, shopping starts now; which colours shall we use for our redecoration? The strong Brazilian visual sense is in rude health.

Reindeer on Avenida Teodoro Sampaio

All of Jazz in Sao Paulo

A Croatian-born trumpeter playing New Orleans jazz in a French-look bistro – where else but in Sao Paulo, cosmopolitan world city?

Brand of cachaça (sugar cane spirit)

All of Jazz is a celebration and an academy for all forms of jazz, set on a quiet street at the modest end of upscale Itaim Bibi in Sao Paulo. It’s in an ochre-red building, with echoes of New Orleans in its first-floor balcony and its ambience.

Rua João Cachoeira 1366

The music starts around 10 in the evening, every day except Sunday, with an ever-changing programme to delight the ear as you sit at marble-topped tables and sip your drink or sample the menu.

Jazz quartet May 11 2013

Bentwood chairs, a tiled floor, a bar against one side and the small room is full – it would be crowded with an audience of 50.

Jazz video jukebox

Before the evening’s band comes on, jazz videos play on a small screen. Upstairs, there’s a wide range of jazz CDs and some videos for sale, alongside a few upstairs tables. The band takes its break on the street out front. Customers join in – this venue doesn’t stand on ceremony.

Trumpeter Busic is well-versed in the classics, from New Orleans to New York, from Dixie to Miles Davis, and his accented singing lends charm to the band’s playful renditions. A Latin Summertime, a gospel-tinged approach to blues – the musicians have a lot of fun with time signatures, styles and colours, sharing it with audience in best showman style.

André Busic Quintet 26th October 2013

The rhythm section is particularly jokey, the pianist inventive, and Busic preaches with the best of them when he cuts loose. The tenor plays with a sweetness all the more surprising for his impassive demeanor, while the greats of jazz look on from their monochrome portraits. This is a venue whose raison d’être is simply to come and enjoy the music.

http://www.allofjazz.com.br/

Teatro Colón Buenos Aires

The Teatro Colón is a landmark for tourists in Buenos Aires, if only to take the guided tour. This is a sumptuous building, recently restored, and with an active cultural programme, so taking the tour is a pleasure. Mainly an auditorium for opera and ballet, theatre performances are the rare exception. To see a performance there, visitors can try a Monday night booking, when prices are discounted.

Teatro Colón – zoom in to see bas-reliefs and busts by Argentine Italian Luigi Trinchero

Its scale is striking – the building’s setting, overlooking the wide thoroughfare of Avenida 9 de Julio to the east, the plazas separating it from the courts or Tribunales to the west, and with a reasonably spacious pedestrian plaza to the north, allows you to see it well. This building is large, seating just under 2,500, with standing room for 1,000 more, and boasting a stage area of some 400 square metres.

Where carriages draw up

The principal entrance on the western Tribunales side on Calle Libertad has an ornate cast iron and glass canopy, to enable patrons to make a sheltered entrance from their carriages, as they were doing at its opening in 1908. The very elevated were able to take their carriages right inside the building, and enter the ornate foyer via a flight of carpeted steps.

Entrance for the better seats

The foyer is as heavily ornamented as the rest of the building, perhaps more so. It becomes clear that then as now, the social dimension of going to the opera loomed large in the public’s mind. An elaborate system of entrances and foyers kept the social classes apart, however united they were in their love of opera.

Grand foyer

Though the (very knowledgeable, English-speaking) tour guide made much of the fact that two principal architects had worked on the building, in contrasting French and Italian styles, the building is in truth a great success in its styling, united in colouring and theme, and actually pleasantly varied in style.

Decorative fittings, also by Trinchero, imported materials – the steps are Carrara marble

The modern additions – coffee shop and restaurant, ticket sales, bookshop – are tastefully integrated into this Belle Epoque confection. But tasteful doesn’t begin to describe the impact of the ornamentation of the upper foyers.

Even the fire hoses are decorative

The ornament is floor-to-ceiling, the colour scheme varied and harmonious, the art work largely gracious and in keeping with the building’s purpose – to impress, and to enable social transactions.

Beautiful stuccoed ceiling

A palace – yes, to the Muses, but a palace – in which to feel at home. The gods and heroes of this pantheon are musicians, their busts presiding over the mortals below.

Every aspect richly, harmoiously decorated

The domesticated gods of a previous culture are pressed into service here. It was said that if you wanted someone to fall in love with you …

Cupid and Venus

… you whispered the name of your intended in Cupid’s ear, and he directed his mother’s arrows to the heart of the beloved.

The upper level

This in a setting which might already make you light-headed. And if your friends were to overhear the name, and assist the arrow in its flight, then so much the better.

Not a love seat – the stained glass praises domestic fidelity in the person of Penelope

The serious side of the transaction was reserved for your elders. You were in due course made to sit on the two outer seats of this sofa de salon while the patriarchs compared notes and bank balances. Only if the outcome was judged satisfactory would the match be made. And woe betide you if a male member of your family made a faux pas, sitting down on one of the other sofas – these were strictly reserved for the ladies. Sitting betrayed the fact that you were a stranger to this echelon.

One of the world’s best acoustics

Oh, and the music? Beyond the foyers is one of the best acoustics in the world (Marshall Long, Acoustics Today April 2009), recognised as such by performers like Pavarotti. The theatre’s “acoustics (have) the greatest defect: its acoustics are perfect! Imagine what this signifies for the singer: if one sings something bad, one notices immediately.” We were lucky enough to hear an orchestral rehearsal on our tour – the acoustics are indeed crystal clear.

And what of the ordinary public? The standing room at Teatro Colón was known as the ‘hen house’, filled with ordinary Italian opera lovers, who made their feelings clear, booing, catcalling, and throwing food at the stage if the music was not to their liking. Despite the social hierarchy, this voice from ‘the gods’ was also well-known.

Tango in Buenos Aires

The tango is quintessentially Latin American, and especially Argentinian. There are Uruguayan and Brazilian variants – tango and maxixe – but just as the samba is thought of in the same breath as Brazil, the tango belongs to Argentina. Arising in the working-class districts along the Rio Plata which separates Argentina and Uruguay, the tango has become a form known and recognised the world over, both its dance and its music.

The back room is to the left

It isn’t difficult to see a tango show in Buenos Aires: the ticket sellers are almost as prolific as the money changers (“Cambio cambio!”) on the main pedestrian thoroughfares. The most ‘authentic’ show is said to be the performance in the back room at Cafe Tortoni, one of the oldest established cafes in Buenos Aires.

Tortoni opened its doors in 1858, as the tango was beginning to emerge from the Porteno workers’ dwellings in La Boca. Judging from the early photographs, the cafes were a home from home for working men, offering food, warmth and relaxed company, in much more comfortable surroundings than the crowded wooden shacks they called home. (See http://theproverbial.org/2013/07/11/cafe-life-in-buenos-aires/ on Buenos Aires cafes.)

Tiny stage

The Tortoni show is intimate, but it is nonetheless a performance for a seated audience. To understand the social meaning of the tango, you need to see a dance session at one of the many milongas or dance halls around the city. Not tourist destinations, these are more a dance school and tea dance venue.

Milonga El Arranque

There are more than 60 milongas in Buenos Aires alone. (Listings at http://hoytango.com.ar/) We went to El Arranque, which shares its name with a famous tango orchestra. On the afternoon we went, there had been a class, with a dance session for students to follow, the music provided by a DJ. A large dance hall in a nondescript modern building, it had an array of tables with checked table-cloths around a large dance floor, and a stage occupied only by a large banner. A simple menu and a rudimentary bar suggest that dancing is the main attraction.

Milongueros and milongueras

Despite the cavernous interior, the dancers moved with fierce concentration, not to say passion, following the musical format and the conventions of the dance with close and sometimes rapt attention. Pairs of dancers take a turn counter-clockwise around the outside of the floor, for a bracket of three or more dance tunes. Each bracket is separated by a section of faster music, allowing partners to return to their own, separate tables. Invitations to dance are made by eye contact and an inclination of the head or the lift of an eyebrow. Not that I saw any – it’s done with subtlety.

We saw couples form and dissolve with easy formality. Some longer partnerships were evident – a teacher dancing with a number of pupils, and executing more showy leg movements in the space left for him in the middle of the floor; younger couples honing their skills for competitive dancing; some couples who danced only with each other, and had perhaps been formed on this dance floor.

Personal styles were also evident. Traditionally the woman follows in tango. The moves are signalled by the man’s hand on her back, pressing and lifting to indicate direction. Some danced loosely and fluently, others with greater attention to formal steps. One woman danced in the Argentino style with all her partners – leaning into the contact at chest level so intensely that if he had moved away, she would have fallen – and dancing always with eyes tightly closed.

http://www.tangotrazo.com/en/tanguerias/milonga-el-arranque-buenos-aires/

And just as the camera does in this footage of a tango competition at L’Arranque, your attention is drawn to the feet, partly by the intricate steps, but also so as not to intrude on the peculiarly public intimacy of the dance. It becomes clear that tango was a social dance before it became a show. And in the milongas, it remains so.

Ohtake Towers

The Torre Pedroso de Moraes and the Torre Faria Lima in the business district along the Avenida Faria Lima in Sao Paulo are a pair of landmarks. Developed for Brazilian company Aché Pharma, Faria Lima stand head and shoulders above the surrounding mixed-use buildings, while Pedroso de Moraes provides a tongue-in-cheek foil. The high tower is iconic near and far.

Street-level view with theatre entrance below

Pedroso de Moraes was built first, and is known locally as the ‘Palácio da Carambola’ for its star-fruit-shaped supports.

Pure geometry

The inverted ziggurat of Pedroso de Moraes is a kind of anti-tower, its sharp edges and broad-shouldered shape a riposte to the sleek areodynamics above.

Intersecting volumes

Yet they interact harmoniously, the high-gloss finish serving to unite as well as to reflect.

Reflective surfaces

A familiar sight when glimpsed in traffic, Faria Lima surprises with its scale in close-up.

It dwarfs the street furniture

The distinctive entrance to the tower’s gallery and theatre is playful compared with its business-like access on Pedroso de Moraes.

Offices of Demarest & Almeida Avogados

The  Instituto Cultural Tomie Ohtake entrance gives the colours of its tower a playful shake, as if it were a handful of bunting ribbons. (Tomie Ohtake is a Brazilian abstract painter and the mother of the architect, Ruy Ohtake.)

Signature entrance

The interior foyers are a series of long low spaces built with more of the raw concrete and white steel bracing used for the exterior. Exhibition spaces are the familiar white cuboids, pleasantly high-ceilinged.

Spacious interior …

… with comfortable café

There were photographic exhibitions on when I visited, both international and Brazilian, including photographs of Brazilian architecture, a fitting subject for such a well-known edifice.

Iconic building …

… with local adventures …

… in architecture to match

One suspects that when Aché Pharma, recently the subject of bid speculation, becomes as obscure a name as Pedroso de Moraes – a Brazilian pioneer bandeirante known as “Terror dos Indios” – the tower for which they funded the development will still be known by the name of its architect.

Reflected cloudscape

Banded colour …

… carried through into interior

Carambola support

Even more dramatic at night

 

Where São Paulo Began

In 1554 a group of  Portuguese Jesuit missionaries established a school and settlement in the unexplored interior of Brazil, on a plateau which sits high above the place where the rivers Tamanduateí and Anhangabaú meet. Known as São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga, it was a mixed settlement of Jesuits, Portuguese colonisers and indigenous Caingangue people.

The first Colégio building was a simple wattle-and-daub hut, or in the words of José de Anchieta, one of the founding priests, “um paupérrima e estreitíssima casinha“, a very basic and narrow little house. By 1556 a school and church had been built using rammed earth.

The names for the rivers, and the fact that they shared the settlement, suggest that the indigenous people had good relations with the colonisers. The site for the mission chapel was originally the house of one of the indigenous chiefs.

Rear wall overlooking the steep drop to the Anhangabaú

Not all the settlers had good relations with the indigenous people. In 1560 the Governor General of Brazil, Mem de Sá, ordered the inhabitants of the nearby village of Santo André da Borda do Campo to move to the Colégio, to protect themselves from indigenous attacks behind its walls. In 1562 the Colégio was itself besieged, and although it survived, attacks were to continue intermittently for the next 30 years. But the settlement grew, and in 1585 the Colégio was expanded.

Inner courtyard

In their mission to convert and educate the indigenous peoples, the Society of Jesus also came into conflict with the colonisers, who wanted the indigenous as slaves and  labourers on their plantations, not as literate Christians. When disputes arose with the labourers who lived in Jesuit communities, the colonisers found they were dealing with the Jesuits, rather than with the labourers. In 1640, the Jesuits were expelled from the settlement they had founded. By 1653 Fernão Dias Paes Leme, one of the colonisers who had supported their expulsion, had brokered their return. The Colégio underwent major repairs.

Bartira, daughter of the cacique (leader) Tibiriçá, with José de Anchieta

The colonisers mounted expeditions to the interior, setting out from São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga to capture runaway slaves, to enslave more of the indigenous population – cheaper than buying African slaves – and to search for gold and precious stones. These expeditions followed a flag, a bandeira, the explorers being known as bandeirantes. It’s a history of which the city remains very aware.

Bandeirante pioneer Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva, Parque Trianon, Sao Paulo

Gold was discovered in the interior in the 1690s. The Jesuits meanwhile continued to convert the indigenous to Christianity, to educate them, and to learn their languages. They were active throughout the colony.

Jesuit Museum at Embu, São Paulo state

In 1759 the Jesuits were expelled once again, not just from São Paulo, but from Brazil and from Portugal by the powerful Prime Minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, who was later made the Marquess of Pombal by a grateful Joseph I of Portugal. The Jesuit church in São Paulo was used by the Portuguese Crown and later the state, becoming known as the Palácio dos Governadores, and the Pátio do Colégio as the Largo do Palácio. The church was demolished in 1896.

From the practice of Severo Ramos de Azevedo & Villares

Surrounded by more exuberant Paulistano architecture – the former Primeiro Tribunal de Alçada Civil  is an extraordinary 1930s confection – the Colégio which sits neatly on its hilltop today is a reconstruction, rebuilt between 1953 when the site was returned to the Society and 1979 when the Museu Anchieta was opened.

Pátio do Colégio, rebuilt 1653 and 1953

This quiet seventeenth-century Mannerist building hides its extraordinary history behind a modest whitewashed facade. When the museum’s re-design is implemented, let’s hope they make more use of its dramatic story.

http://www.pateodocollegio.com.br/newsite/

Cementerio de la Recoleta Buenos Aires

‘Recoleta’ is an up-market district of Buenos Aires, a famous cemetery, and a mendicant order of friars and nuns. The austere Augustinian Order of Recollects, founded in Spain in the sixteenth century, established a convent and church on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in the eighteenth century. The church is still there, well-kept and worth a visit.

Iglesia de Nuestra Señora del Pilar

Less than a hundred years after the church was opened, the order was disbanded in Argentina, and the vegetable garden of the convent became the first pubic cemetery, the Cementerio del Norte.

Interior of the church

The layout was designed by French engineer Próspero Catelin, said to have had the Parisian Père Lachaise cemetery in mind. The dead were not buried but held in mausoleums above ground. As yellow fever broke out in the poorly drained areas of downtown Buenos Aires, especially from 1852 and culminating in the epidemic of 1871, wealthier citizens moved north to safer ground, and the status of the district rose.

Still a working cemetery today – “May they rest in peace”

The cemetery was remodelled in 1880, from when the grand neo-classical entrance dates. Much of the material used in constructing the elaborate mausoleums between 1880 and 1930 is said to have come from Paris and Milan. When you catch sight of the statuary inside these gates, the effect is astonishing in its exuberance and richness.

For his son by founder of paper La Prensa José Camilo Paz – sculptor Jules Felix Coutan

Recoleta is in fact quite small – some six and a half thousand plots compared for example with the 53,000 of London’s Highgate Cemetery – and the city crowds in to the northwest and southwest. As in the city, the Recoleta streets are shadowed and windy, with some sunny corners.

City of the living just beyond the walls

And as in Buenos Aires, there are marvels of urban architecture to intrigue the eye. Just a touch more exotic.

Byzantine-style dome

Neo-classical dome

Elaborate Art Nouveau tomb

One sees quite a few tombs which are barely Christian in style.

Early 20th century ‘Middle Eastern’, Argentinian naval family

The detailed guide book (the website  http://www.ciudaddeangeles.com/  is sadly not maintained) confirms that “in 1863 the bishop of Buenos Aires retired its blessed [consecrated] condition after President Mitre – also buried here – ordered the burial of a well known Mason, blessing that has not and will not be recovered.” In fact, leading politicians – Sarmiento, Yrigoyen – buried at Recoleta in Masonic vaults were members of the Obediencia a la Ley N° 13 lodge.

Family of Italian origin, developers of BsAs wholesale food market

Active from 1859, the lodge has its own vault in Recoleta.  http://www.scribd.com/doc/36186658/Boveda-Logia-Obediencia-a-La-Ley-N%C2%BA-13

Family tomb of de Alzaga and de Yturriaca

The stories behind the monuments are perhaps more dramatic than the memorials. Martín de Álzaga – his family tomb, above, is shared with the de Yturriaca family – was a poor Basque immigrant whose wealth grew from trade in slaves, fabrics and weapons. He participated in the resistance to the 1806 British invasion of Buenos Aires, and its defence in 1807, but fell foul of the new government and was publicly shot in 1812, his body left hanging for three days. The Recoleta tomb is dated 1866 – the guide book says that his wife and daughter confined themselves to their home until their deaths and burials in the same mausoleum.

The impressive tomb of General Julio Argentino Roca stands out on its corner site for its elaborate sculpture and metalwork. Bronze victor’s wreaths adorn the side of the structure, and the angel atop the pediment holds two more – Roca was twice President of Argentina. Known as  el Zorro – the Fox – he devised and led the 1878-1879 Conquista del Desierto, which pushed back the indigenous tribes – dominated by the Mapuche people – who attacked Argentinian settlements in Patagonia, killing about 1,000, capturing 15,000 more, and pre-empting Chilean-Mapuche domination of the area. With the help of the Remington rifle, he laid claim to huge tracts of land, which were awarded to his backers. The settlement of Patagonia by Welsh immigrants dates from this time.

Family tomb watched over by its patriarch

Though crosses top the railing and an obscured Christian cross decorates the pediment, the doused crossed torches on the frieze are Masonic. An apt contrast, in the light of the debate between revisionists and apologists for the Conquista. 

Tombs of national heroes like Roca are well kept, so what are we to make of the dilapidated tomb of the Sáenz Valiente family? The mouldings and ironwork barely keep the patched brickwork standing, and the stucco is long gone.

Tomb of Casto Sáenz Valiente

Anselmo Sáenz Valiente, a successful Spanish grocery merchant, was a hero of the British Invasion of Buenos Aires, joining forces with Martín de Álzaga to resist and repel the invaders, but avoiding political entanglement with him, despite being affected by anti-Spanish measures after moves towards independence began in 1810. His son Casto, the third-born of 14 children, was close to Juan Manuel de Rosas, who was to become virtual dictator of the newly independent Argentina. Perhaps he did not have his father’s instinct for political survival – the guide book says he fled to Uruguay, where Rosas laid siege to Montevideo for ten years. Does the state of his tomb reflect his continued political exile?

A cemetery of mausoleums naturally has architectural interest, but there is a wealth of decorative detail to enthrall the eye too. The non-Christian trend is also in evidence here.

‘Egyptian’ memorial, mourner wearing a Fascist helmet?

The Biblical tradition is of course strongly represented. In a section of Recoleta set aside by de Rosas for prominent citizens, the Panteon Ciudadanos Meritorios, there’s a charming bas-relief in marble illustrating the New Testament verse on children. Its low-key simplicity is restful to the eye.

Sculpted by Italian Livi in memory of Peña, an educator

Sometimes a simple trick of the light is enough.

Shadow of a statue

A small detail can be hugely significant. A simple family tomb …

Top right is a plaque bearing a well-known name.

Memorial to little Eva (Evita) Perón nee Duarte

Roughly translated, it says that whoever follows the same path as Eva Perón, in imitation of Christ, is also one of his disciples. The guide book tells us that there are always flowers on this memorial, and it relates more of Eva Duarte de Perón’s history, dramatic even after her death.

When Juan Perón was exiled from Argentina, Eva’s embalmed body was guarded by her sympathisers in secret, but flowers always appeared at her door; one of the guards shot his own wife by accident while guarding the body. The military government of the day quietly sent the body to a cemetery in Milan, where it stayed for 20 years. A new military government sent the body to Peron in Spain. When he returned to Argentina in 1973, the coffin was once more taken and recovered. Her sisters finally interred the body safely under the concrete of the Duarte family vault.

One begins to understand how strong the symbolism of earthly remains is in Argentina. In 1987, Juan Perón’s hands were removed from his body and an US$8M ransom demanded. It was not paid, no one was ever charged, and the hands have not re-appeared. It’s been interpreted variously as an attempt to promote Argentinian democracy, to destroy the cult of Perónism – which remains a significant political force in Argentina – or a Masonic ritual to deny Perón’s body rest.

The most haunting story though is associated with a memorial striking for its beauty.

Memorial to Rufina Cambaceres sculpted by Richard Aigner

Eugenio Cambaceres was a wealthy man, a controversial politician and novelist, who died in 1888 of tuberculosis when his daughter Rufina was only four. Her uncle was also a well-known politician. Her mother Luisa Bacichi was a dancer from Trieste, who despite not being accepted by local society later took up in with founder of the Radical party and President of Argentina, Hipólito Yrigoyen, who had many informal relationships with women. An unconventional family.

Rufina was found dead on the evening of her 19th birthday. Despite being examined by three physicians, no cause of death could be established. She was interred, but some day later cemetery attendants noticed that the coffin had been moved. When they opened it, Rufina’s face was said to be scratched and injured, presumably in an attempt to escape or at least to be heard. She had been interred alive, while suffering from catalepsy. Her family commissioned the tomb you see, with the freestanding young lady in white at its door.

Taking a little sun

There are those who say they see a young lady in white wandering near the cemetery at night. Certainly the way death is treated quite casually here – all the dead above ground, ornate coffins on display behind glass and wrought iron – lends itself to such stories. Even if the sombre reminder as you exit frames mortality firmly in a Christian context.

“We expect the Lord”

Café Life in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is known as the Paris of Latin America, and at its best, it is indeed a spacious, beautiful, prosperous and cultured city. One of the factors which makes it cosmopolitan is the number of  cafés or bares – there is one almost literally on every corner in the microcentro. The city conducts its life in them, at every level.

Bar of the Plaza Hotel, Florida San Martin, near the river crossing to Colonia

The Plaza Hotel has been an upmarket destination for more than a century. Overlooking the Plaza San Martin in Retiro, it was opened in 1909 and hosts the wealthy and the well-known to this day. Its bar is a destination in its own right. The wood-panelled decor, buttoned leather and subdued lighting make for a relaxed ambience, and its high tea – cakes, sandwiches and a decent pot of tea – is a welcome treat. The skill with which the barman mixes drinks for his regulars suggests that he can provide a treat too, should you be in the mood. On Wednesday evenings they have live jazz music.

London livery company dinner at the Plaza, 1946 – note guests of honour

At the everyday level, cafés abound. The Florida Garden opened in 1962, a meeting point for the avant-garde of the day. During the week it is more a businessman’s venue, with a pleasant mezzanine floor offering an elevated view of the daily bustle. The double counter is workplace and service facility, and the copper accents extend from the coffee machine over the decorated walls and up the stairs. They serve a decent coffee and the usual medialuna (croissant) with ham and melted cheese. It also sells coffee beans loose. The constant stream of customers confirms that it is still serving them what they need.

The counter at Florida Garden, corner of Florida and Paraguay

Out in the quieter suburb of Recoleta, overlooking the plaza in front of the renowned Cementerio de la Recoleta, is the equally famous Café La Biela. Opened in 1850 when the area was still farmland, and the vegetable garden of the local monastery only recently converted into the first public cemetery in Buenos Aires, it was a small pavement café on the site of a general store. As the city grew and as the well-off moved further north to escape the yellow fever breaking out in the lower land by the river, the café grew and changed, hosting the members of the Civil Pilots Association, and in its second century, racing car drivers and enthusiasts from Fangio and Jackie Stewart to Emerson Fittipaldi.

La Biela at Recoleta

It takes as its symbol the connecting rod or ‘conrod’ from a car engine, known in Spanish as la biela. Sipping coffee, we saw customers reading the newspaper, having a meeting while the car waited outside with driver, having their shoes shined at table, taking the afternoon sun on the terrace, or planning their visit to the Cementerio.

El Petit Colon on Plaza Lavalle

Buenos Aires takes its café culture very seriously, and prefers it traditional. El Petit Colón has the look – traditional ceiling mouldings, wooden furniture and bar, patterned wallpaper, brass fittings, black and white photographs, and spectacular light fittings. It’s popular with the lawyers who work around the nearby Palacio de Tribunales and with business people, as well as with the theatre-going public at the Teatro Colón from which it takes its name. Fast attentive service, good bar food and the usual excellent coffee complete the package. Difficult to tell that it opened as recently as 1970.

Café Tortoni on Avenida de Mayo

And so to that venerable Buenos Aires institution, Café Tortoni. Whether you ask where the best café is, or the best tango show, you get the same answer: Tortoni. Founded in 1858, and a feature of city life for generations, this café is such a landmark that if you look like tourists, and a little lost, as we clearly did, the locals give you directions to it unasked.

The bar at Café Tortoni

Here too the decor is in brown, beige, off-white and gold, with stained glass, brass light fittings, black and white photographs, wood and leather chairs, and the usual food and coffee. It’s the original style to which El Petit Colon pays homage. The costumed waiters play their parts well – we saw one grip a bottle of agua in the crook of his knee to open it with his free hand – and towards the back the cultural life of the café is celebrated with photographs, bronze busts and a souvenir shop. On the left hand side at the back is a separate room for the tango performances, seating 50 or so at tables, with a stage at the far end for musicians, singers and dancers (though not all at the same time).

Café Concert

The show we saw featured a pianist at the baby grand, a stony-faced bandoneon player centre stage and an electric bass to the right, with just enough room in front for the singer or for a pair of tango dancers. The performers walked in through the audience, and the dancers changed behind the curtain. A technician at the back ran sound and lights for an appreciative audience of visitors.

Café Tortoni is one of more that 70 cafés and bares declared Bares Notables by the city. Although supported by the city’s programmes, the status of such establishments does not prevent them from closing. They find ways of promoting themselves – tango shows, websites, supporters clubs – which raise their profile. Some recent establishments are experimenting with a more modern style – the Grand Cafe in Plaza San Martin is said to deploy a New York style – and such adaptation is needed for café life to survive. Clearly they are no longer the home from home of working men as seen in the early photographs, but as long as they provide what the Porteño – the citizen of Buenos Aires – needs, they will thrive. It seems that Buenos Aires needs a sense of history with its coffee, its medialuna and its WiFi.

Natural Science Museum Buenos Aires

Staying in Buenos Aires last week, I saw some of the expected sights – Recoleta, Cafe Tortoni, Calle Florida – but it was an unexpected visit to a museum which provided the greatest delight.

View over Caballito

Seeing friends in the neighbourhood of Caballito, we had time to spare so we called in at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia” (MACN) on the main thoroughfare of Avenida Angel Gallardo. 

The museum with street market, from Avenida Angel Gallardo

Designed, built and opened in stages between 1926 and 1937, the museum is the work of the Department of Architecture of the Nation, placed in the Centennial Park. The two entrance blocks were built first, the plainer joining galleries added later, as is evident in the photo above. The design objective was to build “according to architectural standards in force at the time for European science museums.”

The northern entrance – note brass spiders

From the first glimpse of the northern entrance hall, you are in the grip of a Gothic imagination. Yes, the owl is a symbol of wisdom, and the spider in its web perhaps signifies the power of carefully constructed thought, but for many people these are spooky, slightly menacing animals too.

Its twin at the southern end, lights above door replaced

The dramatic nature of their symbolism is emphasised by such devices as the high placement of the rather large owls, and the golden shimmer of the brass spiders and webs against the the black iron-work of the doors. These symbols are intended to invoke awe.

Geometric decoration

The largely geometric decoration of walls and floors points up these natural forms. And there are more surprises lurking in corners.

Animal decoration

The relief sculptures of animals on display in the halls are to be expected in a museum, but the bats at the capitals of the pillars are an unexpected find, and once again, quite Gothic. They are carved in crisp, unmistakeable detail

Bat in direct daylight

Although the Musem’s website mentions two of the sculptors involved – Alfredo Bigatti, who worked in stone and bronze, and for the stage, and fellow-Argentinian Donato Proietto – the building is an anonymous work, perhaps reflecting the character of the commission from the state as well as the tenor of the times.

Staircase to first floor

The handrail to the first-floor galleries uses the same combination of black ironwork and brass – the forms evoke snail shells, in a style reminiscent of Gustav Klimt.

Whale bone

Some of the Museum’s galleries are gloomy boneyards – the museums was directed for many years by a paleontologist, and it shows. The collection of dinosuar remains is extensive.

Hominid bone

There are some good collections of live fish in aquaria, and the bird tableaux have a diverting soundtrack which can be summoned at the push of a button for each species. The geology collection is also good, and all sections have the admirable aim of providing a panorama of Argentinian samples. But it is an old-fashioned approach.

Theropod epidermis

The quiet star of the show for me is the building itself. Maintenance is demanded to keep it at its best – with more dramatic lighting and a greater emphasis on its history and qualities, it could become a well-deserved architectural landmark of Buenos Aires.

Northern door from inside

I noted a bus tour of “Buenos Aires, City of Architecture”, and there are indeed many fine buildings from the Belle Epoque and Art Nouveau and Deco eras. This 1930s masterpiece deserves to join them.

Staircase off southern foyer

The Museum’s dedication to informing and educating its public about Argentinian natural history could happily be complemented by highlighting its architectural history as well.

One of a series of basreliefs decorating the connecting galleries

And if you were looking for a location for the next Batman movie, the Museum could stand in well for Bruce Wayne’s mansion … it’s a hidden gem of Buenos Aires’ architectural riches.

On the Museum, see

http://www.macn.gov.ar/cont_Gral/home.php

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_Argentino_de_Ciencias_Naturales

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardino_Rivadavia_Natural_Sciences_Museum

On Alfredo Bigatti, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Bigatti

http://www.forner-bigatti.com.ar/biog_ab.htm

Club DeLuxe

Heavyweight champion of the world

In 1920, heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson opened a club called Club DeLuxe on the corner of 142nd and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York.

He is said to have gone broke. A prominent gangster called Owney Madden took over the club in 1923, re-opening it after a year. Madden, an immigrant lad from Leeds in England, had risen through the New York underworld with a reputation for violence.

Madden and business partners Big Bill Dwyer and Big Frenchy De Mange (below)

Big Bill Dwyer, believed to own the Pittsburgh Pirates

Big Frenchy De Mange

also became owners in the exclusive Stork Club, where influential gossip columnist Walter Winchell (below) held court.

Walter Winchell in 1939 Photo by Granger (fineartamerica.com)

An owner in more than twenty clubs, Madden was known for his Prohibition-era business activities. He was also known for his revenge tactics and his pay-offs of City Hall.

Owen Madden

From these origins sprang the musical culture which was to conquer the world, to nurture the aristocratic Edward Kennedy Ellington, and to make the name of the Cotton Club an international by-word for exotic sophistication. We should not be surprised that U.S. rappers glorify gangsta culture, or that funk in Rio is associated with organised crime. Whether they will produce another Duke remains to be seen.

To put Club DeLuxe in its setting, here’s a thumbnail sketch of the Harlem nightlife of that time, from The Harlem Renaissance by Steven Watson http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/blues/watson.html

Sao Paulo Mercado Municipal

In 1933 the Mercado Central opened in the centre of Sao Paulo, establishing a covered venue for what had been a collection of street markets for all kinds of food. Harking back to the dominance of agriculture during the café com leite era ended by the Revolution of 1930, the agricultural products of Sao Paulo state were to be sold in what was a grand and decorative yet also a functional building.

Entrance to Mercado Central with coat of arms of city of Sao Paulo over

The cornucopias supporting the Sao Paulo crest are echoed in the fruit-filled urns surmounting the keystone caryatids – could this be the origin of Carmen Miranda’s famous millinery?

Cast iron ribbed roofing with acanthus leaf capitals

The Mercado’s architect was Francisco de Paula Ramos de Azevedo (1851-1928), who ran one of the most prestigious practices of the time. He was the architect of what is now the Pinacoteca Sao Paulo gallery

http://theproverbial.org/2012/07/16/jardim-da-luz-2/

a building which began life as a vocational school for the applied arts. The Mercado has also undergone changes of use – renamed the Mercado Municipal, and from 1969 transformed into a retail- and leisure-oriented space, while the sale of wholesale agricultural produce has moved to the larger, out-of-town-centre CEAGESP site at Vila Leopoldina. Like the Mercado, this site is also open almost every day.

http://www.ceagesp.gov.br/english/

The Mercado Municipal is a retail space where every conceivable kind of foodstuff is sold

Sold by Porco Feliz, without irony

including that essential for the feijoada pork and bean stew, pigs’ ears.

The food enthusiast can spend a happy hour or two shopping for the wares of vintners and butchers, fruiterers and fish-mongers (including piranha), sellers of herbs and spices, cheese-mongers, every kind of coster-monger … the variety of food is astonishing.

A mezzanine floor has been created inside the ample proportions of the market building. It has a good collection of restaurants of varied types, with a large common seating area crammed with chairs and tables, and a range of counters preparing the food bought to you by busy waiters. Going to the market is a family day out. In summer, the tables are cooled by large fans which spray misted water over the diners.

Paradise gardens

A striking feature is the series of stained glass windows on agricultural themes on the opposite side, above the food stalls.

It’s a bird’s life

Imported from Germany, they depict the raising of the produce on offer below. Idealised even for 1930, there is little sign of the agribusiness engine of the Brazilian economy of today. Nonetheless, they are charming. They’re difficult to appreciate at a distance – click on them to see them across your screen. More on the Mercado’s history at

http://vejasp.abril.com.br/materia/mercado-municipal-sp?gclid=CMDa5sTLy7cCFUtk7Aod-QUAPQ

What’s missing from this picture? We couldn’t smell any freshly baked bread, though there are some few stalls which sell bread, and some of the older stalls serving food downstairs are famous for their bologna (mortadella) filled bread rolls. Perhaps food hygiene prohibits baking anywhere except in the padaria. What was stranger for Brazil was not being able to smell freshly roasted coffee – we didn’t spot a single stall.

They’ve Got an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil … ?

But you can visit any of six Nespresso shops in Sao Paulo, and more elsewhere in the country, where coffee is not so much a commodity as a high-margin luxury item, supporting the sale of expensive coffee-making machines which – truthfully – are nothing like as successful as the old Gaggia machine in any corner bar of Italian extraction. The staff are dressed in muted browns, the shop fittings are carefully co-ordinated, and you can serve yourself with capsule coffee. But that glorious smell is not in evidence there either. Strange country, Brazil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVGXcjM9SOQ

Mood Indigo

Not at all blue – from the official website

Digital remaster of October 30th 1930 session by The Harlem Footwarmers, from The OKeh Ellington C2K 46117

How to write a jazz standard.

1. Listen, to your musicians …

“This thing that clarinetist Barney Bigard used to play, Ellington made a tune of that, “Mood Indigo”, that Barney used to warm up his instrument.” Clark Terry

… and to your teachers.

Bigard learned it from his clarinet teacher Lorenzo Tio, who called it a ‘Mexican blues’ and titled it Dreamy Blues.

2. Innovate.

The usual voicing of the horns was clarinet at the highest pitch, trumpet in the middle, and the trombone at the lowest pitch. Ellington voices the trombone at the top of the instrument’s register, and the clarinet at the lowest. With the electric microphones of the time, it created a ‘mic tone’ from the overtones of the clarinet and trombone, giving the illusion of a fourth instrument. Both trumpet and trombone were tightly muted.

English release of original recording, with credit to Ellington and Mills

3. Collaborate …

Lyrics were added in 1931 by Mitchell Parish, although credited to publisher Irving Mills, as was common practice, and accruing royalties for the publisher. Ellington never complained publicly about such arrangements, but praised Mills’ guidance and actions as invaluable to his career.

… with open eyes.

“Why in the devil, when you found out what was done to you” – double dipping on royalties and an agent’s fee – “why didn’t you blow the whistle?” (Maurice Lawrence)  Ellington replied that he could have, but then he “would have been black-balled in Tin Pan Alley”

4. Do the marketing.

In truth, the Ellington band had succeeded beyond expectation, at the Cotton Club and on national radio. Mood Indigo, their most popular single yet, had been released at the end of 1930. In 1931 their first nationally distributed press kit was released by Irving Mills. Tours, films and recognition as a composer were the next steps.

Ellington was fond of saying, “Well, I wrote that in 15 minutes while I was waiting for my mother to finish cooking dinner.”

At the foremost Black and Tan club

Original sound from 78 rpm and Victrola

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2H22Sb0Ds8

Excellent article about Ellington from The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/17/100517crat_atlarge_pierpont?currentPage=all

Official website

http://dukeellington.com/

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood_Indigo

Note on the song

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/duke-ellington-records-his-first-big-hit-quotmood-indigoquot

Extensive biography “Duke Ellington’s America” by Harvey G. Cohen

http://www.amazon.com/Duke-Ellingtons-America-Harvey-Cohen/dp/0226112640/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367434462&sr=1-1&keywords=ellington+cohen

Jazz Orkestra

Jazz nos Fundos is a venue for those in the know in Sao Paulo. On the edge of the Via Madalena nightlife district, and accessed through a working estacionamento or car park, it’s a place to come and listen to the best of Sao Paulo jazz, to patronise with friends and lovers, or to meet the opposite gender. Barely a building at all, it’s a roofed-in corridor which looks as though it was once a car-repair garage.

A nod in the direction of a salon

The venue’s studied air of post-industrial neglect is enhanced by the detritus and the decrepit musical instruments decorating the walls, the rows of old cinema seats for aficionados in front of the stage, and the general gloom of the L-shaped space. A changing art display is hung on some salvaged panels leant against the wall. Customers start to arrive at about 9:30, as the musicians are setting up. Arriving a little earlier means the crush at the small bar is easier to manage. It’s around the corner at the end of the seating area, where you can also dance, or find the toilet. This venue can’t be accused of being too comfortable.

A Latin line-up to make you dance for joy …

The cu-bop line-up of La Orkestra K has played here a few times. Their infectious dance music puts a smile on your face and a song in your heart. With piano, reeds, guitar, brass, wind, percussion and rhythm section, and vocals in Spanish and Portuguese, they cover a range of Latin American musics – Colombian porro and cumbia, Cuban paseo and bolero – and their own compositions, under the musical direction of Paulo K. Individually impressive as soloists, they have clearly worked together many times, to forge a tight and playful ensemble, as their SoundCloud tracks testify.

https://soundcloud.com/laorkestrak

… and streamed live to a screen near you

Formed in 2011, the Paulistano band has its origins in the music school of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas, and they have learnt their craft well. Just as impressive a sign of the musical vigour of Brazilian culture is the fact that Jazz nos Fundos streams all its music live over the Web, and archives it as an excellent library of contemporary Brazilian jazz. It’s a static webcam, but what a soundtrack! From December last year and this February, here is La Orkestra K’s contribution.

http://jazznosfundos.net/#!8883

STOP PRESS La Orkestra K is in the recording studio putting the finishing touches to their first album. Stand by for dancing!

La Orkestra K, the eponymous Paulo K with arms folded

Saturday in Santos

On the coast fifty miles east of Sao Paulo is the port of Santos, the largest in Latin America. When Paulistanos say they are going ‘to the beach’ for the weekend, they are heading east, though many go to the more chic beach resorts further up the coast. Stuggling through the traffic on Friday and Sunday nights is part of the routine. But if you can go earlier or later than the crowd, it’s an easy trip by Metro and bus.

Bus station Jabaquara

Taking the Blue Line or Linha Azul to its end at Jabaquara, and a Cometa bus to Santos Ponto da Praia had me on the beach in less than two hours. The descent to sea level through the rain-forest or Mata Atlântica which spreads over the hills is exciting and scenic.

On the descent into Santos

Santos and surrounds are home to a mere 1.5 million people, much smaller than the Sao Paulo area’s 27 million. The modesty of its dimensions is part of its appeal after the Paulistano urban sprawl.

Bust of the Duque de Caxias, modest compared with his 12-storey monument in Sao Paulo

Built on the coffee trade, Santos is a sprawling expanse of shipping containers and port service businesses. It remembers earlier trades too.

O Pescador, Ricardo Cipicchia, 1941, near the Aquário Municipal

1908 Sailors’ School – Escola de Aprendizes-Marinheiros – now Museu de Pesca

Fishing is still part of the scene, though not as economically important as it once was. While the Chinese container ships plough through the water to trade Brazilian goods with the world, visitors and locals throng the beaches, jog or ride bicycles along the seafront, and sit eating, drinking and talking in the restaurants.

At the harbour’s mouth …

… the view north

Looking south from Ponto da Praia

With some judicious ordering you can have fish and chips for lunch.

Restaurante Aquario’s Chopp

Santos has the usual apartment blocks overlooking – some might say spoiling – the sea view, and a long landscaped walk beside the water.

Beach palms

The occasional villa survives, usually as a commercial property.

Fin-de-siècle town house

The early apartment blocks are not entirely utilitarian – balustraded balconies and ocean-going Deco glamour make an appearance.

A sea front corner block …

… seems to invite a landmark response

Some later buildings make effective use of colour and ornament too.

The ramp doesn’t obscure the exuberant detail of the entrance

And around the corner …

… the Santos answer to the Sao Paulo Copan Building

The more recent blocks look positively dull by comparison; even the newer landmark buildings seem to be trying a bit too hard.

Clube de Regatas Saldanha da Gama

It’s a pleasant discovery to encounter the Chorinho no Aquario, a local music series now in its fifth year, setting up on the Praça Vereador Luiz La Scalla. It features well-known Santos and Sao Paulo singer Nadja Soares with a band of locals and guests, singing jazz and choro standards in a free-wheeling style.

Nadja Soares sings choro, MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) and jazz standards

Later in the evening she appears at the Casa Verde Bistro – more living room than restaurant – in the Encruzilhada neighbourhood in Santos.

Corner of R. Monsenhor Paulo Rodrigues and R. Júlio Conceição, Encruzilhada …

… with the Green House upstairs

Local regulars drift in and greet each other warmly. And when the singing begins, it feels even more like a party in someone’s living room.

More than hearts and flowers behind the green door

The repertoire of artists such as Milton Nascimento from the time of the dictatorship in Brazil is sung with real fervour, and by the whole room. This music stirs strong memories.

They can sing for hours behind the green door

Brazil has the capacity to surprise at the most unexpected moments. In a genteel upstairs room in a quiet part of Santos, I hear an echo of a more turbulent time, when songs and guitars were pitted against torture and dictatorship. I go home thoughtful, reminded once more of how central music is to the life of Brazil.

http://www.aquarioschopp.com.br/

http://www.casaverdebistro.com.br/

Assim Ta Bom!!!

At the elevated heights of Rua Oscar Freire, Rua Teodoro Sampaio is known for music  – up where Oscar Freire runs out of boutiques and restaurants, Teodoro crosses it with shops offering every kind of musical instrument and supporting electronics, instrument repair, scores and books, CDs, and the odd bar. Lower down though, Teodoro becomes a furniture market, with emporiums selling all types of mobiliário – beds, chairs  couches and armchairs, stools, tables, accessories – and it stretches for many blocks. It’s surprising to find live music down here, but that’s just what the barzinho on the corner of Teodoro Sampaio and Rua Joaquim Antunes serves up every Friday night.

On the corner of Sampaio and Antunes

Making its presence heard easily over the traffic grinding its way up Teodoro, a samba band is playing and singing lustily. Assim Ta Bom (Well Alright!) has been playing samba together for 20 years. The core of the band is two brothers on surdo (a large standard bass drum played with a rubber-headed beater) and four-string cavaquinho, and a father-and-son team on percussion and vocals. They also substitute for the cuíca, a kind of squeaking drum, by imitating its characteristic sound vocally. A tantao and a tamborim complete the ensemble.

Assim Ta Bom in action

All the players are mic-ed, and sing along vigorously. And as always in Brazil, not only the band but all of the audience too know the words, and they sing along freely. The band plays in the upstairs room, tiled and lit with neon. The beer is plentiful, and resupplied promptly; bar snacks are served too. The audience comes in large groups, and they run their tabs by putting the empties in their beer crate, and settling up at the end of the night. One table of eight or so consume a bottle of vodka – mostly the men – in an hour. It’s a raucous, good-natured event.

The audience gets on its feet in style

The lyrics are bawled out over poly-rhythmic drumming, through which the cavaquinho melody can just be discerned. This music, played in the same circular grouping or roda as capoeira, is about the rhythm and the words. It prompts some startlingly impressive dancing. As a gringo tourist, I am made to feel completely welcome.

Samba ao vivo

Assim Ta Bom are loud, warm, enjoyable – much like Brazil. The way the locals respond to them – not just friends and family, but casual passers-by and bar regulars too – suggest that like Brazil, they are here to stay.

Brado Pinheiros Sampa

Rua Joaquim Antunes 381

Brado, a newly opened restaurant in Pinheiros in the west of Sao Paulo, is worth a second look and listen. A free-form menu boasts a range of Italian and Brazilian food – the asparagus risotto was good. The bar is stylish without trying too hard.

Good selection, and good service

A tasteful interior is complemented by the quiet walled garden at the back, complete with banana tree. At the front, timber decking extends almost to the footpath. A manobrista  is on hand to spirit your car away to nearby parking.

Two thirds of a jazz and choro trio

On Saturday, the passing traffic wound its windows down to hear choro and Brazilian classics and jazz standards played with elan by a trio of electric bass, keyboard and woodwind. And it wasn’t only me who found the music to their taste – as well as appreciative honks and thumbs-up, I saw one taxi literally go by, reverse and stop out front for three minutes during a lull in the traffic to allow both driver and fare to appreciate the repertoire.

One-Note Samba and more

So much nicer than traffic noise, the music made it a pleasant place to catch the breeze. And with good coffee, prompt service, and panna cotta com marmalada de pêra to look forward to, it’s a tempting alternative to the Saturday feijoada.

http://www.bradorestaurante.com.br/

Wire sculpture – compare with Lanchonete Frevo below

https://theproverbialdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/2013-02-10-16-53-11.jpg

Harlem NY to London, Paris and the World

There were stars of the stage as well as the band stand in the ‘Harlem Renaissance’. One of the earliest was Florence Mills, who had learnt her craft on the East coast vaudeville circuit with her two older sisters, and in a quartet of performers called the Panama Four.

Cast of Shuffle Along 1921

But it was the Broadway success of Shuffle Along, the black jazz musical which marks the start of the Renaissance in 1921, that launched international careers for her and at various times for Josephine Baker, Adelaide Hall, Lena Horne, Paul Robeson and Bill Bojangles.

From Shuffle Along, later included in revue Dover Street to Dixie

One of the earliest musical revues written and performed by African Americans, it ran for around 500 performances on Broadway and on tour, and in London, Liverpool, Paris, and other European cities. See http://jass.com/sissle.html on its production history.

Mills’ voice was too soft to register well on the recording technology of the day, but she became a very popular performer nonetheless.

Mills is said to have turned down a starring role in Ziegfeld’s Follies to work on the revue Blackbirds with entrepreneur Lew Leslie. From the first 1926 version starring Mills, Blackbirds became an international success.

by London society photographer Bassano, 1923

In London, Blackbirds was a sensation – Blackbirds parties were all the rage, and the cast were invited to fashionable ‘society’ events. The Prince of Wales said he had seen the show 11 times.

Christmas wishes from London 1926

Its success proved Mills’ undoing. The London show ran for more than 250 performances during 1926 – something like five shows a week for a year – and it took its toll on her health. She returned to the US unwell the following year, dying of an infection while in hospital, aged just 32.

Thousands of admirers came to the funeral home and to the funeral. Duke Ellington memorialised her in a piano composition. Rooted in the ‘stride’ style of Harlem, it’s notable for being a solo composition reaching into the parlours of white American and middle-class black American culture – a piano is a weightier investment than the brass instruments of New Orleans jazz. Here it is, played in October 1928. You can hear the Duke finding his voice in this tribute to Florence Mills.

Black Beauty

http://www.florencemills.com/

OKeh Duke

“The vagabond who’s knocking at your door

Is standing in the clothes that you once wore … ”

from It’s All over Now Baby Blue (Bob Dylan) 1965

Blues of the Vagabond

Way back in November 1929 in New York, the band led by Duke Ellington, resident at the Cotton Club and known on record as The Washingtonians, The Harlem Footwarmers, Joe Turner & His Memphis Men, Sonny Greer & His Memphis Men … and so on, recorded a side for OKeh written by Ellington called Blues of the Vagabond. Duke was the immaculately dressed gentleman professional, arranging, playing piano and leading the band. He looked like this.

The young Duke

At the apogee of what was called the New Negro Movement – later known as the Harlem Renaissance – in the following year they recorded as Mills’ Ten Blackberries, Frank Brown & His Tooters, and the New York Syncopators. In October 1928 for Okeh, under the Duke’s name, they had recorded what became something of a signature tune, The Mooche, also written by Ellington. Here it is: irresistible!

The Mooche

Choro Blue Sao Paulo

Opposite a glamorous building of the privately-funded Universidade Nove de Julho in Barra Funda, a slightly shabbier building plays host to a minor musical miracle.

High-rise private university, Avenida Francisco Matarazzo, Barra Funda, reflecting …

… low-rise public school, Avenida Francisco Matarazzo, Barra Funda

In the music room of the Colégio Olga Ferraz, where the Associação Cívica Feminina (ACF) runs after-school activities, a band for local youth meets regularly to practise. It’s the Banda Choro Blue from a small charity, the Instituto de Música Choro Blue, run by expatriate Bostonian John Berman and his partner, the tireless Lilian Candalaft. This article in the Brazilian business magazine Epoca has more details  http://epocanegocios.globo.com/Informacao/Resultados/noticia/2012/11/alegria-do-choro.html

Where the Brazilian greats are studied, and guest musicians visit

When we arrive, some kids are already there, and greet us in a consciously adult manner, secure on their own territory. A good number of them are children of migrant workers from the north-east of Brazil, nordestinas who find work in Sao Paulo as maids and cleaners, some of them single parents supporting children on very modest wages. One of Berman’s motivations in working with these students is to raise their awareness of and pride in their own musical culture, which is rich and strong in the African-influenced north-east.

Jazz and choro musician John Berman (foto Michel Pereira)

A natural and charismatic teacher, he gradually draws them into the practice room, helping them to set up music stands and instruments, checking tuning, welcoming his students warmly as they arrive, and introducing the visitors. I am presented as an interested blogger, his daughter Debra as a New York visual artist – more about her work at  http://brasilart.org/2012/07/15/human-canvas-photo-post/ and at  http://brasilart.org/2013/02/17/decor-deb-berman/ . Her boyfriend Max Comasky, a bass player of 13 years standing, sits in with the band today.

Berman begins by reinforcing some learning points on Brazilian musicians and musical styles, in the guise of choosing something to play. The kids respond with good-natured, sometimes jokey answers.

Deepening the learning

Veterans of public playing despite joining the band somewhere betweeen the age of eight and thirteeen years, they settle comfortably into playing from their repertoire, and the music begins to swing. One young man sits beside the guest on bass, absorbing his moves with close and longing attention – he aspires to playing the bass himself.

Max Comasky, bass, and understudy

Students begin with the recorder before choosing an instrument, perhaps starting in the band on percussion, which is also Brazilian.

Group learning, percussion section

Some are studying instruments elsewhere – the sisters on the front bench are taking classical lessons for violin and for flute, though they play the band repertoire with skill too – and everyone can take the loan instruments home to practise.

Close concentration on the front bench

The elan with which they play makes clear that these students do practise – the two lads on saxophone swap improvised phrases playfully, the other flautist on the front bench shyly constructs a phrase, the clarinettists underpin the pieces with steady melodic flow.

Alto and tenor saxes, with tenor doubling on flute

Modestly accomplished

Concentrated woodwind

When Berman wants to illustrate a point about the rhythm of the music, he waves his arms wide and claps and counts in the rhythm he wants, and has the students stand and move to the music so that they feel the rhythm. Spontaneous smiles break out.

Get up, get on up …

Comasky demonstrates his ‘slap bass’ technique, adding the instrumental element.

Get UP, get on up …

As latecomers arrive, they pick up instruments and join in. Despite it being school holiday time, the band’s all here.

Not a good place to take a phone call …

… but he makes that triangle ring like a bell

And yes, during this practice, Deb Berman warmed up by decorating the entrance door before moving on to the back wall, for a quick-sketch mural in the colours of the Brazilian flag.

Brushwork

But by far the most exciting and impressive thing is that these kids, barely teenagers, perhaps in the face of indifference from parents

Percussion …

… wind and …

… woodwind

are enjoying practising and playing music, over a time-scale of years – that’s more than many students with much greater access to such opportunities can manage. Their joyful noise is a testament to their spirit and that of their supporters. Encore!

Banda Choro Blue

P.S. Here’s a clip from Brazilian breakfast TV about Choro Blue. The band is covered from about 2:15 on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ead0aUr1lm4

P.P.S. And here’s a snap of Deb Berman’s mural at Choro Blue’s forthcoming new practice rooms. The paint is still wet …

Choro Blue mural, Sumaré, Sao Paulo

Lanchonete Frevo

Sao Paulo is quiet this weekend. There are blocos out dancing in the streets – I can hear them coming up from Vila Madalena, as can the barking dogs, followed it seems inexorably by emergency sirens – but many folk have gone elsewhere to sample the delights of carnaval, while the city known in Brazil for hard work (and some say for not knowing how to play) pauses to draw breath. It rained heavily today, as it can in January and February. That dampens carnaval spirits. This year’s accessory is the clear plastic disposal anorak.

Today I strolled down Rua Augusta to the corner of Rua Oscar Friere. It’s an interesting mix – Oscar Freire is all designer boutiques and high-end restaurants, though the locals say that trade is a little precarious. Augusta on the other hand is known for drag queens and prostitutes. In previous generations it was known for chic coffee bars and the fashionable youth style of la dolce vita.

Center Oscar Freire Augusta

The building on the corner is an elegant example of Brutalism, the raw concrete cast in flat facades pierced by rounded windows. The concrete of the balconies is harder to keep clean, and the inhabitants have domesticated them with paint, but the faintly nautical effect can be glimpsed behind the abundant plant life and inserted air conditioners.

A graphic sign used to grace the shopfront on Oscar Freire, showing a man drawn in black and white dancing with a coloured umbrella. (Google Earth is keen on copyright.) Lanchonete (pronounced lanchonetchi) Frevo has been here since 1956.

Entrance to Rua Oscar Freire 603

On Sunday afternoon it’s quiet, though it does a brisk trade during the week. The diner is famous for beiruites – a cross between a hamburger and a steak sandwich, it’s a slice of beef with sliced tomato, melted cheese and oregano, in toasted pita bread. A small one is a decent snack. A chope of draught beer makes a refreshing accompaniment. Service is copious, fast and friendly.

The business is built on this simple fare. The decor, unchanged since it opened, has moved from being out of fashion to being a design classic, by virtue of standing still. Even the appliances – scales, beer pump, air conditioning – are vintage. They don’t make ’em like that any more.

Wire and wood figure 1956

Primrose yellow tiling, fixed red bar stools, and wooden decoration of the supporting beams, window sills, hanging lamps and the front of the kitchen – styled as a beach hut, complete with plastic palm trees – anchor it firmly in the 1950s. The same colour scheme of grey, red and primrose yellow is used in its upmarket sister site.

Frevo Shopping Iguatemi

The square tables start to fill up, some pushed together for groups of family and friends. I order dessert, discovering that they do not serve coffee, so I order another chope.

He dances over the beer pump

The bevelled mirrors bolted to the walls, even the taste of the dessert – strawberry ice-cream with tinned fruit salad – is 1950s. Frevo is an institution, one of those places which has been around long enough to boast about it, with black and white photographs, with regular and one might say ancient customers, and a venerable patron.

Dancing couple, cool breeze

And the name? Frevo is the music and dance of carnaval from Recife in the north-east of Brazil, the umbrellas integrated into an acrobatic dance routine. Perfect for a rainy Sao Paulo carnaval afternoon.

Anglophone Latin America

We Anglos are used to speaking the world’s lingua franca – around 70% of the world’s business is transacted in English – so we’re taken aback to find that not everyone can default to our tongue, or that some have only a handful of words in their Anglo vocabulary.

It’s not confined to Latin America – in Tokyo airport I saw an alluring refrigerated display of a drink they call Sweat – but in Brazil, with less British influence than say Argentina, it’s especially true, though they’re catching on, witness the huge number of English language schools. Sao Paulo is providing free English lessons for taxi drivers to prepare for the Cup and the Games. Cultura Inglesa, a clever combination of consulate, arts centre and language school, has 56 branches in Brazil.  http://www.culturainglesa.net/wps/portal/inicio

Evidence for the absence of English in Brazil and Uruguay surprises you with unintentional, sometimes Anglo-Saxon humour. A selection below.

Boutique, not church, Punta del Este, Uruguay

Supermarket, Montevideo – not a Welcome sign

For the educated dog, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Not.   Supermarket, Sao Paulo

Let’s hear it for fabric softener. Supermarket, Sao Paulo

Boutique near the Playa de los Ingleses, Punta del Este, Uruguay

Pharmacy, Sao Paulo

Bakery section, Sao Paulo supermarket

People are puzzled when I stop to take such pictures …

Rebuilding the city of Sampa

Sao Paulo is under constant development and refurbishment. As in many large cities, the sounds of building work are a near-constant accompaniment to daily life – power tools, delivery trucks, steel and concrete fabrication, the shouts and whistles, and the hand-tools, of workmen (haven’t seen a woman builder yet) are woven into the soundtrack. In Sao Paulo, ‘verticalisation’ is the main activity.

Make a space and fill it in

The older buildings are gradually demolished to make way for towers of apartments, with perhaps a commercial element included. This process is not always straightforward – the redevelopment of Avenida Faria Lima in the 1960s, for example, met with some resistance. See http://theproverbial.org/2012/08/16/regeneracao-gentrificacao/ .

Corner of Rua Artur d’Azevedo and Rua Fradique Coutinho

On the corner of Azevedo and Fradique, one block of buildings has been gradually shut down for demolition and re-development. A series of graffiti-style posters has appeared, drawing attention to the site.

The female figure was the first to appear, on the traffic control unit, much as they have done in nearby streets, at first painted onto the unit direct.

Corner of Rua Joaquim Antunes and Alameda Gabriel

Eventually all four sides of the Azevedo and Fradique unit were covered, security banding adding a randomly appropriate element to the image.

Mixed media – paint, newsprint, traffic unit. Her eyes have been opened

Images on paper had begun to appear elsewhere in the neighbourhood.

Rua Teodoro Sampaio

As the humans leave, they emerge

As buildings fell vacant, the images spread, much as their real-life subject might do as they are disturbed by demolition. The instinctive revulsion most people feel towards cockroaches was deployed very effectively in this piece of guerrilla art.

The bar on the corner is now closed

Zezé of the gymnastics academy had been above the shopfront on Azevedo – latterly an automotive workshop – for 35 years, and bid her students and neighbours a sad farewell.

Rubble on the academy stairs and the blinds awry – only the façade is still standing

This development is symptomatic of a deep-seated issue in Brazil – the ownership of property. Business owners often do not own their premises. The goodwill they build up over years can be destroyed with little notice to make way for a more profitable development.

A year ago the artist put the finishing touches to the mural on the local pool hall, also established about 30 years ago (the leaping / floating man against a blue background an homage to French surrealist Yves Klein – see  http://tudosobretech.wordpress.com/2012/11/11/exposicao-a-fotografia-manipulada-antes-do-photoshop/  ). Whatever benefit the new building delivers, I doubt it will be as characterful as this establishment. Are the graffiti artists the only ones to mourn its passing?

Mural art with cockroaches

UPDATE Demolition is well under way. A hole in the fabric of the city, soon to be filled by another vertical. For a moment, the unadorned sides of cast concrete buildings are exposed.

View on the corner

UPDATE 02

Here’s the hole in the ground from which the new tower will be built.

Corner of Azevedo and Fradique, October 2014

 

Return to Necropolis

In a previous post http://theproverbial.org/2012/11/19/sao-paulo-necropolis/  I sketched the history of a leading cemetery, the Cemitério São Paulo on Rua Cardeal Arcoverde. I went back on Sunday for a stroll – it’s a quiet place in a noisy city, its sculptural works are some of the most impressive to be seen, and it’s a noticeably green spot in the concrete jungle which surrounds it.

Angel in the city

Arriving early, you encounter the destitute who sleep in the shelter of the grand graffiti-ed entrance porch, with blankets, cardboard and plastic for warmth. Some also use cachaça – sugar cane spirit – perhaps mixed with soft drink. In this setting, one is more inclined to think “There but for the grace of God … ” than to condemn.

The other side of the porch was occupied

Rua Conego Leite which leads to this entrance suggests the cemetery’s former grandeur too – a terrace of picturesque Art Nouveau villas hides under painted motley, a neo-classical loggia on one corner of the crescent facing the entrance echoes the porch’s style.

Loggia, corner of R. Cardeal Arcoverde and R. Conego Leite

Inside the cemetery there are signs of life too. I explored another corner this time, and beside a plot too small and awkward to use I found a kind of living space and home-made shrine on the niches for cremations, where a sheltering tree grows.

Someone lives here

The trees and plants, here by accident or by design, are in good shape.

Beautifully variegated, self-seeded …

… or perhaps not. Next to a well-tended plot

Shaded by a traditional yew tree

A more controlled planting

Thoughtful integration of plant and stone

The cemetery is thronged with the usual devotional and memorial sculpture – vistas of Christs interspersed with Pietas, the occasional Madonna and Child, grieving families, and a scattering of angels. More unusual examples stand out in this feast of sculpture.

Relaxed, informal angel, awaiting his or her charge

Memorial family group

Grieving family group

Overcome with grief

Neighbours in death

An imaginative approach to sculpture is not restricted to the human figure here. Contrasting colour, shape and texture – an arabesque of carved marble against a slab of dark polished granite – the use of arch- and box-shaped space, the integration of plant life with stonework, even the varying treatments of the plinths, all display the keen Brazilian sense of the visual.

The symbol of the opening door recurs.

Heaven’s gate

Slabs of stone can be incised …

Academic family tomb – “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree” Psalm 92

… whether horizontal or vertical …

Memorial to veteran athletes of Sao Paulo, with Olympic urn

A poetic adieu, not set in stone

… or indeed casually leaned against a rough-worked upright. A slab of stone can be left symbolically blank …

Both blank and incised, both symbol and language

… or serve as a sculptural reminder of a first-rank family.

Back of family memorial by Brazilian sculptor Victor Brecheret

(Front-facing view on the crest of the hill in my previous post  http://theproverbial.org/2012/11/19/sao-paulo-necropolis/ ) The northern entrance at the bottom of the hill echoes the idea with a more prosaic but nevertheless striking composition in raw concrete.

Northern gatehouse and offices

It’s an effective background to another innovation, stone trelliswork which echoes the pierced wall of concrete and also integrates plant life.

Closed and open

This memorial alerted me to yet another Paulistano immigrant community, the Hungarian, and with the same ‘thoughtful integration of plant and stone’ as the box-shaped Hungarian memorial above, made me ask if I was seeing a Hungarian aesthetic.

Stone of various kinds can be seen in bas-relief too, whether traditional military-style work …

Compare with the WWII Brazilian Italian airman in previous post

…  a memorial style …

Journalism is an honoured profession in Brazil

… or a more symbolic portrayal.

The grain of marble like falling light

Purely cast bas-relief can also be found.

Door to mausoleum shared between three families

There are signs that people occupy themselves in varied ways here – placed on the back of one tomb I saw a collection of broken pieces of white marble, and imagined children amusing themselves by collecting them while older family paid their respects and browsed. The staff inter the dead, but they also gather fallen branches, build and make repairs, clean the tombs with feather dusters.

If you visit as I did not to bury or to pay respects to family or friend, nor with a morbid urge, it’s the sculptural aspect which is so striking. A range of examples illustrate the point.

Pensive angel by Gildo Zampol

Among the angels in white marble which appear here, especially along the walk from the entrance porch leading up to the chapel of rest, this work is outstanding not just for its technical virtuosity – zoom in for a closer look –

Torso close up

but equally for its finely judged expressiveness. This is a portrait, an archetype, and a spiritual ideal. It sits quietly amidst the ritual and the workaday aspects of the cemetery, a beautifully executed artwork.

Window and torchère, chapel of rest

Tomb components with instructions for assembly

Memorial sculpture can be showily theatrical or surprisingly frank here.

The archangel Michael, though here it could be Candomblé deity Eshu

The Last Kiss by Alfredo Oliani. Her eyes are already sunken in death

He is still very much alive. Commissioned by a wife for her husband’s tomb

On the ridge of the hill, a well-known though less direct work by another Italian Brazilian sculptor is known as the Túmulo do pão, the Tomb of Bread. It’s a poignant reminder of the impact of a death in the family.

Túmulo da família Forte by Galileo Emendabili

Sculptor of the military obelisk in Ibirapuera Park which commemorates the 1932 Sao Paulo Constitutional Revolution, Emendabili is of course popular here. This smaller-scale, more private work has a huge impact.

The pathos of the boy’s head on the table and the stoical grief of the man are beautifully conveyed. Staged to make full use of its setting, giving the same symbolic weight to the table and to the loaf of bread as to the human figures, this is a tour de force, one of the strongest in an impressive collection of sculptures which stand the test of time.

The dead tellingly marked by absence

More at http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemit%C3%A9rio_S%C3%A3o_Paulo

David Newman (ts) The Ray Charles Band

David Newman Texas 1933 – New York 2009

Ray Charles needs no introduction. His version of “Unchain My Heart” with the Raelettes is cool and tight where Joe Cocker’s is raucous, sprawling. It makes for a rather different interpretation of the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0lCxoF88jU

On that 1961 track, the sax player is David (‘Fathead’) Newman. Newman was a jazz player on tenor sax and flute. Beginning in 1954, he spent 12 years with Charles, and then joined the band of jazz flautist Herbie Mann for a 10-year stint.

He was a well-known hard bop jazz player in later years – playing with Stanley Turrentine, and with Cannonball Adderley as producer, for example – but he played very widely. The roll call of those with whom he recorded – Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Queen Latifah, Dr John, Manhattan Transfer – demonstrates that he has nothing to prove. His debut album, recorded in 1958, released in 1960, and introduced by Charles, who also plays piano on the album, is a more R&B-tinged offering.

The intention “was to find some swinging numbers, not too far out, that everybody could understand and enjoy, and still show off the best qualities of each member of the band.” Here is their rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s Latin dance track Tin Tin Deo, with Marcus Belgrave on trumpet, Bennie Crawford on baritone sax, and Edgar Willis and Milton Turner on bass and drums.

Tin Tin Deo

Jazz at Punta del Este

At the Festival entrance, Swing Street, Punta Ballena

The Festival Internacional de Jazz de Punta del Este in Uruguay is in its 17th year. A festival on a dairy farm, its main venue is an outdoor stage set in picturesque countryside at Punta Ballena outside the beach resort of Punta del Este, 3 hours along the south coast from Montevideo. (See www.festival.com.uy/ )

The main stage in its setting

Punta is a place where people feel comfortable – here LBJ attended an American summit in 1967, the World Trade Organisation began with the Uruguay GATT talks here in 1986, American film stars buy houses here.

The Festival office

Dairy farmer Francisco Yobino began a jazz festival here in 1996. His Finca del Sosiego was doing well making dulce de leche – milk-and-sugar fudge, a popular dessert in Latin America – and he had diversified into leisure activities. His first love, jazz, proved irresisitible.

Front row, great view, good sponsorship

He is no longer farming, but the show goes on. The musical director is veteran Cuban clarinettist Paquito D’Rivera, an international performer and composer, one of three band leaders featured on the night we went.

Main stage pre-show

The music began while it was light, led by drummer Carlos Carli. He’s a long-time collaborator with D’Rivera, born in Uruguay – and very pleased to be back – now running a music school in Madrid, and he’s played with Gary Burton and Pat Metheney among others. With Ricardo León on piano and Cono Castro on acoustic bass, we had a tight rhythm section.

As the sun sets …

His ensemble featured Spanish bandoneon player Leonel Gasso, a well-known accompanist of tango singers and a veteran of tango shows. The bandoneon – a concertina originally from Germany and a standard instrument in the tango’s orquesta típica – is an unusual jazz voice.

… the music starts

Gasso gave it full play – and in the more familiar tango repertoire of Astor Piazzolla – playing the instrument balanced on one knee while the jazz flowed steadily underneath.

Carlos Carli Cuarteto

The audience, many of a certain age, and from Brazil as well as from Argentina and Uruguay, responded enthusiastically, though no-one danced the tango … The Uruguyan Vice-President was reported among the audience, a sign of how seriously Uruguay takes its culture.

Blissed-out audience

As darkness fell, Paquito on clarinet and Diego Urcola on trumpet guested with Carli, bringing on the night in style. They stayed on stage for the second set, joined by Alex and Zachary Brown on piano and acoustic bass, and Eric Doob on drums – young US musicians who also played an impressive bracket as a piano trio. The Quinteto played a series of classical melodies – Bach, Chopin, Beethoven et al – in a jazz vein, improvising around the well-known tunes with great good humour.

Paquito D’Rivera Quinteto

D’Rivera plays with strong rhythmic drive and lyrical sweetness. And he’s an accomplished showman as well, chatting and joking with his audience, and giving his colleagues room to shine. We were in a fine frame of mind at the second interval. I strolled around for a look at the festival.

Evening dining hall

The dining room was being prepared for the after-concert paella and, the PA system in the corner suggested, a musical feast too. Corporate sponsors could enjoy the use of a pavilion with table service close to the stage during the concert, though there were no takers this time. Some people did come dressed for dinner.

Fresh air and music

The well-organised facilities also included simpler food and drink – that essential for an enjoyable evening in Uruguay, the parilla or barbecue grill, was doing a roaring trade.

Asado or barbecue in full swing

Punta has about 10,000 residents, 15,000 if you include the surrounding country, but it is boosted hugely by tourists during the summer. An evening’s jazz was an inviting prospect after a day at the beach – the 500-odd seats had almost all been taken. Perhaps it was the fresh night air thinning out the crowd.

Outdoor auditorium at interval

The final band of the evening, the Gary Smulyan Quintet, hails from New York. Once again a trio of hugely competent young musicians drove the rhythm section – Mike LeDonne on piano, John Webber on acoustic bass, Joe Farnsworth on drums – enabling Gary Smulyan and special guest Joe Magnarelli on trumpet to run wild and free.

The Gary Smulyan Quintet

A diminutive figure, Smulyan sports a baritone sax which he plays with startling ferocity and attack, though he can also blow sweet and low. The aficionados who remained were treated to a whirlwind tribute to cool jazz and bebop giants of the instrument Gerry Mulligan and Pepper Adams.

On this showing, Punta serves up a good-natured and world-class festival. Other Punta venues also deliver excellent music. Medio y Medio runs a sell-out mini-festival in a characterful Punta Ballena venue, while the Conrad Hotel and casino offers a wide range of theatre, music variety, and floor-shows. There’s a good chance that summer visitors to Punta can find a cool end to their summer holidays.

Birth of the cool … is that a halo or a music disc?

Uruguay Automobile

In the Switzerland of South America – in Montevideo, Colonia and Punta del Este – a unique Uruguayan approach to cars can be seen. Cars are expensive and the climate is benign, so the road along the south coast from Montevideo to Punta boasts gently rusting fields which present a history of the car in the twentieth century. And some are on the street …

Mid-20th century car on 17th-century street, Colonia. Not the rustiest road-going car I saw …

At Carrasco airport, the taxi fleet is dominated by white C-class Mercedes estates, and the long-distance bus services are frequent and excellent. The transport infrastructure is sound.

Land transport, República Oriental del Uruguay Armada, Colonia

The familiar brands are there.

Champion spark plug, Montevideo

In Punta, playground of the rich, you see plenty of Porsches and the odd Ferrari, while at the other end of the scale, Uruguyan recyclers – recolectores – use a very eco-friendly form of transport.

Recolector, Plaza Zabala, Montevideo

Horse-drawn transport has its enthusiasts and collectors, but most striking is the 3- and 4-wheeled, small-engine transport.

Cart and carriage collection, Finca El Sosiego, site of the Punta Jazz Festival

As elsewhere, quad bikes are basic and economical, adopted and developed enthusiastically. The well-known brands appear here too.

Kawasaki quad, petrol station, Punta

In Colonia hire quads ply the cobbled streets; Dad drives with son up front, while Mum and daughter take the rear-facing seat, enjoying that view. Quads can also be hired at the ferry terminal from Buenos Aires.

Ready to tackle the slopes

Locals clearly find them useful.

Quad in a mild climate, Colonia

None more so than the jobbing builder I encountered. It was hard to believe that this is road-legal, though it reveals the Uruguayan approach to regulation: when he’s stopped by the police the usual reaction is a joking “Get that thing out of the way!”

Kick-start engine, no differential on the axle

It boasts a 1969 100 cc Honda engine, like the Honda Cub step-through bike, and does 38 kilometres per litre, 107 miles per Imperial gallon.

Single windscreen wiper, tiller-style steering

Metal sides, fibreglass roof repaired with gaffer tape, sliding windows, carpeted floor and doors …

Room for all the tools of the trade, including self-made ladder

He has to drive carefully in cross winds, and take corners slowly. Don’t think somehow he’ll be putting in a claim for injury on the job either …

P.S.

Here’s one I saw at a wedding reception.

1949 V8 Cadillac, Montevideo 2014

Montevideo Ciudad Vieja

During February, I took a break in Uruguay, to see their famed carnaval and to sample the pleasures of coast and countryside. Nothing had prepared me for the delights of the old town centre in the capital Montevideo though. To say I could have been in Paris or Brussels, or perhaps in Palma, is not intended as a back-handed compliment – Uruguayans themselves are proud of the more European style of their culture compared with other parts of South America. The elegance of Montevideo architecture astonished me.

Ex-headquarters of Uruguayan Navy, now ferry terminal, Puerto de Montevideo

The centre of Montevideo is small enough to explore on foot. A busy and prosperous port – ferry terminal, cargo operations, one of the few railway lines – it handles a constant stream of visitors from Buenos Aires, a few hours across the Rio de la Plata by ferry, and tourists from neighbouring Brazil. They stroll past as you sit on the terrace of your favoured restaurant with a glass of medio y medio, an easy-drinking mix of espumante and dry white wine.

British cast-iron water spout …

In the usual way, the central wholesale food market has been transformed into a popular retail emporium. The Uruguayan version has a surprising number of barbecues or parrilladas – I stopped counting after 20 – offering every kind of meat cooked to order. During the working week at lunch time, they are extremely busy, serving between a dozen and 40 or 50 customers at a time, at counters and tables. Not a country for convinced vegetarians, Uruguay.

… and British market hall, Mercado del Puerto

A pleasant surprise awaits you a block or two away, up the hill from the quayside. The historic core of the centre is crammed with turn-of-the-century town houses, street after street of them.

Gracious stucco and cast iron ornament …

… from Belle Epoque to Art Deco

Some are inhabited and in good order

Others await investment

Beautiful moulding, though balustrade needs attention

Art Nouveau gem …

… and occasional, more utilitarian, Art Deco

Entrance to a naval officers’ club …

… beautifully tiled

Majolica colours, naval motifs

Some frontages need rescue

Others demand more drastic measures

Heritage renovation

Further up the slope of Montevideo Hill, the Plaza Zabala has some of the grandest buildings, around an equestrian monument to the city’s founder, Bruno Mauricio de Zabala. Formerly residential, these palatial buildings are now commercial or cultural.

La Casa Matriz, now Discount Bank

Palacio Taranco, now Museo de Artes Decorativas

The museum’s director told us proudly that the 1910 building’s design was completely French – the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is also the work of its architects Girault and Léon.

Palacio Taranco interior

Other, less grand buildings have been re-purposed too. Away from the centre, a prison has become an art gallery, with temporary and permanent exhibitions – a cool Donald Judd caught my eye.

Predio Carcelario de Miguelete, now Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo

Prison cells from 1889 exhibiting artworks now

And in a more comfortable part of town, a prison administration block (see below the clock) has become a shopping centre.

Administracion welcomes shoppers

The country’s institutions  – parliament and central bank – still occupy imposing buildings in the centre. Guardians of Uruguay’s political and economic health, both are regarded with fierce loyalty by their citizens.

Asamblea General in wedding-cake style, complete with carriage drive

Banco Central de la República Oriental del Uruguay

That other great institution, the Roman Catholic church, is also in evidence, both in Montevideo and in the country.

Montevideo church

San Carlos church

A nation’s history can be read from its gravestones. At San Carlos, there was the pauper’s grave of a slave of a military officer, and of one who had fought in the ‘war with the English’ (1806-1807? 1845-1849?).

Graves of Maria, “morena esclava del Colonel Leonardo Olivera”, and of a commander in the war “contra los Ingleses”

Indeed, driving through the countryside brought to mind British landscapes, complete with flocks of sheep and dry-stone walling.

Could this be Wales?

Grand monuments may honour Uruguayan politicians, but it was refreshing to see the role of ordinary farmers and drovers being acknowledged too.

Supporting the Zabala monument

Wool and beef are still major exports

The gap between rich and poor is less marked than elsewhere, and the physical evidence of prosperity is clear. It seems that a prosperous life has been and is still possible for the vast majority of Uruguayans – it’s known as the Switzerland of South America.

Entrance to a country villa, now museum

And prosperity is not confined to the capital in this agricultural economy.

San Carlos town house

Cast iron door grille

The Uruguayan way of life appeals. Which is why I’m going again. Stay tuned to see more of this … and a happy and prosperous 2013 to all!

Town house courtyard with working well, and yerba maté kit in foreground

Aeropuerto Internacional de Carrasco, airside – architect Uruguayan-born Rafael Viñoly

More Sampa Street Art

Walking down Rua Cardeal Arcoverde, at the gateway to the bar-and-restaurant-mecca of Vila Madalena in Sao Paulo, I stumble upon artistic traditions, old and new. I’ve been this way before, and enjoyed the street art along a roughly-built brick wall flanking a car parking site.

Street art, Cardeal Arcoverde …

As so often in Sao Paulo, the open space is fleeting, temporary. Car parking is a way of making real estate cover its costs until you can make it really pay, by building an apartment block on it.

… now under black paint, and the building demolished

The street art may have been superceded, but something catches my eye. I’d noticed a form of street art recently which had made me smile – images on paper flyposted to the street wall. It seemed appropriate, given the subject.

Rua Teodoro Sampaio – see also http://theproverbial.org/2012/05/26/cockraoches-again

Here was a whole nest of such images – maybe this was from where the other had migrated, or was I seeing a new trend emerging?

Xilo Shirt shopfront, Rua Cardeal Arcoverde, Sao Paulo

‘Xilo print’ is Portugenglish for woodcut print. From this shopfront a group of artists produce and sell printed T-shirts, prints on paper, and printed canvas bags and cushion covers. Blocks are cut by hand into MDF (medium density fibre-board) and stored in racks in the shop – they print a shirt while you wait. The images are cultural icons – musicians, artists, actors, cinema characters, signs and symbols, the ever-present sexual images. Old blocks are built into the decor of the shop. And they offer woodcut printing classes.

There are originals for sale too, mixed media on paper, displayed hanging by bulldog clips from nails in the wall. High art appears among the cultural icons, from Leonardo to Magritte. I mention the now-obliterated art across the street, and I’m told that the harlequin figure – see above – was by a Spanish artist. These folk care about their art, and they make it pay too.

Creative quarter, Vila Madalena

What’s more, Xilo Shirt is in a little cluster of original clothing shops, all decorated in the distinctive manner of Brazilian street art while blending seamlessly with the ‘native’ graffiti. A car mechanic’s wall next door sports a colourful satirical piggy bank next to a blue octopus with a manic grin. .

Pig and octopus

The combination of outspoken visual brio and entrepreneurial energy strikes me as characteristically Brazilian. You sense the huge potential of the culture, especially when you consider the country’s immediate economic prospects.

What was less expected was a glimpse of the past. Further down Cardeal, there’s a basement shop which has always intrigued me. It’s a jumble of furniture, architectural fragments, light fittings, bric-a-brac and the odd painting, but I hadn’t seen it open before. The door was open, so I made my way down a sloping walkway with inset steps – like the entrance to a tavern cellar – and spent an intriguing half hour with the occupants and their wares.

Carved marble cartouche at the altar, Catedral da Sé

Turns out they are restorers of antiques, hence the varied jumble. They make objects to order too – a resin Egyptian sarcophagus for someone’s birthday celebration – and carve plaster moulds for novelty figurines. Incredibly dusty, this Aladdin’s cave gave me a glimpse of another Vila Madalena, a fine arts workshop. I recall that it’s said that the craftsmen and women working on the Sao Paulo cathedral in the 1920s lived in Madalena. Like planets aligning, the pull of the area became clearer. I saw the street art from a longer perspective.

La Famiglia

Familigia Mancini has had not one but two very successful restaurants in the old Italian quarter of Sao Paulo, Bela Vista or Bixiga, for many years. On the gently curving one-way pedestrianised cobbles of Rua Avanhandava, the customers’ cars, the taxis, the moto-boys delivering pizzas on their light motor cycles and the occasional rubbish truck or Prefeitura van jostle for space while people alight and manobristas whisk their cars away. It’s lucky there’s plenty to watch on the street, since you can wait forty minutes for a table, nursing a Campari and soda on the benches outside Mancini’s.

Mancini’s, Rua Avanhandava, Bela Vista, Sao Paulo

Set amid the tall Sao Paulo apartment towers, the street is a glittering river of la dolce vita which has brought the neighbourhood upmarket. Apartment blocks have been renovated, and the affluent footfall has attracted chic interior decor boutiques – another attraction to occupy you while you wait to be seated.

Mancini’s is a comfortable establishment, but tonight we are on the other side of the street at Walter Mancini’s, where not only the food but also the music vies for your attention. In contrast with the homely interior of Mancini’s – exposed brick and wood over a number of levels and alcoves – Walter Mancini’s is built along a curve of plate glass looking onto the street, and refracting the lights of the interior. This is one place where Sao Paulo – TV actors, journalists, established musicians – comes to be seen, and it’s reflected in the decor.

Front row seats at Walter Mancini’s

The soundtrack is jazz standards, played by a changing line-up of trios and quartets who take to the central podium. A small grand piano, acoustic bass and a drum kit are fixtures, and the amplifier is decently soft and clear. Valve trombone, saxophone, a chanteuse, all make an appearance. The musicians appreciate and acknowledge the occasional applause from the customers – many are so engrossed in their conversations and their company that you can forgive the players their stony-faced demeanour. For all that the playing is skilled, and the standards played with competence and passion. You see the musicians at table when they have played their set.

Oh, the food? I’ve never had a bad Italian meal, even in the back streets of Palermo, though some have been indifferent. Here it’s Italian Brazilian, which is prepared with a somewhat heavier hand – pasta is thicker and doughier, sauces more salty, flavours less balanced and refined – competent, satisfying and popular though it is. In truth, this is a social restaurant rather than a gastronome’s delight, where the ambience is key, whether one is with family or with the stars and the ‘wannabe’ stars. The decor gives you a clue – a long frieze of framed black and white photos of old Sao Paulo, and over the bar, brass plaques commemorate the performers, writers and artists of the metropolis. Lowering your eyes when you finish studying the plaques, another, more obvious function of the bar is crystal clear. Here you can enjoy the delights of your favourite tipple as you observe le tout Sao Paulo. Once you have secured a seat.

A Sao Paulo insititution

Hamadan Carpet

Bought a carpet runner today at Praça Benedito Calixto from the expert Oswaldo. It’s a beautiful floral pattern featuring the traditional dark blue indigo and dark red madder, with geometrical elements of the pattern in natural wool of a creamy white, the floral decoration with pink, brown and green detail, and the pattern symmetrical around a central medallion.

One half of Hamadan carpet runner, 10 feet by 2 feet 6

Traditionally a centre of carpet trading for what is made in the surrounding villages, the finer carpets are named for their villages while more everyday items are known by the name of the city, Hamadan. These beautiful objects are described as “good utility carpets”. See

http://www.carpetencyclopedia.com/pages/Styles_and_origin/Persian_carpets/Hamadan-189.html

When you learn that Hamadan has been known for its carpets for a very long time, and you begin to realise just how long ago that could be – it’s on the Silk Road, it’s mentioned as Ekbatana in the Book of Ezra in the Old Testament, as well as by classical Greek historian Heordotus, and indeed may be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world – your perspective on what’s under your feet, and on the people who made and make these objects becomes dizzyingly extended. Take a step back from the generic ‘Persian carpet’ and appreciate it in its historical context, just as beautiful as its impact in the here and now.

Sao Paulo Necropolis

It really is called that … this municipal cemitério has a grand entrance. The street opposite ends in a semicircular crescent, now obscured by commercial development. The shops specialise in antique furniture, appropriately enough, whereas the porch shelters the destitute.

On busy Rua Cardeal Arcoverde – named for the first cardinal born in South America

Begun in 1920, since both the Cemitério da Consolação and the Cemitério do Araçá were full, the Cemitério São Paulo extended the opportunity for the socially ambitious literally to build on their reputation with grand tombs and statuary by established sculptors.

Just past the entrance there’s a well-kept memorial to the combatants of the 1932 Sao Paulo Constitutional Revolution, showing the city’s crest.

Their inspiration the law, LEX

The gate is a neo-classical composition, matching the chapel and the records office in style if not in colour scheme.

Both the sober entrance framing the city and…

… the chapel of rest flanked by funerary cypresses show us peace above, PAX

A crucifix stretched out in the sun beside the records office

You’re struck by the profusion of statuary, especially of the human figure in every attitude of grief.

Unusually strong male statue strikingly installed

The sloping site positively writhes with humanity in vistas and avenues.

Metropolis and necropolis

The cemetery is a welcome patch of nature in its urban surroundings, providing quiet, fresh air and cool shade, though as in the surrounding city, every available space is used.

Niches in the perimeter walls

While there are some grave sites for professional groups …

The final curtain

Mausoleum for nuns of the Brazilian order Missionarias de Jesus Crucificado

… and for individuals …

Italian first conductor of Sao Paulo Conservatorium watched over by van Beethoven

… the vast majority are family vaults, and focus on their dynasties from both sides of the family, emphasising the male line.

Individuals pass on, we continue

Their names are from Italy, Lebanon, Japan and Armenia  as well as from Portugal. The iconography is largely Roman Catholic, with classical and Masonic allusions too –

Cristo Redentor, the Good Shepherd at the Door, the broken column

Masonic temple in miniature

Even Shinto veneration of one’s ancestors appears in syncretist Brazil

– in this context, meaning accrues readily.

” … shall be raised indestructible.”

Tile work makes an occasional appearance.

Mother and child, family tomb

Statuary in metal and in stone is finely wrought.

Shepherd boy and charges

Colour and texture effectively deployed

Marble crisply carved, whether in close-up …

… or complete piece

The mausoleums are well built, with careful detailing.

Drainage for planter boxes

Some measures have been taken against the ravages of the twentieth century – air pollution, for example – and there are almost no graffiti.

Art Nouveau work with near a century’s accumulation of grime

This angel remains snow white

Some memorials were prettily and deliberately conservative in the 1920s.

Angel in bas-relief under Romanesque arch with acanthus-leaf capitals

Some embraced the future with a will.

Memorial to a son in the Italian air force

Some symbols are updated in style, or used in a less obviously religious way.

The Via Dolorosa winds around a funerary vase

Image of the statue of Nossa Senhora da Conceição Aparecida, patronne of Brazil

Young woman enveloped by a stiff cloak – perhaps alluding to the venerated statue

The worship of Mary is a recurring theme in Brazilian Catholicism, with appearances as the Virgin and as the Mother of God.

From the life of Mary in bronze, the family name and “Ave Maria” carved high on the obelisk

Modern mother and child

Obelisk or chapel, traditional or modern, family or individual, even Christian or not, all kinds are gathered here.

For a priest, a chapel …

… complete with altar, Islamic inscription, Candomble offering … ?

… and angels above

Small but functional family chapel

Family tomb by leading Brazilian sculptor Victor Brecheret

Jesuit tomb for Maluf family – perhaps less keen to highlight construction now

(See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-20373040 )

Sure of salvation through living right …

Traditional grouping with traditional message

… or trusting in God at the last trump …

At St Peter’s gate

… when the final preparations are made,

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

a door does seem an appropriate symbol.

Chapel of rest

Sao Paulo Street Life II

Life in Sao Paulo always seems to be book-ended by tower blocks – unless you live in an expensive suburb like the Jardims, where the height of development is curtailed, or in a gentrifying suburb like the slice between Avenida Faria Lima and the Pinheiros Marginal ring road – see

http://theproverbial.org/2012/08/16/regeneracao-gentrificacao/

– where the tower blocks are commercial, not yet residential. In Pinheiros, residential towers are springing up on available plots, though the apartments being sold off plan are not moving as easily as once they did.

A pair of towers face each other …

You notice that in a suburb like Itaim Bibi, which has been developed as a business and residential district for some time, the property owners and their architects seem to be competing for landmark status.

… across the street in Itaim

It becomes a bragging contest, in which money talks.

Itaim landmark not just in its own street, with pretensions to the status of the Copan Building

Close up, it’s huge

The retail branches of banks – they do very well in Brasil on a level of customer service which expatriate Anglo-Saxon customers find surprisingly inadequate – are dotted about the city. Their investment in branch property is modest, but well presented.

Lighting outside bank branch off Rua Henrique Schaumann

The chic boutiques display their wares cautiously for the emerging middle class. You sense a precariousness about their existence which does not seem to be shared by the banks.

Show room dummies on Rua Henrique Schaumann

Alongside, on the hoardings of building sites, street art flourishes briefly.

Next door to the showroom

And in the interstices between developments, the poor make a living.

Catadores – recyclers – are a familiar sight in Sao Paulo, pulling their handcarts laden with metal, wood, or most often cardboard, through heavy traffic. Their efforts contribute to an admirable and economic 76% of cardboard produced by Brasil being recycled. More at

http://www.gringoes.com/articles.asp?ID_Noticia=1312

They recycle cardboard, support their childen – the family sleeps behind this fence tonight

The cheerfulness of most Brasilians in the face of such differences in prosperity, whether or not during the traditional season of goodwill, gives one pause for thought, and much hope for Brasil’s future …

Traditional Christmas trees, Sao Paolo style

… even book-ended by such disparities in prosperity. Perhaps that is not the problem we perceive it to be.

Just another tower in Itaim …

… reflecting its neighbour across the street

Church of Gold

The Church and Convent of São Francisco (Convento e Igreja de São Francisco) in Salvador is a well-known tourist destination – its gilt woodcarving is deliberately and overpoweringly impressive. You may have seen it in Michael Palin’s recent BBC documentary series on Brazil. A church of the Franciscan monastic order, the current buildings were begun in 1686 (the convent) and 1708 (the church) though decoration of the interiors continued through the first half of the 18th century.

Praça Anchieta, Pelourinho, Salvador de Bahia

The church is set at the end of a long narrow square – named for one of the first Jesuit missionaries to Brasil in the 16th century, José de Anchieta  – off the main square in Pelourinho, the historic town centre.

The cross on the praça is a 19th century addition.

Its facade is in the early baroque style, with large elaborate volutes which support the central gable, and make the composition a little top-heavy …

Central gable flanked by campanile towers with mother-of-pearl tiles

… though it works well close up. You enter via a porch to the right.

Painted perspective on the ceiling of the porch.

Built between 1749 and 1755, the porch is an impressive piece of interior decor, with panels painted on wood, and a striking illusionist ceiling painted by José Joaquim da Rocha in 1774. It’s a bravura display of skill in baroque composition, albeit in paint. Panels in blue and white tile work (azulejos) are a 1782 addition.

Cloisters of the Franciscan monastery, with salvaged stone

From this dark paneled and painted chamber, you emerge into a cloistered stone courtyard lit by a fiercely blue sky. It’s as though you’ve traveled three centuries from inside a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities to step into a surrealist Giorgio de Chirico painting.

The inner walls of the cloister are decorated with azulejo tile panels based on the work of 17th century Flemish artist Otto van Veen, who produced engravings illustrating epigrams from Roman poet Horace.

“Estarás seguro se viveres bem.”

The choices are gloomy and perhaps inevitably sententious – there is much brooding on death and the fate of sinners, as well as on the virtue of knowing your place and of being thrifty. The tiles are held in place by crude repairs and patches in places – an unintentional effect is to underline the ‘tempus fugit’ theme, but sometimes the effect is comic too.

Scrambled sage

The worthy scholar’s confused mien is understandable – he looks like he’s trapped in a sliding number puzzle.

This looks like an architectural salvage yard.

Tile collage

Van Veen taught Pieter Paul Rubens for a number of years, and produced a number of ’emblem books’ which influenced and served as source material for many later artists.

However bright the skies, nothing can prepare you for the blinding interior of the church, said to be the best example of the igreja dourada or ‘golden church’ style of Brazilian colonial baroque.

Nave with side chapel and pulpit, Igreja de São Francisco, Salvador da Bahia

The splendour of the surfaces, the elaborateness of the carving, the spiralling columns, the profusion of decoration on every available surface, the almost total absence of straight unadorned line, even the choice of complementary colours – white and blue – all are designed to overwhelm the worshipper with the gilded glory of this church.

I found myself looking for a more restful surface on which to focus. The ceiling over the altar was a little quieter.

Gilded painted vault with cherubim over the altar

The nave ceiling was heavily decorated too, but with less gilt.

No rest for the eye

Even the chiaroscuro of a bright window offered some respite from the blazing glory of the dourada style.

Beautifully carved and decorated oriole window high up in the nave

Your eye may alight and rest on the dark lustre of carved jacarandá wood, the work of Frei Luis de Jesus ‘The Woodcarver’, for which this church is also justly famous.

Finial on railing of side chapel

If your eye falls below the handrail, you may wonder how or indeed why the monks were able to decorate their church with such voluptuous sway-backed acolytes.

Dark beauty

At the altar the caryatids are fair and gilded, with pink hands and faces.

Upholding the word of God

And above the altar an unusual crucifix, after the image by the Spanish painter Murillo, shows Jesus embracing founder St Francis of Assisi.

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/bartolome-esteban-murillo/saint-francis-of-assisi-embracing-the-crucified-christ

But wait, even allowing for fervent religious imagination, no one swept up at the Crucifixion …

Do my eyes deceive me?

High up on the altar, a workman calmly and carefully sweeps up the dust. Another man was going around replacing light bulbs. I found myself resting my eyes on their activity.You welcome such visual interest in the goldstorm of this interior.

Man at work

My perception was truly confused – was this holy water font, donated by Dom João V of Portugal (‘O Magnânimo‘), golden or not? Deliberately chosen no doubt to allude to the dourada style, it is made of yellow conglomerate. Dom João also donated the Horace / van Veen azulejos.

One of a pair at the entrance to the church

When you learn that a fifth of each ton extracted from the gold and diamond mines of Brasil was crown property – Portugal is said to have collected more gold over a few decades than Spain took from the rest of Central and South America over 400 years – and that Dom João was also known as O Freirático because of his preference for nuns as sexual partners, the interior of this church comes into clearer focus.

Dowry donation boxes

Brasilians are philosophical about such cultural history. This piece of furniture in the sacristy was used as a kind of ecclesiastical safety deposit box, where the fathers of prospective brides placed money for their daughters’ dowries and presumably for the cost of their weddings. No visitors to the church were surprised that behind the regularity of its squared facade, some doors gave onto bigger boxes than others.

In 1742 Dom João suffered a stroke which left him, the erstwhile Prince of Brasil, politically ineffectual. He spent the last years of his life, the time of his donations to this church, devoted to religious activities.

Unintended humour of labeled statue in the vestibule, with Biblical Golden Calf behind

The relaxed attitude – now and during his reign –  of Brasilians to religious life is at one with the syncretist version of Catholicism tinged with west African Yoruba traditions which continues to grow in Brasil today. Is this statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception actually standing on a crescent moon, like the Yoruba goddess Iemenja?

Brasil’s culture swirls with fascinating cross-currents – the Franciscan Igreja de São Francisco faces the Jesuit Catedral Basílica de Salvador across the square, for all the world like rival football clubs. Both are in a district, Pelourinho, named for the public pillory or whipping post used for punishing African Brasilian slaves “pour encourager les autres”. Brasilians accept such seeming contradictions easily.

” … it is in giving that we receive … ” (Prayer of St Francis)

The irony of a church named for a saint the basis of whose Rule was poverty being decorated with an estimated 960 kilograms of golf leaf – not to mention the dormant power of the Roman Catholic Church in a country where the public education system is by common consent a shambles, political corruption is endemic (see

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-20373040

for an example) and the gap between rich and poor significant – is a little harder to accept.

Salvador da Bahia Museu de Arte Sacra

Given the strength of religious feeling in Brasil, you might expect the Museum of Religious Art in Salvador da Bahia to house a significant collection, and to be thronged with visitors. ‘Yes’ to the first, but a clear ‘no’ to the second – the museum has excellent collections of religious statuary, paintings, silver and other artefacts, but the attendant told us that visitor numbers had been affected by the European downturn, since that is the origin of the majority of visitors.

Entrance with finely carved gate

The museum was built as a Barefoot Carmelite monastery between 1667 and 1697, serving as a seminary from 1837 to 1953. It’s tucked down the Rua do Sodré, off the busy Rua Carlos Gomes thoroughfare. An unfashionable down-at-heel area, the architectural heritage is nevertheless of high quality, both the Museum itself and some neighbouring buildings. Security is evident and cautious. We were advised by the parking attendant to be wary, but we saw family life going on too – sons visiting older parents – in the same street. From the Museum, the view over the Bahia de Todos os Santos is lovely.

Elegant town houses nearby, squatted for now

The scrolling volutes of the facade suggest an interesting building, and the interior does not disappoint. Seventeenth century tiles – azulejos – showing flora and fauna and religious imagery line the eight confessional niches and the walls, and also appear on the facade of the church. The confessionals, built as part of the original church so that monks could hear confession without leaving the monastery, are unique in Brasil.

A plain and elegant interior – round sandstone arches and a white plastered vaulted ceiling over sandstone Doric columns – is crowned with a simple cupola. The floor of polished wood burial niches is divided by stone courses. Only the altarpiece is ornate, made of finely wrought silver and silver gilt, with a Madonna floating above.

Early baroque facade

You need to remind yourself that this is a museum, not a church. What’s perhaps more surprising is that building was in serious disrepair before the Museum was transferred there in 1957. That was the initiative of the Rector of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) Edgar Santos Rego, a key figure in the cultural life of Salvador and of Brasil. Though it’s not much visited by Brasilians, it is a popular venue for wedding ceremonies.

Salvaged tile-work collage left of the entrance

You are directed and supervised carefully around the collection by the attendants. The Museum discourages photography, so you will have to imagine the charming details of this interior – on the hand basin for officiating clerics, bronze taps in the shape of dolphins against quatre-foils of madder and veined black marble, leaping deer and piping birds on the auzulejos, the light, cool, spacious interior, the arrays of male and female saints – separated in image as in religious life – mounted in serried rows on the walls of an upstairs room. Or you could visit it in person. It’s a worthwhile and refreshing detour from the tourist trail.

http://www.museudeartesacradabahia.com.br/

Bar Piratininga Vila Madalena Sao Paulo

You can tell you’re in Vila Madalena well before you get out of the car – the facades of the bars shout for attention, with mural art, enticingly lit windows, or clever architecture such as salvaged floor boards nailed any old how against the frontage. Too-loud live music advertises its wares from open doorways. Clients cluster around the popular venues, spilling out over the steep and broken footpaths onto the street, talking, laughing, embracing. The manobristas or parking attendants try to flag down the cars crawling by. The occasional residential houses left stranded in this sea of nightlife seem slightly shocked by all the activity.

Bottles of Johnnie Walker Red Label and Black Label kept for individual customers

Bar Piratininga on Rua Wisard is an amiable venue behind an unassuming glass canopied front. Once a house, it’s the usual long shed of a building, divided over two open floors with a mezzanine at the rear, and a decent small sound system piping live piano music throughout. We go up to the first floor alongside the piano and order drinks.

Tonight Olmair Raposo is at the keys, playing a broad range of popular rock from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. He’s a friendly bear of a man, his repertoire and his English showing the influence of his ten years abroad in North America. Elton John is a particular favourite, as are the Beatles, who occupy a special place in the hearts of Brasilians. Raposo plays with lilting, sometimes hard-driving rhythm, and sings with clear diction.

Olmair Raposo, pianista e vocalista with guest John Berman on clarinet

When he is joined by clarinettist John Berman the pace picks up as they dip into jazz standards, batting inventive solos back and forth with gusto.

We order a portion of mandioca, sweet deep-fried manioc root which comes to the table golden yellow, hot and crisp, and is rather good with tomato ketchup. The waiter executes a few dance steps as he reaches the top of the stairs – everyone enjoys the music here. The youngish clientele listen attentively and applaud with enthusiasm. Raposo repays their attention by playing their requests, scribbled on a napkin and brought to him by the staff. They cheer and sing along.

1920s house and car, up-to-date venue

It’s hard to believe that some years ago this venue was on its last legs and about to close. It reached back into its history – once a cafe, it was one of the first bars in Sao Paulo to serve draught beer or chope, also pioneering music trios at a time when most bars offered a guitarist on a stool, “banquinho e violão“. Becoming one of the first ‘theme’ bars, it dressed its staff in 30s and 40s style, displayed period photographs of Sao Paulo and used a restored 1929 Ford for its business.

Business picked up so much that it is now one of Madalena’s best-loved venues. And the name? The Campos de Piratininga is the flat plain atop the coastal wall of the Serra do Mar where Sao Paolo begins. With its happy upbeat feel, this venue can indeed claim to represent something of the spirit of the city first known as São Paulo dos Campos de Piratininga.

http://www.piratiningabar.com.br/

Embu das Artes

On the south-west edge of the Sao Paulo connurbation, Embu maintains an identity distinct from the urban sprawl of its enormous neighbour. The centro histórico is a series of cobbled streets with brightly painted stuccoed houses, and shops and restaurants serving the tourist trade. Elsewhere in town there are collections of shops selling ‘arty’ furniture – heavy wooden mock-rustic chairs, kitchen and console tables, wrought iron chandeliers, gates and panels, pool-side furniture, sculptures made from scrap car parts – but in the centre the work is finer.

Picturesque houses and market stalls on every street of the old centre

The shops and stalls sell a wide array of paintings – naive, realist, Brasilian and European landscapes, abstract and op-art – and sculpture, all kinds of handcrafts, bric-a-brac, food and drink, semi-precious stones and jewellery, carpets, and antiques. The better quality antiques, some as early as eighteenth century, come from the fazendas or large farms – Marcelo Aguila has a tall library bookcase including steps and a landing wide enough to accommodate an armchair. He also has a set of four white-glazed earthenware statues of women portraying the seasons, and a pair of console tables of jacaranda wood with marquetry tops and ivory detailing.

Views across Largo dos Jesuitas …

There are lace and fabric handcrafts, wooden objets d’art and utensils, and hats and other clothing for sale, and a specialist pet market. An excellent silversmith sets a wide range of Brasilian stones. A forro duo play accordion and pandeiro – like a  tambourine – on a street corner. A clown in full costume offers to make balloon animals.

… down Rua Boa Vista …

The  covered terraces of restaurants are filled with day-trippers enjoying food, drink and live music, some even dancing in the lunch-time crowd. The sun beats down fiercely, though the dark clouds piling up bring lightning and heavy rain later. Not one, but two ‘living statues’ perform in the main square – see above and below.

… and towards Rua Nossa Senhora do Rosario

We have lunch at the excellent Emporio Sao Pedro, a business which has successfully combined food and antiques for a number of years. A James Taylor sound-alike troubador sings and plays guitar in accented English. The restaurant’s address, the steep Viela das Lavadeiras or Laundress’ Alley suggests something of the history of the town centre.

View from the verandah of the Emporio Sao Pedro, Viela das Lavadeiras

As in much of Brasil, European settlement was led by the Jesuits, who established a church here in 1554, later adding a monastery, which buildings today form the Museu de Arte Sacra dos Jesuitas. Built to a simple rectangular plan with high white walls, blue shuttered windows and a pan-tiled roof, the church is both elegant and cooly functional.

Museu de Arte Sacra dos Jesuitas, Embu das Artes

The white walls, plain wooden floor and ceiling help to focus attention on the ornately carved and painted baroque wooden altar pieces, with twisted columns framing illuminated saints, a central crucifix and a monochrome Madonna above. Clerical vestments are displayed as if kneeling, wooden candelabra are backlit on the altar. A carved balcony decorated with the monogram of the Society of Jesus juts out of the right-hand wall at first-floor level, presumably for the principal of the monastery to be able to address the lay faithful.

The view north from the Jesuit monastery

The construct is intensely theatrical, the large bare space for the audience focused on the miraculous images in the cabinet beyond the fourth wall of the altar rail, the front row reserved for the brothers now at rest beneath the polished wooden panels let into the floor, the decorated balcony ready to broadcast the devotional word of the Society. Out in the brothers’ cloistered garden, a plain cross is picked out with red flowering plants and a white gravelled border behind a low clipped hedge.

Though the museum has a rich holding of religious art, artefacts and architecture, you can sense in the simplicity of how its message is formulated that the organisation is trying to reach beyond its history to its mission – AMDG, ad maiorem Dei gloriam, to the greater glory of God. The Google Earth satellite view below of the Society’s monogram in the garden at Embu – zoom in, right hand side – continues to broadcast its devotion.

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=embu+das+artes&ie=UTF-8&ei=NiiUUOq6C8LL0AHB0IC4Dw&ved=0CAsQ_AUoAg

I am reminded by this view, by the street-names in Embu, by the dedication of the museum volunteers, by the everyday use of expressions like “Nossa!” – for Nossa Senhora – and “Graças a Deus” – Thanks be to God – how intensely religious a culture is Brasil.

Itapoã

To the north of Salvador da Bahia the beaches stretch out along the coast below the toll road up on the ridge known as the BA099 or the Estrada do Coco. Growing coconut palms is still a major agricultural activity here. The beaches are famous too – Porto da Barra and our destination, Itapoã or Itapuã, have been immortalised in song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljxP777W0F0

The coast suffers from classic characterless ‘ribbon’ development, but it does boast historic landmarks like the lighthouse fort at Barra, built on a rocky spur which catches the breezes.

The Farol da Barra or Farol de Santo Antônio 

Since 1686, the lighthouse warns of a sandbar (barra) where a galleon was wrecked.

Entrance to the Forte de Santo Antônio da Barra

These days the message is a warning of another kind. Here’s the mascot for the FIFA 2014 World Cup, an endangered three-banded armadillo from the North-East which rolls itself into a ball when threatened.

Living statue and ‘Brazuca’

Organisers plan to use one of three names for him, to be announced in November, but an Adidas-sponsored FIFA survey suggests that he will be known as Brazuca, an informal word for Brazilian national pride.

The Atlantic coast or orla signals a discernible change in climate, cooler and windier than in the lee of the Bahia de Todos os Santos.

Along the orla

At Itapoã there are other attractions besides the beach. The Lagoa de Abaeté is a freshwater lake set in sand dunes not far from the coast. For followers of candomble, it’s an important place for the goddess Iemanja who rules the sea and bodies of water.

Lagoa do Abaeté with white horse – abaeté meaning ‘real man’ in indigenous Tupi 

More prosaically, it’s also been a spot for washerwomen to carry out their work since the days when it was a small fishing village. In the late 1970s regulated and unregulated development grew, and people took sand for building work or actually lived in the dunes. The lagoon and dunes, and a washerwomen’s association, were made a metropolitan park in 1993.

At the Abaeté gazebo, with keyboard player and roving singer left

The park includes a gazebo which overlooks the lake. It’s open on all sides, with canopies over tables and chairs, and a good number of cafes and purveyors of food and drink. Every cafe has its own musical entertainment – food, drink and especially live music are essential for an enjoyable time in Brasil. As always, the audience of regulars knew the words and sang along.

Shady side of the gazebo, with seafood-sponsored musicians

Judging from a glimpse of the favelas in the back blocks of Itapoã, this was a clearly more pleasant place to spend a hot Sunday afternoon.

The usual vendor of refrigerantes or cold drinks – taped styrofoam box full of ice and cans – with message on kiosk: “Jesus leads to truth and life”

The Bahian speciality acarajé made with ground black-eyed peas deep-fried in palm oil is cooked and sold around the gazebo. A staple of Bahian cuisine said to be the Yoruba inspiration for Arabic falafel, it’s offered to the gods in candomble ceremonies.

Legend in her own lunchtime, vendedora de acarajé Ana

We had driven very slowly up to Abaeté past a school which was serving as a polling station, since the state elections were being held that day. The school was thronged with people who had been bussed in by the political parties to vote, and the footpaths were a blizzard of voting cards.

Drifts of election cards along the footpaths, thrown out of trucks in handfuls

Officially alcohol can’t be sold on election days until the voting has closed, but in Bahia the restriction is not taken seriously. In the balmy air, warm with the occasional breeze, scented with the blossoms of the park, sitting in the shade with a drink and live music to enjoy, the travails of politics seemed to retreat to their proper perspective.

Flowers vivid against Bahian sky

The Yellow House

In the old centre of São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (‘Salvador‘ or more often ‘Bahia‘), you can sense the fresh breezes from All Saints’ Bay (‘Bahia de Todos os Santos‘), but a view of it is more difficult. In the upper town or Cidade Alta, the two- and three-storey buildings block your view with a beauty of their own, while in the lower town or Cidade Baixa you glimpse it at sea level from between the buildings of the industrial waterfront, or right down on the beach.

Flying into the city of Salvador, third largest in Brasil

Elevador Lacerda between the high town and the low town of Salvador Bahia

Walking through Pelourinho on our first night, I was drawn to a restaurant which offered views of the bay from its terrace. A quick stroll along the Rua das Portas do Carmo confirmed that it was an attractive option – we visited the Mamma Bahia restaurant on the same street the following evening.  http://theproverbial.org/2012/10/13/salvador-street-life/

Hotel Casa do Amarelindo is a 10-room hotel in Pelourinho which also serves the public in its restaurant and at the panoramic bar let in to the roof on the fifth floor. The owners have restored this nineteenth century town house with care, preserving floor tiles, wrought iron and plaster-work, and decorating with imagination, in strong yellow (amarelo) and other colurs.  http://www.casadoamarelindo.com/  The view, even at night, is not its only attraction.

Trompe-l’oeil tiling at the entrance

Wrought iron grille to interior, original wood carvings in lobby

In the lobby they display and sell the work of woodcarver Miguel Morois, originally from Uruguay though a citizen of Bahia for the last forty years. He portrays the gods or orixas of the Yoruba candomblé religious tradition, sharing the space with figures which appear more Western. More at   http://brasilart.org/2012/10/23/miguel-morois-brasilian-sculptor/

Xango, god of thunder and justice, his tool the double-headed axe, with
Iemanja, goddess of the sea and fecundity, her tool the silver mirror

Once more you see the cross-fertilisation of the Portuguese Christian and the Yoruba candomblé traditions: these figures bear more than a passing resemblance to the carved saints of the Catholic churches.

Jesus, saint and angel in the Catedral Basílica de Salvador

If you look carefully, you see the African influence in the Christian tradition too. Some painters and wood-carvers of the baroque Bahia churches were indigenous and African, the traces evident in their work.

Carved and gilded images in the nave of the Catedral Basílica de Salvador

It’s no surprise that the figures being created now have mixed characteristics. This is the Archangel Michael of Chrisitian, Jewish and Muslim tradition, weigher of souls and defeater of Satan.

Archangel and fallen angel

She is the African goddess Iemanja (see also http://theproverbial.org/2012/07/10/mermaid/ ) , her colours light blue, pink and white. Is that why she is so pale in this figure from the Afro-Brasilian Museum (MAFRO) in Bahia?

Figure of Iemanja in the Museu Afro Brasileiro

We take the lift to the roof terrace to soak up the fresh night air from All Saints’ Bay and to taste a caipirinha made with best local cachaça (sugar cane spirit) and maracuja (passion fruit) juice.

Panoramic terrace bar at Hotel Casa do Amarelindo

The restaurant downstairs serves an excellent moqueca (seafood stew).

View from restaurant to lobby

I reflect that in Bahia it seems to be possible to have the best of both worlds, a happy combination of old and new, of African and Portuguese, in a beautiful setting. Long may it be so.

Yoruba child god twins (ibejis) / Portuguese Saints Cosmas and Damian

Bonfim Church of Salvador Bahia

In Brasil, you notice that people sometimes wear at their wrist a length of thin coloured ribbon, with words printed on it. These are the fitas or fitinhas do Bonfim, a kind of lucky charm for the wearer and a souvenir of their visit to Salvador in Bahia. Though they are sold everywhere on the street and in shops in Salvador, they originate from the church of Our Lord of the Good End, a Igreja de Nosso Senhor do Bonfim, on a rise at the tip of the Itapagipe Peninsula in the northern part of the city.

Tradition suggests that if you have the ribbon tied around the wrist with three knots, making a mental request or wish for each knot, and leave the ribbon in place until it falls off through natural wear, your wishes will be granted. Visitors also tie the fitinha to the church railings, or elsewhere on the building.

Fitinhas do BonFim tied to the railings of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim overlooking Bahia

The church is a pleasingly proportioned mid-eighteenth century building, more modest than many of the other well-known churches in Bahia, with a white-tiled facade. It is named for the devotion to Jesus at the moment of his death (the bon fim), imported like many of Brasil’s earlier traditions from Portugal.

Nosso Senhor do Bonfim on Montserrat hill on the Itapagipe peninsula in lower Salvador

The fitas are the length of the right arm of the statue of Jesus crucified, kept atop the altar inside the church and brought out on the feast day, January 6. The ribbon is said to have been used in the nineteenth century for suspending a pilgrim’s medal around the neck. By the 1960s it was being sold on the streets of Bahia, and was adopted by adventurous hippy travellers as a Bahiano accessory.

47-centimetre-long souvenir

What is perhaps less obvious is that the ribbons are in the colours traditionally associated with various West African Yoruba gods or orixas, and that Nosso Senhor do Bonfim is closely identified with the Yoruba deity Oxala, father of the orixas and creator of humankind.

His right arm to guide you

His colour is white. Brasilians have developed the tradition of donning new white clothes at the turn of the year, and other New Year traditions such as going down to the beach and jumping seven successive waves to bring luck for the coming year. And at this most popular of Brasilian churches, there is the evidence of another religious tradition.

The faithful gather from afar to admire the evidence

Described as a museum of ex-voto objects, a side room of the church is festooned with the gratitude and the evidence of the faithful who have been cured of the ailments of their limbs and other body parts. A group of French tourists – also a staunchly Catholic country – were led around by an enthusiastic guide. These additional beliefs seem to accumulate with ease on the margins of the religious environment of Brasil.

Testimonials, photographs, replicas, racquets …

The church has an air of rich calm, born of its generous proportions, good light and the sweet breezes of its elevated position.

Elaborate altar set within simple walls below a painted ceiling

Simple nave, open to the elements

The plain backdrop has the effect of making the more heavily decorated elements – wrought silver lamps, inlaid marble floor, painted and gilded ceiling –  very striking, helped by their well-judged use of materials and proportions. This is a beautiful building.

Finely wrought silver lamp

Strong and simple monochrome floor

Beautifully decorated ceiling over the altar

A believer may of course see the crucified Christ high up on the altar, with the Virgin and child beneath, as the most significant image. And striking a more severe note, a pair of paintings at the entrance remind us of the consequences of our actions, and shows us that the Protestant church did not have a monopoly on visions of hellfire.

Our Lady, Star of the Sea

Death of the sinner – the wages of sin

Institutions of the Roman Catholic church – saints, the confessional – are in clear evidence. They are held in fine balance against the elegance of the baroque architecture of the Age of Enlightenment, and leavened with the richness of African beliefs.

Confessional on show in side passage

Saints wrapped against the dust in the gift shop on the square – and one real for 20 fitinhas

One can certainly imagine that the spectacle on the 6th of January is gripping – a procession from the church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception on the beach eight kilometres down the coast, led by throngs of Bahiana women in traditional full white lace dresses, who come to wash the steps of the church with perfumed water, to the sound of drums and Yoruba chants. This cathedral of the Diocese of Bonfim can indeed claim to represent Bahia, and perhaps something of the richness of the spirit of Brasil.

January 6 at Bonfim, as per mural at Salvador airport

To the sound of drumming

Billie Holiday, Juke Box Jazz Giant

Billie Holiday, cover girl

I’ve mentioned jazz pianist Teddy Wilson in a previous post. What was less clear to me then was how ground-breaking his work with Billie Holiday was. Yes, it sounds gorgeous, as a quick listen will confirm, and not at all like the dark and dramatic Billie of Strange Fruit recorded at the end of 1939. This is light, upbeat, poppy music.

Miss Brown to You

Fox Trot – Vocal Chorus Billie Holiday

That’s one of the first of the tracks to be recorded by Billie and Teddy for Brunswick Records, between 1935 and 1938. Billie Holiday was signed to Brunswick by influential producer John Hammond to record current tunes with Teddy Wilson in the new ‘swing’ style for the growing jukebox trade. They were given free rein to improvise the material. Their first collaboration included “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and “Miss Brown to You” in 1935. Most of Holiday’s early successes were released under the band name “Teddy Wilson & his Orchestra.” He and Holiday produced 95 recordings together.

What a Little Moonlight Can Do

Not just throw-away hits, these singles were to influence enormously the direction jazz vocals were to take. After the success of “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”, Holiday began recording under her own name  – on the 35-cent Vocalion label – producing a series of extraordinary performances with the swing era’s finest musicians. Hammond said of her, “Her singing almost changed my music tastes and my musical life, because she was the first girl singer I’d come across who actually sang like an improvising jazz genius.” Listen to “My Last Affair” from 1937 to hear what he means about her phrasing.

(This Is) My Last Affair

Fox Trot – Vocal by Billie Holiday

The Brunswick label was broke and unable to record many jazz tunes. The commercial impact of the Teddy Wilson-Billie Holiday sides from 1935 to 1938 was significant. Because Wilson, Holiday, Lester Young and others came into the studio without arrangements – which cost money – and improvised the material, the records they produced were very cheap.

Holiday was paid a flat fee, not royalties, for her work. Some of the records were successful. The single “I Cried for You” sold 15,000 copies. Hammond said, “15,000 … was a giant hit for Brunswick in those days. I mean a giant hit. Most records that made money sold around three to four thousand.”

In July 1936 Holiday began releasing sides under the band name “Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra.”  The 1936 side “You Let Me Down” is a stand-out, and hints at the darker material to come.

You Let Me Down

By the late 1930s, Billie Holiday had toured with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, had a string of radio and retail hits with Teddy Wilson, and had become an established recording artist. Although she was unable to record in the studio with Count Basie, Holiday included many of his musicians in her recordings with Teddy Wilson. Her songs “What A Little Moonlight Can Do” from 1935 and “Easy Living” from 1937 were being imitated by singers across America, and quickly becoming jazz standards. The road ahead for her was less clear.

Easy Living

Billie Holiday opens at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem with Basie in 1937

Salvador Street Life

In the centre of Salvador (São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos), capital of the state of Bahia and of Brasil until 1763 – before Rio, before Brasilia – life on the street is very lively.

Thunderous drumming from the top floor

Its architecture is two- and three-storey baroque town houses, religious buildings and open squares.

Church under renovation, Largo Terreiro de Jesus

The historic Pelourinho core is cobbled though not pedestrianised. It is named for public pillories or whipping posts (now removed) used in the past to punish slaves. The slaves, many of them Yoruba speakers from West Africa, were quartered in the basements of the houses – you wonder how they fared during the brief but heavy downpours here.

Tourist family posing for the camera in borrowed Afro-Brasilian costume

And though the streets are thronged with people, it’s disturbing on a number of levels that you can walk the streets of this UNESCO World Heritage Site because the Afro-Brasilians who lived here were displaced to outlying suburbs, and because of a visible armed police presence.

Hillside village (favela) with not a square inch unused

The Afro-Brasilian heritage is evident from the moment you arrive. Better known as Bahia, Salvador is one of the largest population centres for people of African origin outside Africa – about 80% of the city’s 2.5 million people  are of African or mixed heritage, according to the 2010 census. There seems little racial tension, although the poor, service staff and entertainers are overwhelmingly black, just as in other parts of Brasil.

Sweet-voiced samba singer in the excellent Mama Bahia restaurant, Rua das Portas do Carmo …

… where he looks on from under the street light

Bahianos are well aware of their cultural heritage, whether displayed in the excellent Museu Afro Brasileiro  http://www.mafro.ceao.ufba.br/  (MAFRO), or in public monuments like this bronze of Zumbi dos Palmares  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumbi  in Largo do Pelourinho.

Spear-wielding seventeenth-century African Brasilian resistance leader, with boarded-up cinema behind

They also know about the non-African Bahiano heritage – a policeman identified for us with pride the building now housing MAFRO as the first medical school in Brasil (in 1808 when the Portuguese Court moved to Brasil, I discover). At the time of the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Brasil in 1759, it was the largest Jesuit college outside Rome.

Now MAFRO, ex-Jesuit College, ex-Royal Military Hospital, ex-medical school

Circular (lecture?) room behind ex-medical school, over-run now by stray cats

Just down the street we found health services of a more popular nature.

The Old Black snuff (rapé), good for colds, sinusitis, headache, migraine, asthma … and snoring? (roncaria)

An appealing aspect of this historic centre – and characteristically Brasilian – is the mix of high and popular culture. Like the local moqueca (fish stew), it makes for a delicious whole. And there is much more to sample on the Bahiano menu.

Quilt in fabric craft shop near Terreiro de Jesus

Floor of sacristy, Catedral Basílica de Salvador

Catedral de São Sebastião, Rio de Janeiro

God’s big tent: the cathedral from morro Santa Teresa

Surrounded by hills or morros, the centre of Rio is crammed with buildings old and new. The old testify to its former glory, the new to a resurgence of prosperity and pride. The view from morro Santa Teresa – named for its convent but known until the mid-eighteenth century as morro Desterro, the hill of exile – is panoramic.

Old Cathedral interior, also variously a Royal, an Imperial and a Carmelite Convent chapel

The Old Cathedral on Guanabara Bay is theatrical in its colours, its furnishings and its configuration, something of a pocket opera house for the pageant of royalty. A witness to Brasilian history, it has seen Royal and Imperial weddings, baptisms, funerals and coronations, and the signing of the Imperial Constitution.

Kingdom to Empire, to Republic and beyond, Brasil is still an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country, so a new cathedral was certain. Protracted negotiations between Church and State secured a new site, and the modern cathedral was built between 1964 and 1976, to a design by architect Edgar Fonceca, and dedicated to Rio’s patron saint. Not to the glory of King or Emperor, but for the city’s people under the slings and arrows of poverty. Its conical form and its use of concrete remind you of Liverpool Cathedral, but its ziggurat steps are distinctively Latin American. Or is it volcanic in its shape and colour?

At the entrance to the Cathedral, cool polished concrete provides an open welcome

Inside, it’s a huge space, seating five thousand, with standing room for more. Its shape gives you a soaring echoing space – filled when we were there with recorded Gregorian chant – and a beautifully quiet and even coolness too, a welcome relief from the traffic clamouring and grinding its way past the flight of steps below the broad apron.

It is an appropriately contemplative space, a welcome luxury in a crowded city, its cool gloom a refuge and its walls a shield against the everyday.

One of four, this southern panel opposite the main entrance depicts the unity of the Church

The four coloured panels – plastic rather than glass – rise to the arms of the clear Greek cross which forms the summit’s rooflight. Visitors and worshippers move quietly about the space, not a boat-shaped nave but circular. A cool breeze plays softly on your arms and face. Calm descends.

St Francis of Assisi admonishing a dove, by Sao Paulo sculptor Umberto Cozzo

When you rise from your pew, or complete your circuit of the Cathedral, you emerge gently into the heat and light of the day, refreshed, more at peace. Whether or not you are a believer, what the sanctuary offered here is effective, leaving you a little stronger, a little calmer, a little more prepared to meet the world and all its works.

http://www.catedral.com.br/

Rio Centro Lindo

View from morro Corcovado with Hipódromo da Gávea

Rio de Janeiro, named Cidade Maravilhosa by its proud inhabitants, is built in one of the great natural settings for a city – an excellent natural harbour, broad beaches, thickly wooded hills almost to the water’s edge, a lagoon, a warm-to-temperate climate, and abundant flora and fauna.

Flora on the ascent to the summit of Corcovado

A troupe of monkeys in residence in an abandoned hotel on the way to Corcovado

Rio cloudscape from the Corcovado summit

Rio pushes right up to the hills

Rio’s Centro is a poignant mix of grandeur and decay, reminding us that it was once the sophisticated capital of a wealthy country.

Centro street lighting of breath-taking splendour

Facade awaiting restoration, Centro

Plannned in 1602 as an aqueduct, Arcos da Lapa became a viaduct for bondes tram in 1896

Centro Art Deco cinema with tiled capitals

Rio’s great institutions are still in place, albeit with their roles adapted to this century.

Ex-Imperial chapel on Praça Quinze de Novembre, now a Carmelite church

Still a Carmelite hospital, with sculpture in courtyard, Centro

Other institutions adapt too – Scotland never saw a ‘kirk’ like this.

Presbyterian church at night, Rio Centro 

You may wonder where the famous sights of Rio are  – Cristo Redentor, Sugarloaf, the beaches. There are many images of them, and they ARE spectacular, but in this cidade linda (beautiful city), even the everyday and the decayed catch your eye.

One Rio institution which has resisted change is the Bar Luiz. Founded in 1887, the original building is more or less intact – only the name and the address have changed, resisting war, demolition, and renovation. (See its history at  http://www.barluiz.com.br/)

A long day of sight-seeing draws to a memorable close in these surroundings. When we dined there, the waiter told us that the original off-white geometric floor tiles were not replaced as planned, ‘because the customers wouldn’t hear of it’. It is said to serve “o melhor chope do Rio de Janeiro”, the best glass of beer in town. Saúde!

Rua da Carioca, 39, Centro

Mafalda Minnozzi at Tom Jazz

The music venue Tom Jazz is a well-known intimate jazz venue in Consolação, Sao Paulo, also catering for the up-market crowd for private parties and serving as a platform for the launch of new projects. Last night gamine Italian Brasilian chanteuse Mafalda Minnozzi was there for the second night of a two-date launch of her new CD.

Launching her new CD Spritz

She is not merely a singer but a very engaging performer with a strong stage persona, and an amusing line in monologues about the attractions of Rome and of Italy. She makes good use of what used to be called feminine wiles to flirt with and to amuse her excellent band, and her audience. They enjoy her eccentric delivery and her repartee, they are mesmerised by her singing, they sing along on demand and they volunteer enthusiastically for audience participation.

She had fun with Annibale from the audience

Minnozzi has a strong voice. She’s a ‘belter’ when she wants to be but she can use the lighter, more fey end of her register too with a sound reminiscent of Cyndi Lauper from the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun phase. Her cultural references are from La Dolce Vita of the 1950s and 60s – her dress sense, her repertoire, her musical idol Ennio Morricone. She sings Portuguese and Italian with equal ease. If you’ve seen the film of The Talented Mr Ripley with Jude Law, you’ll understand her milieu well, including her rendition of Tu Vuo’ Fa l’Americano.

Given the huge Italian influence, Brasil is a natural home-from-home for her. She has performed regularly in Brasil since the late 1990s, including for Globo’s telenovella soundtracks, and with Brasilian greats Paulo Moura, Martinho da Vila and Chico Buarque. Her audience knows her lyrics well. She can also call on more sombre repertoire, with songs in a Brecht and Weill vein. She has something of Piaf’s catch in the voice too.

Minnozzi uses face, gesture and posture with abandon in her delivery

Tom Jazz has a configuration similar to that of Sampa jazz club Bourbon Street – a long narrow space with small tables for light dining, a stage at one end, a mezzanine balcony upstairs with more tables and a bar, and a high-quality sound and lights set-up. The four-piece band is tight and sweet, the repertoire easy Italian and Brasilian MOR.

Minnozzi surprised me last night with a cover of the 1966 Dusty Springfield hit You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me; I discover it was a hit in Italian first, the previous year. Here’s the official video of her October 2011 hit Con un Sorriso (With a Smile) in Italian; she also issued a Portuguese version for her Brasilian audience. Truly an international star.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGktNG32C9k

Sala Sao Paulo

Moon and stars ceiling light, Julio Prestes Cultural Center / Sala Sao Paulo

Concerts at the Sala Sao Paulo tend to be spoken of by venue rather than by performer or composer, and you soon see and hear why. From here, coffee from the interior of Brasil was taken by rail to Santos to be shipped to the world. This building has led many lives.

Ex-entrance hall, Estação JP

These days the acoustics of the former Julio Prestes railway station or ‘JP’ are world-famous. It is compared with the best classical music venues, which whether by ‘feel’ – Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw – or by acoustic science – Boston’s Symphony Hall – were purpose-built. All the more commendable that the happy accident of the station’s ‘shoebox’ shape was enlisted for the permanent home of the São Paulo State Symphonic Orchestra OSESP.

Cast iron stairway, HQ of Estrado Ferro de Sorocabana

On Sundays at 1100 am the Sala holds a regular free Matinais concert. The house rules – no eating or drinking, no wearing of shorts, no clapping between movements – suggest an educational remit for this joint State and Federal government project.

Former open-air courtyard of the Estação JP

Last Sunday the Sala hosted the Orquestra Sinfônica de Santo Andre, under the baton of Carlos Eduardo Moreno. The traditional programme – Beethoven’s Fifth, a bassoon concerto by von Weber – showed off this regional orchestra to perfection. Strong instrumental playing and a beautifully controlled ensemble responding vivaciously to the Maestro’s reading gave a capacity audience some spine-tingling moments.

Concert platform

The acoustic is indeed excellent. While the glories of the 1920s neo-classical building are preserved, the main focus of the restoration was the sound: the suspended adjustable ceiling, the sound-absorbing floor, the ‘air lock’ entrances, the thermo-acoustic roof, the placing of the seats, all were designed to optimise the flow of sound. US specialists Artec created an auditorium in 1999 which eliminated the noise of passing trains. The trains no longer run, but the acoustic is outstanding, crisp though not too dry, and the hall is a pleasure to run your eyes over as you enjoy the music.

Orquestra Sinfônica de Santo Andre in action

The enthusiasm of the 1500-strong audience confirms the wisdom of this spend, an investment in the long-term health of Sao Paulo’s musical life. Yet this miracle of a concert hall is just a few blocks away from the current Metrô station, the Estação da Luz, and the desperate and destitute who frequent the Jardim da Luz over the road.

Campanile of the Estação JP from the Estação da Luz

Searching for the Sala, we mistakenly parked alongside Luz, and asked the locals who had appeared from nowhere for directions to the Sala. They indicated the Estação da Luz, and suggested we should pay them to look after the car, to prevent it from being scratched. This being a fact of Sao Paulo life, I gave them R$10 as we got out of the car. It was then that we were told that the Sala was a few blocks walk away, in the other direction. We drove on wiser and they R$10 richer. The contrasts of life in Sao Paulo were thrown into sharp relief.

http://www.osesp.art.br/portal/paginadinamica.aspx?pagina=salasaopaulo

www2.santoandre.sp.gov.br/page/1524/34

Edson Louzada, Artista Plastico

Saturday night in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro. The street market is in full swing, stalls everywhere in the grounds of a local institution (we never did discover what it was), high above the traffic of the street. On sale are handicrafts of all kinds – lace and embroidery, wooden, metal and ceramic ornaments, clothes of all kinds and for all ages, sweet and savoury food, and above the terraced gardens where the stalls are pitched, a rudimentary bar in a large room. And visual artists.

Paintings are regularly on sale in street markets in Brasil, testifying to the strong visual sense of the Brasilian culture. In Praca Republica in Sao Paulo on Sundays, here in Santa Teresa in Rio, in Praca Benedicto Calixto on Saturdays in Sao Paulo, fine artists, amateurs and decorators jostle to attract the eye. We stop at a pitch on the corner of a terrace, occupied by Edson Louzada.

Edson Louzada’s calling card

A genial presence with curly white hair, he appreciates our attention and talks freely about his work. Pop artists – Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Peter Blake – are clearly his artistic forebears. He’s a Paulistano retired from advertising to paint, and to enjoy the Rio lifestyle. Many of his works are homages to the Warhol full-face portrait, executed in the large-scale comic-book style which Lichtenstein popularised. Warhol’s portraits had a tongue-in-cheek element – photo-booth portraits, and large daubs of bright silk-screened colour, to accentuate the ‘famous for fifteen minutes’ style of his clients. In Brasil the celebrity portrait has reverted to iconic status, and Louzada’s work fits the bill. He needs to sell.

Something else attracts my eye. He has used another kind of icon. The statue of Cristo Redentor, “the world’s largest Art Deco statue”, is floating in a field of mixed-media images. Postcards, newspapers, tourist snaps and scraps of musical score draw your attention to and fro, skimming over a comic-book Cristo which both embraces and shrugs at Rio life – the hillside favelas and the richly-stuccoed ceilings of the ancien regime, the coastline lights twinkling against the silhouette of the Sugarloaf, the smooth young limbs of carnaval dancers and the handguns of youth crime (POW! really does mean POW!), yellow Santa Teresa trams and black-and-white pavements,  futebol  and  choro  music.

“Corcovado”, tecnica mista, Edson Louzada, 2012

Fraud, dengue fever, politics, violence and pacification are yesterday’s news aging on fading newsprint. You may take Cristo’s gesture for a fatalistic ‘whatever’ raising of hands except that, in best comic-book tradition, top right a bright yellow aeroplane flys a banner the colours of the Brasil flag proclaiming “Basta de Corrupção!!! “Enough corruption!” Again, an artistic style which has come and gone in the West is reinvigorated in Brasil. Pop art, murals and graffiti, jazz, soap opera – they breathe new life in the Southern hemisphere.

When you ask someone here “How are you?” they reply not with a British “Not too bad” but with a Brasilian “Tudo otimo!” “Everything’s grand!” Given the optimistic energy of Brasil, perhaps they will be able to address the problem of political ethics with new vigour.

P.S. Edson Louzada can be reached at louzadapop@gmail.com. Every Saturday and Sunday evening between 6 and midnight he is at the Avenida Atlântica market on the central reservation – the calçadão – on the beachfront in Copacabana in Rio. He’s at posto de salvamento 5, opposite Rua Sá Ferreira.

Bar Brahma, SP Centro

This bar is clearly a Sao Paulo institution, and it knows it. “Founded in 1948 by German Henrique Hillebrecht” as the web site has it, the downtown bar has witnessed much of Sampa’s history, and played its part in its rise – music, food, political debate – and decline, closing in the neglect of the 1990s which seemed to afflict much of Sao Paulo’s Centro. The substantial turn-of-the-century Edificio Independencia office block of which it is the ground floor stands empty now. The landmark Copan Building around the corner experienced a similar rise and fall. See  http://theproverbial.org/2012/08/04/feijoada-copan/

The management imagines Sao Paulo’s Bohemian set “thankful” and “reverent” at its resurgence in 2001 “on the most famous corner of the city”. It claims an enticingly varied musical and gastronomic offering. Quite a reputation to live up to. Tonight the music comes from Paulistana roots sambista Carolina Soares, who appears regularly.

What we have here is a music emporium. On the Boulevard terrace, the traditional Riverboat’s Jazz Band – trumpet, banjo, washboard, euphonium – complete with straw boater hats and red or black sleeve suspenders play New Orleans tunes for the punters while the parking manobristas drive away and return cars. They are playing as we go in, and still in full swing two hours later. They’re good, even with the over-familiar tunes.

Riverboat’s Jazz Band, “considered one of the foremost traditional jazz bands in the country”

Inside, a singer-guitarist is the first sight to greet you from a high stage. As you go further in, you notice access to an upstairs area – lounge? Internet cafe? tourist information point? all three? – as you thread your way through to the Salão Principal where the main act performs. Handsome thick dark green tiling curves away down a service corridor. The main room is already crowded and, without a reservation, a table beside the service entrance is the best you can expect. Nevertheless the carpaccio salad was good and the service attentive.

Salão Principal, Bar Brahma, Sao Paulo Centro

A choro group  – cavaquinho, mandolin, guitar and pandeiro – play the familiar repertoire well, though the PA obscures their sound, and the crowded room of birthday celebrants, drinkers, diners and dancers pay scant attention. Called Choro Brejeiro – Provocative Choro – they also appear here regularly.

By the reaction of the audience, the main attraction is undoubtedly Caolina Soares. She makes a striking entrance, buoyed by an instrumental build-up from her band and setting her stamp on the evening with her presence. Tall and Juno-esque, she sways and turns gracefully in an eye-catching yellow-gold figured silk gown which she clutches and twitches as she performs.

Sambista Carolina Soares with band. Note goofus player.

She too is a Sao Paulo institution, a regular performer during carnaval and at the Sambódromo, who also tours internationally. The crowd knows the lyrics well and sings along as she praises the girls from Rio Grande do Sul, and sings of love and desire. This is MPB (Musica Popular Brasileira) with a samba tinge.

The Bar is expert at giving its customers what they want: they also operate bars at the Aeroclube Sao Paulo, the capital Brasilia and now in Alphaville in Sao Paulo. They run a samba school and events such as a vinyl record collectors’ fair at the Sao Paulo Centro bar, and lest you fear they are too MOR, the cutting edge Sao Paulo jazz venue Jazz Nos Fundos programmes live music for them in the adjacent smaller Brahminha. Bar Brahma is indeed as described, “a franchise model developed by the premium new business division of Ambev”.

Paying the bill at Brahma: beer, bar and franchise

Ambev? “A subsidiary of global brewing company Anheuser-Busch InBev and the biggest brewery in Latin America and the fifth in the world.” (Wikipedia). And the name? An Anheuser-Busch brand, “Brahma is a Brazilian beer, originally made by the Companhia Cervejaria Brahma which was founded in 1888.” Bar Brahma is part of a global business, not just a corner bar with good beer and a samba singer.

Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro

Brasil is hip. Time Out London publishes a Sao Paulo edition, Macy’s New York has a Brazilian month, Rock in Rio and now ArtRio are international hits  http://riorealblog.com/2012/09/13/artrio-snowballs-into-a-draw-far-beyond-carioca-dreams-the-second-time-around/ , the Forbes September 10 cover girl for a feature on “The 100 Most Powerful Women” is Brasil’s Presidenta Dilma Rousseff. It is time for Brazil to be discovered. Again.

The Impressionist view of Santa Teresa

We Flew Down to Rio and danced The Carioca in 1933. Peggy Lee sang “Caramba! It’s the Samba” in 1948. We sighed over The Girl From Ipanema in Astrud Gilberto’s accented English in 1963. US New Wave singer David Byrne produced a number of Brazilian music compilations – 1989’s O Samba is very good. It’s no accident that we know Brasil through the music of this most musical of nations.

Teatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro, opened 1909, restored 2010

In reality, Brasil has always developed independently and prolifically. The Rio de Janeiro of the 1920s and 1930s rivalled Paris and London for sophistication, with broad boulevards, grand architecture, modern art (see Semana de Arte Moderna  http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semana_de_Arte_Moderna )

Exhibition curated by Mário de Andrade and the Group of Five, image by Emiliano di Cavalcanti

and the disposable income which made it possible, in the time of the ‘café com leite’ political settlement of coffee barons and cattle ranchers.

In the old capital Rio, Time Out tells us that “the more adventurous tourists” make their way up the hill to Santa Teresa. Rio is full of such hills, from the morro do Corcovado (Hunchback Hill) on which Cristo Redentor stretches out his arms, to the lesser-known hills which are home to the favelas – originally meaning villages – where Rio’s poor find a place to live. As in Wales, you move down to the better locations as soon as you can.

The view enjoyed from Cristo Redentor

When you take the 014 bus from Centro up the cobbled hill to the Santa Teresa neighbourhood, the ride is exciting – you feel the tyres scrabble for purchase as they slide across the granite setts. The bright yellow trams which were a distinctive feature of the area are being renovated … or has the service been withdrawn because of a fatal accident in 2011? Probably both, if the usual Brasilian story prevails. Expert at making a virtue of necessity, they are proud of their ability to find a way through (um jeitinho). And are the trams really called bondes because when they were introduced they advertised the attractions of European war bonds?

Prosperous from the foot of the hill

You look down on landmarks such as the tent-like canopy of the Catedral de São Sebastião as you ascend.

Downtown from uptown

Amid the mix of crumbling infrastructure and abundant natural growth, you notice something else.

The call of nature must be obeyed

As well as the usual Brasilian signs of enterprise – a dress-maker displaying her wares in a villa window –

Not just dummies

you see that this has been a prosperous suburb for many decades. The 1910s Art Nouveau villas are examples of their type just as beautiful as in Paris, Brussels, Palma or Montevideo.

Villa, Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro

Yes, there are trendy restaurants, and more established places too.

Interior of the excellent Bar do Mineiro, Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro

And the smart money is already here – properties are being bought and renovated, no doubt with the World Cup and the Olympic Games firmly in mind. When I took a closer look at the beautifully cast brass of this Art Nouveau door furniture, the jobbing builders came out to enquire what it was I wanted.

Door handle, Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro

Even the graffiti seem to have a delicate spiralling beauty, compared with the directness of the work you see in Centro. Poets come and sell their self-published work while you are out at dinner. The Saturday evening street market boasts as many fine art painters as crafts stalls.

Santa Teresa mural art, Rio de Janeiro

Santa Teresa has been a Bohemian artistic retreat for many years, a heritage of which the locals are rightly proud. How comfortably it sits alongside the neighbouring favela I could not be sure on my first visit. Sitting on the terrace of the bed-and-breakfast villa overlooking the pool, watching a troop of monkeys scamper along the roof ridge, swing into the garden trees and on up the street, I could not help but decide on a return visit to the beautiful city of which Santa Teresa offers such an alluring prospect. I’m sure I am simply the latest in a long line of admirers.

View from the terrace of the comfortable Villa Laurinda, Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro

Little Richard

I’ve been listening to early rock and roll, and marvelling at how some of those artists still sound fresh now, and how influential they have been. The best example: Richard Wayne Penniman, who can’t have been in any sense little, beyond childhood.

He acknowledges jump blues man Billy Wright as an influence, and you can see and hear the resemblance – upswept quiff, sharp suits, heavy driving beat – but Penniman turbocharges the music and the look. Above all, he makes a show of his performance. He also borrowed heavily – the look and the piano style – from another artist of the era, the forgotten Steven Quincy (SQ) Reeder, known as Esquerita.

Tracing acknowledged musical influence is relatively straight-forward – for example from Little Richard back to singer Brother Joe May, who only ever sang gospel, but was heavily influenced by Bessie Smith, as well as by gospel singer Willie Mae Ford Smith. You can do the same going forward in time – it’s hard to find a rocker not influenced by Little Richard’s example. Penniman’s look and showmanship was a big part of his act, so tracing those influences can also be illuminating.

Other influences, just visually … Bob Dylan’s make-up on the Rolling Thunder Revue …

Liberace’s piano playing style, and dress sense …

… Elvis Presley …

… also Jerry Lee Lewis …

… or is it Ray Charles?

… as well as Elton John …

… Janis Joplin …

… James Brown …

Iggy Pop

from http://www.wallcg.com/

Michael Jackson

Prince

… Boy George’s hairdo …

His influence is enormous …

And then there’s the people who have actually worked with him, like the young Jimi Hendrix …

… or his peer Chuck Berry.

The King of rock and roll. Here’s a reminder of how good he sounded, back in 1955 Lucille

Back to Bourbon Street

Bourbon Street, the purpose-built Sao Paulo jazz club named for the street in New Orleans, calls one of its cocktails a Hurricane. Reason enough for it to be empty, but this Thursday holiday evening it was so empty that the upstairs balconies were closed. Sao Paulo is ‘travelling’, fleeing the metropolis for more scenic points – on the beach at the coast, in the mountains in the interior, to the attractions of Rio, anywhere but in the metropolis, which those who are not Paulistanos say drives them crazy. So who was there last night?

Entrance to Bourbon Street Moema, Sao Paulo

The club is a large dimly-lit auditorium, with tables on two levels on the ground floor, a dance floor in front, and upper balconies curving around both sides, supported by slim cast-iron pillars. At the back is a bar, at the front a deep stage, lit from behind through glass brickwork set into the curved back wall. A DJ plies his trade from a balcony. Lighting and sound, played a little too loud as usual, are modern and high-quality. The venue is both public and intimate

Directed to a table under the watchful portrait of Ray Charles, we sat following the patrons dancing to a Brasilian soundtrack. The lively crowd took to the floor readily, more so when Orquestra SAGA arrived  http://www.orquestrasaga.com.br/SAGA/Home.html. They’re a biggish band dedicted to playing Brasilian dance hall (gafieira) music, fronted by Gabriel Moura, son of musician Paulo Moura (for more on Paulo Moura see http://theproverbial.org/2012/07/21/musical-nation/ ). The band is well-connected with previous generations of Brasilian musicians, playing with some of the most famous – singer Seu Jorge, percussionist Wilson das Neves, singer Fabiana Cozza, trombonist Itacyr Bocato. The name of the band? Sociedade Amigos de Gafieira.

Interior Bourbon Street Moema

The couples danced well, the women waiting to be asked by the men and occasionally dancing alone, the men squiring their partners expertly around the spacious dance floor. Many of the dancers knew each other well, perhaps belonged to a club (SAGA?), we concluded, attracted by the gafieira soundtrack. But others in the audience danced just as willingly and as well, and here too, more women than men. All ages, shapes and sizes, some of the men wearing hats inside, in the current fashion, even while dancing. Older men generally were neatly dressed down, the younger ones favouring a more working class look – jeans, and white Tshirts under open checked shirts, or perhaps a striped polo shirt. The hats may be in homage to the SAGA brand – panama hat and co-respondent shoes, though I didn’t spot the shoes.

Orquestra SAGA vocaliste Flávia Menezes

Women, on the other hand, had taken the opportunity to dress up – keyhole dresses, or off the shoulder, with laced-up backs, big hair, some also sporting impossibly high heels even for walking, let alone dancing. None more glamorous than the Orquestra’s singer, whose dress was an alluring confection of dark rose pink, the banded satin serving both to reveal and to conceal in the time-honoured way. Her singing partner Moura – fawn hat over his dreadlocks, ‘unstructured’ buttoned jacket and tie – clearly favoured the working class look.

The music and dancing both excellent, there was an infectious warmth about the occasion which made you wish for more of the same, not just as a ‘preservation’ event but as a regular night out, not only booked for a night when the bar was likely to be otherwise empty, but as popular as in the Rio de Janeiro of the 1930s in which gafieira arose.  http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gafieira   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gafieira

House band at Estudantina in Rio de Janeiro, where the gafieira revival began in the 1980s

The Life of a Sprite

Beautifully detailed Italian Sprite Boy 1955

In the early 1940s the ‘Sprite Boy’, an elf-like cartoon figure, made his appearance in magazine ads for Coca-Cola. He was created to help associate the term ‘Coke’ with Coca-Cola. (For some time, the company fought the idea of using the word Coke to refer to Coca-Cola.) The Sprite Boy wore two hats, a bottle cap and a soda jerk’s hat, to represent Coke in the bottle and Coke at the soda fountain.

French Canadian sprite boy 1944

There was a vogue for elfin figures in advertising. Kellog had three little elves, Snap, Crackle and Pop, to promote Rice Bubbles. Esso used a little white sprite figure whose head, in the shape of a pale yellow drop of oil, also had the same upswept hair style. The Coca Cola Sprite Boy was created by staff artist Haddon Sundblom,

Official ‘repro’ decal for soda machine

also responsible for the iconic Coca Cola Father Christmas.

Happy Christmas

From rusty signs in small town America

Causeyville, Mississipi

to Main Street

Sprite Boy as apparition

and on to the world of antiques and collectibles

Plywood die-cut sign, 1940s

the Sprite Boy has taken on a life well beyond his advertising career, a kind of Robin to the Batman of Father Christmas. The Sundblom version of Father Christmas defines our vision of him, exported to the world as the red-suited gent, courtesy of Coca Cola.

Ink blotter 1950s

In the same way, the Sprite Boy has become a minor icon in his own right, not only connected with his beverage,

US collectible phone card

though he has been enlisted for non-commercial work before now.

War Sprite Boy 1943

(from History of Coca Cola in Brasil at http://jipemania.com/coke/1940/ )

The Sprite Boy was generally disembodied, only hands and face showing

1948 Walter Lantz animation, never produced

and seeming to take on the characteristics of the host country.

The Sprite Boy in Belgium

The Sprite Boy in Mexico

The Sprite Boy in France

Endorsed by the Italian Navy?

I recall him as a decal on the glass door of the Flash Gelateria in Hindley Street in downtown Adelaide in the 1970s. As for his product, I remember being thrilled in the 1960s to win a whole crate of Coke as a prize in an essay competition. And afterwards I could take the bottles to the local ‘deli’ (shop) to claim the deposit. The essay? It was about my visit with the school to … the Coca Cola bottling plant. We treasured such things as branded bottle openers from these visits too … we had some from small local competitor Woodroofe’s, makers of Woodie’s Lemonade, another childhood elixir.

No Sprite

In business terms, the Coke Sprite Boy advertises the reliability of his product. Just as with Macdonald’s, you know what you’re getting.

Quality Sprite Boy

He is to be trusted.

Stencilled Sprite Boy tin sign, US auction

Or is he? An internet search suggests that he is generally regarded with affectionate nostalgia, a reminder of a bygone innocence, but some http://jadetora.blogspot.com.br/ find the image repulsive, in much the same way as clowns have become a ‘scary’ image.

Outliving the physical artefacts,

Early 1950s Sprite Boy – http://www.flickr.com/photos/mshutch/4220129536/

the image has its own appeal and goes on with its own life in our collective memories. Where have you seen the Sprite Boy?

Um Festa im Bela Vista

An annual street festival running since 1926, the Festa de Nossa Senhora Achiropita happens on every weekend in August in the Sao Paulo neighbourhood of Bela Vista. This area alongside the business district of Avenida Paulista is also known as Bixiga. Debates about the origin of this name (bladder? smallpox? balloon?), the exact boundaries of the district, the origin of the largest population group (Calabria? Naples?), the claim to be Sao Paulo’s best night life district (or is it Itaim Bibi? or Vila Madalena?) suggest a lively and disputatious local culture. During Festa, Rua 13 de Maio is crowded with sightseers, loudspeakers blaring Italian popular songs (“Volare – oh oh – cantare – oh oh oh oh”)

Rua 13 de Maio, any weekend in August

The street decorations glitter in the floodlights, the crowds crush into the open street between the stalls. Many are selling the legendary fogazza. It’s described as savoury stuffed pizza dough fried in oil – the stuffing may be spicy cheese or meat. There were more people queuing on the street for it than there were passers-by. Going into the church of Nossa Senhora Achiropita seemed a more inviting prospect.

“Not by bread alone”

Communal life has always been important in Bixiga. An immigrant area, Italians became the dominant group early last century. Their influence can be seen in domestic and street architecture, cuisine, local music and especially in the church and its social welfare provision.

Nossa Senhora Achiropita supports local charities with the proceeds of the Festa, organises food for the destitute, creches, an educational service, and Afro-Brasilian-style worship in the church.

The venerated Madonna hails from Rossano in Calabria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossano_Cathedral , an area famous for its marble and alabaster. Sao Paulo was given special permission to dedicate a church to her.

Italian-style social life is thriving here too. Restaurants and bars or cantinas abound. It’s as though a slice of Italian village life  has been transported to Sao Paulo entire.

Cafe des artistes …

Some have been here longer than the Festa itself.

Named for the town near Naples, established 1907, and proud of it

Visitors to the Festa seem subdued, queueing numbly for food in lines behind barriers, pounded into submission by the exuberant sound track, its lyrics lustily sung by stall holders. Strangely, there are no musicians to be seen. At intervals along the street, security guards keep a watchful eye on the crowds from elevated platforms. Bixiga has a reputation as a safe neighbourhood, and clearly wants to keep it that way.

At the top of the street, on the edge of the Festa, young sex workers and their pimps drink a mixture of soft drink and cachaca (sugar cane spirit) around a portable music system. Past the police barriers at the bottom of the street, a slightly wilder festa can be found. Two musicians sit playing inside a makeshift structure – cage? stage? Floodlights and follow-spots on the balcony of a three-storey building opposite illuminate a group of performers beside the musicians.

Street theatre musicians

Actors, both men and women are dressed in flamboyant white gowns, and they wear radio microphones, their dialogue broadcast far and wide. They are followed by a camera-woman. What she shoots is projected onto the building opposite the floodlights.

The performers declaim, playfully stop the slow-moving traffic, and move through the crowd, disappearing and re-appearing while the camera follows them. A red balloon escapes and floats into the night. A bursting red suitcase stuffed with red clothes is carried tragically away. I’m told the target of their satire is the political class. I haven’t seen multi-media street theatre like this since the 1960s.

Their street their theatre

And in the church, another kind of theatre. It’s a riot of brightly painted colours simulating coloured marbles, a humble echo of the richly decorated Catedral da Sé de São Paulo in the same parish, of which the mosaics, the marble and even the organ are the work of Italian artisans between 1913 and 1954. Nossa Senhora Achiropita could well have been their local church.

Carved marble cartouche, one of 16 around the altar, Catedral da Sé

A pair of folk musicians sing a well-meaning but mournful-sounding duet with guitar accompaniment – some things seem the same the world over. A well-spoken priest describes Achiropita’s history and mission, moving seamlessly into a Christian service in the comfortably full church.

Interior, Nossa Senhora Achiropita, Bela Vista, Sao Paulo

And who is the miraculous Madonna, Nossa Senhora Achiropita, invoked in the service? Appropriately in this minor miracle of a painted building, she is the subject of a wall painting in the Rossano Cathedral, a Madonna and child “supposedly discovered in the cathedral plaster and not painted by human hand” (Wikipedia), hence ‘a-chiro-pita’. From this perspective, the humble Achiropita seems as impressive as the mosaics and statuary of the capital’s Cathedral close by.

The work of 20th-century Italian artisans, Catedral da Sé

A Picture = 1,000 Words

In Brasilian culture, the visual sense is very strong. Street art and graffiti are everywhere, as regular readers will know. In Vila Madalena today – famous for its murals in “Batman Alley” – the annual street fair had all the usual attractions, but the striking street art is so common it goes unremarked. Why was I taking this picture? people seemed to be wondering. Why not what was going on up there on the stage?

Eyes on the stage, Rua Fidalga, Feira Madalena

One street fair attraction new to me was car customisation Brasilian style. The artist had parked this utility vehicle in the cordoned-off street, covered the windscreen with cardboard, and was concentrating on his spray cans. Was it a moving billboard, a commission, an action art piece? Not sure, but it was eye-catching.

Custom paint job, Sao Paulo style

Everyone carries cameras to record the life around them, whether it’s a choro band – the excellent Choro Blue  http://www.choroblue.org.br/ – playing on the street fair stage, or their own photogenic daughter dancing to them. A well-specified SLR camera is almost as common as a cel phone camera on these occasions.

Instituto de Música Choro Blue setting up

Visual stimulation is appreciated everywhere in this built environment. Something comes to mind: where does the graphic style – bright colours, thick black outlines, conscious interaction with architecture – come from?

Popular young choro,samba and dance musicians being filmed in action

Could it have escaped from here?

Window of the Congregação das Irmãs Passionistas church, Rua Conego Eugênio Leite

Improving literacy is (still) a concern for state education, and a politician may be elected to office literally without being able to read or write. You can imagine that in a pre-literate culture, the stained glass of the churches telling the Biblical stories provided the blueprint for today’s more secular work in this intensely religious country.

Arte Naif Rio

The Brasilian Museum of Naive Art in Rio de Janeiro  http://www.museunaif.com.br/ is an overlooked little treasure house at the foot of the hill – Corcovado – on which the statue of Cristo Redentor stands with its arms spread wide. A pleasant villa beside the rack rail tram terminal for the journey to go up Corcovado, it sees a tiny fraction of the visitors to the statue. But it is very much worth a look.

Tiled veranda floor, Museu Internacional de Arte Naif do Brasil

To be sure, Corcovado is a visual delight. You can see why Tom Jobim’s jazz standard  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8pmAGjqMU4  spotlights it. The views of Rio from its heights are breathtaking.

Rio de Janeiro at the feet of Cristo Redentor: “Que lindo … “

Rio’s natural setting and its flora and fauna are memorable.

On the steps to the Corcovado summit

Monkeys in residence in an abandoned hotel on the way to Corcovado summit

The paintings in the museum, though not always well lit, are a fascinating international cross-section of naive art.

The British representative work

They range from works which take their cue from the high art tradition

Married (casada) Couple

to more lyrically abstract pieces,

Iracema Arditi, Azulzinho (Little Blue),1972

from the documentary

The Australian contribution

to the quirkily poetic.

Eve Vic, Suriname, Cuidade com a cobra (Beware of the Snake)

But whether they portray animals or people, at work

Market, Kenya, 1996

or at play,

House band at Estudantina – not playing musica Brasileira the night we visited

they do what all good art can do:

View of Rio, detail

they transform the way you see. Truly worth a look, if you’ve already made the journey to or from Corcovado’s more well-known art work.

World’s largest Art Deco sculpture

http://www.museunaif.com.br/

Life imitates art. Tourists photograph themselves in the same pose at the summit

Regeneração / Gentrificação

Ex shop fitting

Down towards the Marginal Pinheiros, one of Sao Paulo’s ring roads, the street is being dug up. Drainage is being renewed, curbs and surfaces relaid, traffic re-routed. It displaces the locals and confuses the visitor – it seems a sign of something afoot in this suburb.

Gentrification in action on the top floor STOP PRESS Road being re-surfaced

In  nearby areas, properties are renovated, chic boutiques open, restaurants flourish: the growing middle class is bringing prosperity to these city suburbs.  The area is mixed use – a mobile phone supplier below, rented residential above, a seamstress next door.

Judging by the sign, this has been for sale for some time.

Everyday life is disrupted by such development, and the old neighbourhood living patterns broken up.

Displaced fruit vendor still trading

The traces of earlier waves of development are evident. Against local opposition, housing was removed in the late 1960s to make way for the extension of Avenida Faria Lima. Outlines of buildings remain, street art forgotten and overgrown.

Avenida Faria Lima

Sometimes a vista is newly emphasised – a church hoves into view, the foliage of a tree is highlighted.

Waiting for the tarmac

This modern gem seems safe, being a university building.

Universidade Paulista (UNIP) law school building …

The water tower is pure War of the Worlds.

… with … is it a Martian Tripod on the roof?

Complete with green street art

It seems clear that small-scale street life is to be dwarfed by the beautiful behemoths of corporate Brasil, although gallery art is included, as in the Instituto Cultural Tomie Ohtake.

Torrre Faria Lima, and Torrre Pedroso de Moraes housing Instituto Cultural Tomie Ohtake

The corporations support local initiatives like this river water purification project and park hard by the Marginal – and if you could smell the river, you’d understand.

View from Praca Victor Civita

The decking is suspended above layered beds, where maize and bio-diesel plants grow, and rain and river water are filtered. Businesses display their CSR (corporate social responsibility) credentials with pride – there’s a sponsored ‘green school’ with an education and cultural programme run by the Sao Paulo city Prefeitura.

Verdescola and other social responsibility opportunities

The destitute and the yoga class mix warily under the gaze of the towers. Such disparity of opportunity jars. Is this truly the best that can be done?

Sao Paolo Street Life

Sao Paulo lives on the street socially. The apartment blocks, ‘vertical villages’, have meeting rooms for parties and so on, and you chat to your neighbours in the lift and the lobby, but spontaneous social intercourse is much more likely on the street. You may have exchanges at the taxi rank or ponto (if you can tear them away from their chat, their water coolers, their telephones and their TVs – yes, even at the taxi rank), at the paderia or delicatessen, even at the shop where you bought something. I shook hands warmly with la patronne at the local upholstery shop as I went by. http://theproverbial.org/2012/07/14/a-brasilian-eye/  Good to see that her advertising is bearing fruit.

Soft tree bearing fruit

Beggars ply their trade, some with crutches which are clearly props, some just as clearly physically less able. People – mostly men, but some women too – sleep on the street by day or by night. They may be destitute – it’s the habit for the better-off to give them small-denomination notes, both philosophical about their stations in life. The less destitute may use a handcart to collect cardboard, wood or metal for recycling. They tend to sleep under their carts at night, singly, in couples, or with a dog. Many of them are from the north-east, drawn to Sampa by the prospect of paying work. Prostitutes work at stretches of road where traffic jams are frequent. I’ve even seen eggs being fried in a well-used spot outside the local supermarket, and a portable stove in use on a central reservation.

View from the under-storey – folded cardboard on a handcart foreground

If you sell fruit and vegetables and there’s street renovation going on, you set up around the corner until it’s finished.

Road works and  displaced  street trader, Rua Sumidouro

Other trades work on the street too. Sellers of bottled gas make their rounds with a specific, musical fanfare, hauntingly repeated. Street traders are not restricted to markets – around a building site they sell hand tools and hardware, in the park refreshing agua de coco. At traffic intersections when the lights are red, vendors offer football club merchandise, fruit, drinks, sweet and savoury snacks, flowers, umbrellas … and if it sounds like a circus, yes, there are buskers too – jugglers, clowns, unicyclists, living statues, even one evening a pair of very amateur acrobats (if standing on your sister’s back counts) neither of whom were yet teenagers.

The knife sharpener makes his rounds regularly.

Pedal power, Avenida Pinheiros

Although Sao Paulo is overwhelmingly motorised, cyclists are active even during the death-defying rush hour, and on Sundays many make the journey in groups to the largest park, Ibiripuera, to ride around its leafy cycleways. Cycling campaigns run regular cross-town rides, or are they demonstrations? One night I stood on the corner for more than ten minutes while campaigning cyclists rode by, bells ringing insistently, LED headlamps flashing in disjointed syncopation, and ride marshals over-riding the traffic lights, stopping the cars at intersections to allow the cyclists through. There must have been hundreds of them. The city cycling club which I saw today were celebrating their fifteenth anniversary.

… and all of them with the yellow jersey, Rua Teodoro Sampaio

Traditional attractions remain. A street vendor had taken up his pitch opposite the busy local supermarket, his hurdy-gurdy cranked by hand, with a bright yellow cage on top. I asked if I could take his picture and he agreed. At the music his green parrot squawked and whistled, emerging untethered to see what it  could see. It regarded my out-stretched hand coldly and retreated to its perch. Disregarding his keeper’s warning, I whistled and stretched out my hand again, receiving a well-judged bite for my troubles. We agreed it could easily crack nuts, but its final response sent me laughing down the street. At my second overture, it went indoors, and pulled the door closed behind it in a well-practised action. Its opinion of Sao Paulo street life was clear.

Brasileiro both

P.S. What I hadn’t realised was that for two reais, this is also a form of telling your fortune. The parrot can pick a folded slip of paper from a drawer under the yellow cage, which it ‘kisses’ before it’s taken by the vendor and given to you. The drawer is divided into compartments for men and women. And your fortune includes a lucky lottery number for you. A wise old bird.

Fortune teller

Orquestra Pinheiros

At the Clube Paineiras do Morumby, a large private members club in the prosperous and leafy Sao Paulo suburb of Morumbi, the Orquestra Pinheiros gave their tenth anniversary concert, a programme of jazz standards and show and film tunes. The club itself  http://www.portal.clubepaineiras.com.br/site/ is 52 years old, a large social, cultural and sports club, built on what was once a tea plantation established by Englishman John Rudge after 1808.

Roof over the restaurant

The club still has something of the plantation about it, set on an expansive sloping site, the open-air dining area crowded with tables under umbrellas, reminiscent of closely planted tea bushes. The lights of Sao Paulo’s ‘verticalisation’ twinkle on the horizon.

Morumby alfresco 

The club house is built with the familiar Sao Paulo raw concrete.

Ferro-concrete, tile and neon arcade, Morumby

It’s enlivened with colourful tiling and paint, and plays with the inside / outside boundary, apposite for a sports club.

Clube Paineiras Morumby: inside view from outside

The concert takes place in the Cineteatro, where the stage hosts the 35 musicians plus technical support. Later, guest vocalists will  share the stage. It’s an impressively large group which can make a big sound. Murilo Alvarenga, our genial maestro, also sings and is responsible for tonight’s orchestration too. He’s one of the few professional musicians in this group; apart from one or two sitting in, this orchestra plays for the love of it, not the money, practising twice a week. And Sr Alvarenga too is clearly here for the love of the music. His enthusiasm for it is infectious as well as educational, and the audience respond strongly.

Audience for …

As the programme unfolds, they nod in time and tap their feet to the music, occasionally voicing their enthusiastic approval.

… Orquestra Pinheiros …

By the end, they award the musicians a standing ovation and an encore for the last number, the song Sway, composed by Mexican bandleader Pablo Beltrán Luiz in 1953, and most recently popularised by Michael Bublé.

… swaying in Clube Morumby’s Cineteatro

Vocalists Ana Tagliannetti and Rita Valente have fun with their response to the lover’s scenario in the lyrics, bringing this good-natured evening to an enthusiastic close. You wonder if tackling it in Spanish might have added to the fun … here’s the composer’s version, from a 1977 performance for TV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hti_DB9nyZM&feature=related

Feijoada Copan

Lunch at the Bar da Dona Onça http://www.bardadonaonca.com.br/ on the ground floor of the iconic Copan building in Sao Paulo Centro. Being Saturday, lunch is feijoada, a black bean stew with various cuts of pork – rib, sausage, crackling, ear – and traditional accompaniments like farofa (toasted manioc flour to sprinkle on top), rice and pickles, as well as more unusual accompaniments like banana, mild chili and orange segments, which work well with the heavy fatty cuts of pork. The decor is a stab at period edgy (not original) which works quite well.

Interior of Bar da Dona Onca

But the star of the show is the Copan building, which you see as you approach through traffic, a wave in a sea of rectangles. It’s a huge edifice, 30 storeys at least, with room for 5,000 residents in apartments of various shapes and sizes. Undergoing refurbishment, it’s a recognised architectural landmark by a world-class architect – Oscar Niemeyer – though I have some sympathy with the Paulistano view that “like everything he did, it’s good for taking pictures, but lousy to live in.” (Regina Rheda)

The Copan Building by Oscar Niemeyer from street level

The district around it is full of architectural interest, from the circular tower of the ex-Hilton Hotel …

A hotel, once

… to detailing like this op-art tiling on the alley-way entrance of a neighbouring building.

Down the alley to the neighbours

But the Niemeyer is the Oscar-winning star turn. Gradually abandoned as a central business district and prime residential address in the 1960s, in favour of Avenida Paulista for business and the Jardims for home, it still has the presence to impress, like the Niemeyer-designed Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói in Rio de Janeiro.

Beautiful setting, startling space-age building, Niteroi

That building looks striking, but it doesn’t work well as a museum – awkward entrance, especially when raining, an exterior gallery with blinding reflected light over the water, and artificially-lit gloom in the circular interior – and you ask yourself what the sinuous shape of the Copan means for the internals of its apartments. This is bravura architecture, playing to the strong visual sense of the Brasilian culture, and able to be railroaded through without the hindrance of the cautious UK planning system. Here, function follows form. It says something for the aesthetic sense of Brasil’s elite – not to mention their social awareness – that these are iconic buildings. It’s undeniably and impressively beautiful, and a welcome change from the rectangular.

A hulking beauty

It makes a thought-provoking comparison with what was built 25 years later in Rotterdam: http://blog.padmapper.com/2010/07/28/22-futuristic-apartments-you-need-to-see-to-believe/ striking and futurisitic, but on a smaller scale, and reportedly more user-friendly. What can Brasil do in the same vein? The next few decades will be interesting …

Architect Piet Blom’s tree houses, 1982

Lips Page

On the cover of his 2008 biography by Todd Bryant Weeks

Oran ‘Hot Lips’ Page was an outstanding trumpeter, singer and band leader of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. A background in the roots of jazz in the 1920s – he played in backing bands for vaudeville, circus and minstrel acts – took him right through to the emergence of jazz as an internationally recognised music in Europe. He was of course mindful of Louis Armstrong, but also acknowledged local musicians from Texas and from Kansas City as influences on his trumpet style.

His vocal influences are no less impressive – Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox – and you can hear something of their shouting and wailing style in Frantic Blues, a track from New York City in 1944, recorded while he was leading the house band at the Apollo Theatre.

Hot Lips Page & His Orchestra NYC 1944

The tenor sax breaks are by Lucky Thompson, a regular collaborator. And the shouting and wailing doesn’t stop when Page picks up the trumpet!

Public Sculpture Brasil

A first glance at the public sculpture of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro suggests that the strong Brasilian sense of the visual is as evident here as in graffiti and street art, and indeed in everyday life.  http://theproverbial.org/2012/07/14/a-brasilian-eye/  From the turn of last century, sculpture decorated functional public buildings …

Entrance to Mercado Central, Sao Paulo, with bandeirantes seal above

… as well as the more usual cultural buildings …

Ticket window, Teatro Municipal, Rio

… and public monuments to the great …

Bandeirante pioneer Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva, Parque Trianon, Sao Paulo

… and good …

Chief Scout Lord Baden-Powell, Praca Republica, Sao Paulo

… whether or not the inscription is in Brasilian Portuguese.

Architect of Italian unity, Jardim da Luz, Sao Paulo, República Federativa do Brasil

At times, the public work is quite exotic …

Street lighting near the Arcos, Rio Centro

… while domestic sculptural decoration is sometimes more restrained …

Cast iron, Santa Teresa, Rio

… and at times less so.

Furniture at the Museu da Casa Brasileira, Sao Paulo

A country for which the national symbol is a statue …

Cristo Redentor, Morro Corcovado (‘Hunchback Hill’), Rio – largest Deco sculpture in the world

… can be expected to have a tradition of studying classical sculpture …

Sculpture Gallery, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio

… certainly as plaster copies.

Copy of Greek warrior, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, for use in art classes

Not just a public monument, domestic sculpture also turns up regularly in museums and markets.

French bronze, Museu  Nacional de Belas Artes

Religious sculpture, like this Jesus and Joseph, is widely used …

Interior of Carmelite church, an ex-Imperial chapel, Praca Quinze de Novembre, Rio

… both inside and outside …

St Francis, Catedral de Sao Sebastian, Rio

Detail, St Paul, Praca da Se, Sao Paulo

… and on a small scale as well as larger than life-size.

Devotional figures, Last Supper, including Judas, Museu da Casa Brasileira, Sao Paulo

Funerary work is also strong; graveyards are a riot of statuary. More pictures to follow. UPDATE –  see  http://theproverbial.org/2012/11/19/sao-paulo-necropolis/  and  http://theproverbial.org/2013/01/30/return-to-necropolis/

Actors’ gravesite, Necrópole São Paulo

Quasi-religious statuary can also be found …

Sphinx guarding Grand Lodge of Brasil, Rio

… as can more public celebrations of the arts …

Maestro Carlos Gomes outside the Teatro Municipal, Rio

… and of leading figures from other religions and cultures.

Praca Mahatma Gandhi, Rio. The Mahatma is a revered figure in Brasil

After helping the Portuguese to expel the French, Araribóia founded Niteroi in 1573

Civic leaders …

Faria Lima, Sao Paulo mayor from 1965 to 1969, on the road named for him

… and journalists are today’s subjects …

Statue commemorating newspaper journalist, Jardims bairro, Sao Paulo

… along with the occasional abstract art work …

Red Moon, Jardims, Sao Paulo

… but in a city of rectangular apartment blocks and offices, when the cars stop outside the sculpture museum MuBe (Museu Brasileiro da Escultura http://mube.art.br/ , these are the kinetic, highly-coloured sculptural objects they are stopping to photograph and admire.

Lamborghini showroom, Avenida Europa, Sao Paulo

Monday Night Musicians

Monday night is when working musicians have the night off – bars are closed, restaurants recover from the weekend trade – so what do working musicians do? They play music! Tonight the Movimento Elefantes collective hosted an evening of big band jazz.

They were playing at the Teatro da Vila in Vila Madalena in Sao Paulo, a venue so obscure that the taxi driver hadn’t heard of it, though he knew the names of all the streets. It’s the modest theatre space for a local public school just off Rua Rodesia, Escola Estadual Carlos Maximiliano which, threatened with closure, established a community and arts programme to maintain its viability.  http://teatrodavila.org.br/

Setting up at Teatro da Vila

Movimento Elefantes is a group of 10 big bands, dedicated to keeping big band jazz alive and appreciated. My musician informant tells me that there were well-known players from the heyday of Paulistano big bands in the 1980s in the audience. Some of them sat in with the band tonight for various numbers.

Banda Jazzco at play

Jazzco is hosted by its genial bass player Amador Bueno, who keeps the good-humoured quips coming as dependably as he drives his bass. The 12 band members – four saxes plus flutes, two trumpets and a trombone in the brass section, and keyboard, rhythm and bass guitar, drums and percussion – shape a tight and intricate music, hard-driving and adventurous in its harmonies. The drummer delights in playing not just with colour and volume, but with time signature too. The short solos each player took between his breaks were a particular delight.  http://movimentoelefantes.com/bandas/bandajazzco/

Popular bar, popular music – corner of Rua Rodesia and Rua Jerico

The band asks the audience to contribute what they think is a fair price at the end of the night – the appreciative capacity audience in this small theatre clearly thought it worth much more than the price of a beer. The customers in the Mercearia Sao Pedro across the road enjoyed the music too!

Ton Ton Jazz

“Ton Ton Jazz and Music Bar” says the logo …

Out to see the Paulistano ‘little big band’ Patavinas Jazz Club at Ton Ton Jazz http://www.tonton.com.br/ in Moema, Sao Paulo. It’s a night-life district near Shopping Ibiripuera (not near the park of the same name), where venues like Bourbon Street Music Club also ply their trade. The moody black-and-white photographs on the walls may show acknowledged US jazz greats, but in truth, jazz becomes a broad label here. Bourbon Street hosted a very tight US funk band recently, and the second act last night at Ton Ton was Banda Funk Five. The longest line was outside the club opposite, for an 80s and 90s rock night.

Ton Ton Jazz interior

What they have in common is live music – Sao Paulo is crammed full of it. The antiques market at Praca Benedicto Calixto features a beautifully sweet choro ensemble every Saturday afternoon. Even my local supermarket (!) regularly plays host to live music – I’ve heard a guitarist and a keyboard player live there on different occasions.

Ton Ton Jazz is the long shed I’ve come to expect in Sao Paulo, with a bar at one end and a stage at the other, a loud PA plus three distracting video screens, but the food, the drink and the service are fine.

11 playing on stage – the Patavinas line-up

Patavinas Jazz Club http://www.patavinasjazzclub.com/ is led by guitarist Andre Hemsi. Along with their keyboard player, he composes much of the band’s repertoire.  They’re an entertaining spectacle, though they don’t sport the choreographed movements of a massed brass section, big band style, despite the music stand logos. The interplay of the musicians, and their evident enjoyment of their ensemble work and solos, is what lights up the stage. The keyboard player stands out, even though he’s at the back – he looks like Jack Teagarden, and he plays as sweetly. The daring of his invention can be breath-taking.

Andre Hemsi is the other half of the band’s motive force. He’s a fluent and wide-ranging stylist, stepping up to solos with assurance, and just as strong in support. With the rock-solid rhythm section behind, the front line take their solos with aplomb, whether long-time members or stand-ins. And it’s good to see a woman playing jazz, trumpet in this case.

In a sense, the most impressive factor doesn’t dawn on you until later: these are all original compositions. They range from reggae through swing to bebop, tackled with panache and vigour. The Brasilian love of music nurtures this musical culture, with little regard for the boundaries between genres. Jazz is alive and well, and living in Sao Paulo!

Rio & Sampa Graffiti

The art of graffiti is in rude health in Brasil, certainly in its two main cities. Nothing like an exhaustive survey follows, just a few snapshots, but the variety is astounding, as is the quality. Free street art has never looked so good!

Sometimes you just glimpse it from the car as you go past …

… and sometimes it’s built to the same scale as the skyscrapers.

Sometimes the image uses its architectural setting …

… or the setting can simply provide a bare surface …

… whether buildings or street furniture …

… or simply a wall. A cartoon style predominates, but …

… artists also use complex visual textures, and play with the setting’s colours.

P.S. Here’s the same wall five months later. Same spidery line, same integration with surrounding colour. Subject: Christmas tree?

Near Largo da Batata, December 2012

This excellent piece on Rua Riacheulo in Rio uses an effective mix of styles …

… while this one in Rio’s Santa Teresa sticks with simpler graphics, and ignores setting.

Even at night under artificial light …

… and perhaps being a group effort …

… (reading right to left) …

… the impact is memorable.

It may have been there a long time but …

… when you go past again, it’s worth another look.

The Yellow Line

On the Sao Paulo Metro underground rail service the Yellow Line or Linha Amarela serves the Faria Lima station. It’s been open for two years, serving a mixture of offices on Avenida Faria Lima, and smaller businesses and residences around Rua Teodoro Sampaio. A busy station, it is designed to connect with bus services which go through the terminal nearby, though much of the development of the surrounding terrain is still to be done.

A long queue for buses; helicopters clatter overhead, afternoon rain clouds mass

It is the first Sao Paulo line to be built privately. Delays caused by accident – a tunnel collapsed – and subsequent investigation and, it’s said, by the slow process of compulsory purchase, have also affected the opening of the next station at Pinheiros, still under construction.

Police and traders share welcome shade at the Faria Lima bus terminal

The stations and trains are up-to-the-minute, with glass platform barriers (like the Jubilee Line in London). Rolling stock is supplied by Hyundai. The architecture makes good use of raw concrete and brightly coloured tilework and signage. The lighting is bright without being intrusive.

Ticket barriers, Faria Lima station

Travellers pay a flat R$3 fare, insert the ticket in the barrier and pass through the turnstile. Season tickets use RFID. A simple system which seems to work smoothly.

Platform Faria Lima

The station is cool and clean, people move quickly but without stress. The carriages are bright, with stainless steel grab rails, plastic and fabric seating, advertising screens and service announcements.

Light shafts, Paulista station

Rolling walkways connect with other lines. One stop up the line is Consolacao and Paulista, an interchange station. Here too the architecture is spacious and bright, with plenty of visual interest.

Up to street level exit onto Rua da Consolacao

At the exit looking back

Looking down the light well

If all the lines are built to this standard, Sao Paulo has reason to hope that its infrastructure problems can be addressed, before, during and after the Olympic Games and the World Cup.

Platform tunnel, Paulista

Your journey takes you not just from station to station but from the old Sao Paulo to the new, and back. Integrating the two without losing the charm of the old or the convenience of the new is the challenge to which Sampa’s planners need to rise.

Faria Lima station exit at dusk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_4_(S%C3%A3o_Paulo_Metro)

Sampa Skyscrapers Again

Apartment tower being prepared for repairs, Pinheiros

Walked down to the Faria Lima metro station today, to go up to Consolacao – named for the cemetery – for its lighting shops. I’m collecting images of Sao Paulo’s towers, struck by the variations on the ferro-concrete box which I discover. It’s starting to become a habit, perhaps an obsession … staring up at the buildings, or worse, photographing them, I get strange looks. Don’t mind, when the visual environment above street level is so rich. The netting they use during refurbishment puts me in mind of the ‘wrapping’ works of visual artist Christo.

Heaven knows the facades can look blank – any colour welcome! Consolacao.

Three more variations on ways to disguise the box mentioned before ….

Exuberant tiling, and no windows, on this facade, Concolacao

Random air conditioning, with open windows and angled facade, Consolacao

Departing from the strictly rectangular, near Faria Lima

Much of the build at Consolacao is post-1945. Sometimes individuality is asserted in a very low key way …

Owners probably of Japanese origin, graffiti script in distinctive Sao Paulo style

…and sometimes it’s right up front.

Lighting retailer, Rua da Consolacao

The area has good examples of both residential and commercial architecture.

Feature timepiece, and sliding shutters

Some buildings ARE in dire need of disguise, but some are gems.

A tattoo-like graphic to hide the skeleton under the concrete  skin.

How can I resist looking up? Keeping one eye on the traffic …

Elegance meets Brutalism

More on Sao Paulo skyscrapers and other Brasilian architecture at

http://theproverbial.org/2012/07/18/sao-paulo-skyscrapers/

http://theproverbial.org/2012/07/22/more-sampa-skyscrapers/

http://brasilart.org/2012/07/19/trophy-towers/

http://theproverbial.org/2012/06/21/reading-compulsive-architecture/

Antiques Market SP

Living statue, Feira de Antiguidades MASP

At the Museu de Arte Sao Paulo (MASP) every Sunday, scores of antiques traders set up their stalls for the buying public. (For more on what happens at MASP, see http://theproverbial.org/2012/07/15/human-canvas/ .) They have been doing so for more than 25 years, and the public come in their thousands. The stalls take up all the cobbled space under the museum. A craft market has sprung up over the road in front of the Trianon park, which boasts its own antique, the last remaining shred of the original Sao Paulo flora, the Mata Atlantica.

Italian 1920s statue of bandeirante pioneer outside Parque Trianon

The market is organised by the Association of Antiquaries of Sao Paulo state (AAESP), and the antiques are of high quality. It’s noticeable that the stock has Brasilian characteristics. Some objects – spectacle frames, knives of all kinds, religious artefacts, fine art glass, optical goods, watches and fountain pens – stand out for their plentiful supply. Naturally the more usual jewellery, antique prints, silver, porcelain, fine fabrics, and coins, and ‘classic’ modern objects like telephones and tin toys, also make an appearance. This market is more ‘fine art’ than the Saturday market at Praca Benedicto Calixto, though a good number of traders sell at both.

At both markets, the fine art objects are often European – English and German silver, porcelain and cutlery, French bronzes and glass – while Italians feature in Brasilian public sculpture and church mosaics. Popular and nostalgic objects – vinyl and CD music, books and posters, toys, a little furniture – are  mostly Brasilian, as are the crafts.

French bronze torchere, from an estate or fazenda in Sao Paulo state

We are of course seeing the past. It sheds light on how Lula, Brasil’s previous president, made such an impact when he encouraged Brasilians to be proud of their own country, and how it might be politically possible to sustain the high duty and tariff barriers for imported goods. In Australia we used to have what was called the ‘cultural cringe’, with reference to the UK. That’s long gone, and it isn’t much in evidence in Brasil with reference to Europe, except perhaps in these traces of the past.

More Sampa Skyscrapers

Interesting to see what an impact even a small deviation from the straight and vertical achieves: these three are all on Avenida Paulista, a premium Sao Paulo address where architects are given presumably a little more leeway, not just a cost / return target.

FIESP (State of Sao Paulo industry organisation) headquarters

This one off Paulista is hidden behind the rectangular, but its curve stands out

Curving up and away from Paulista, it has banks, lawyers and airline tenants

All a long way from the view of this naive artist in the Museu Internacional do Arte Naif in Rio though; the vision is more like a scaled-up row of Greek villas. Will we be brave enough to move beyond the palette of sombre grey, beige and off-white in our corporate building? See http://brasilart.org/2012/07/19/trophy-towers/ for an example of one Brasileiro architect who has.

from the collection of the Museu Internacional do Arte Naif do Brasil in Rio

http://www.museunaif.com.br/

Musical Nation

By the time he was 9 years old, Moura knew he wanted to be a musician

Went with friends to listen to a tribute concert for Brasileiro woodwind player and composer Paulo Moura organised by his widow Halina Grynberg, as part of a programme supporting an exhibition she has curated about his musical life. The venue is the Pompeia SESC in Sao Paulo.

Interior, SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo

The SESC Pompeia theatre is in the old factory buildings on the site, rather than in the swish new purpose-built towers. The imaginative re-use of industrial space, with seating, a central open fire, and a sculptural water feature, is striking enough, but the theatre space is more so, with two sets of raked wooden seating facing each other, and the stage at the centre of the industrial shed.

Centre stage, SESC Pompeia

Moura played with US jazz greats – Cannonball Adderley – and with Brasileiro maestros – Sergio Mendes – as well as with classical stars – Leonard Bernstein – in a long career which spanned the international rise of samba and of bossa nova. Tonight’s programme features a quintet of pianists on four, yes FOUR grand pianos. They have all played with Moura at various times. The lids of the grands are placed at the four corners of the stage, their sombre black adding a funereal reminder that this is a tribute.

Four of the five pianistas – Lima, Taubkin, Sverner, Korman & Tiso

The melodies these tunesmiths play are standards from the choro, samba, and bossa nova repertoires, by Moura and other Brasilian composers. They play in an astonishing range of styles, from Brahms, through Debussy, to ‘piano bar’, and reaching back to ragtime and forward to bebop. A deluge of notes is hammered out to a rapt and attentive audience. The evidence that Brasilian musical styles are just as wide-ranging and flexible as any jazz or classical idiom is authoritatively set out, underpinning the credentials of this most musical of nations.

Young Carioca musician with instruments and technology

I remind myself that one of tonight’s composers, Chiquinha Gonzaga, scandalised the polite society of her day with her interest in and support for the choro music which we revere here. The question crosses my mind: will we sit and listen in 50 years time to the baile funk music which is currently banned in the Rio favelas, in the same attentive way?

For more on funk in Rio, see http://riorealblog.com/2012/07/15/funk-baile-dance-begins-to-make-a-return-to-rio-favelas/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Moura

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_moura

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/SESC_Pomp%C3%A9ia

http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/programa_new/busca.cfm?palavra=moura&busca_tipo=1&x=0&y=0&sel_idioma_header=

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiquinha_gonzaga

Sao Paulo Skyscrapers

The old Sao Paulo is surrounded. The ‘vila’ houses are still evident in side-streets, dwarfed by the towers of offices and apartments. They command a premium price, although fears about their security also feature.

Rua Irmao Lucas

On the busy thoroughfare of Avenida Faria Lima, office blocks jostle with shopping centres. Begun in the late 1960s, Faria Lima was built at the expense of older residential districts (even more so than Avenida Paulista in the CBD). It is a showcase of Brasilian architecture of the era.

Parking station (estacionamento) on Avenida Reboucas, near Faria Lima

The Brasilian habit of vertical gardening softens the occasional outline …

Planting, Faria Lima

… though other ways to disguise the ferro-concrete box include tile work …

Tile facing, Faria Lima

… concrete mouldings …

Window frames, Faria Lima

… coloured window film …

Angled casements, Faria Lima

… or perhaps something unintentional. Landlords may stop their tenants from installing outside air conditioning units.

Individual air conditioning, Faria Lima

There’s an occasional homage to early US skyscrapers …

Retro-styled block, Faria Lima

… but only the sleekest, chic-est towers depart from the plain rectangular. (More on Ruy Ohtake at http://brasilart.org/2012/07/19/trophy-towers/)

Torres Pedroso de Moraes & Faria Lima. Brasilan architect Ruy Ohtake for Aché Pharma

The tower blocks advance steadily on low-rise housing.

View from top floor, Shopping Eldorado, Avenida Reboucas …

As night falls, darkness and lighting soften their outlines.

… “um vista cartão postal” according to the waiter …

The lights of passing cars, aeroplanes and helicopters animate the scene.

… at Hiro Restaurante Japonês; recommended.

The hum and roar of traffic plays a low continuo for the city, never completely asleep.

Estacionamento, Avenida Reboucas, by night

Jardim da Luz

The view from outside the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo

Standing outside the Sao Paulo state art gallery, it’s as though the city is trying to make a point of its own about art: this enormous mural on the side of a nearby building seems to say “Art is everywhere, not just in there!” as the groups of guided children are escorted in.

The building itself, once a vocational school for the applied arts, has been ‘made over’ sensitively, and houses a fine collection of painting and sculpture, as well as putting on a programme of events, and an education programme. The cafe is decent too.

The restored Pinacoteca building

On the day we visited, an American flautist was setting up the sound equipment for a piece in which she used a delay to repeat her phrases so that she could accompany herself, on a quartet of flutes of different sizes. It made for a mesmerising sound, echoing across the glass-roofed interior and around the raw brick galleries.

Flautist and delay, Pinacoteca Sao Paulo

The gallery is set in the park of the Jardim da Luz, better known as the haunt of drug users and prostitutes than for its 19th century function as a botanical garden. Nonetheless it is a pleasant public space, complete with gravelled walks, statuary, pools and fountains, and an elegant art nouveau bandstand. On the day we were there, the group of men at its base were absorbed in their dice game. You had the impression that all the aspects of its heritage were still in full swing, except perhaps the music.

Playing in the Jardim da Luz

People sat on benches in the dappled sunlight, enjoying the relative quiet and fresh air, walking with their young families, or taking a break from work. The mature planting cast cooling shade over it all.

Mature bamboo in the Jardim da Luz

Across the road, the iconic English-designed Scottish-built Estação da Luz rail and metro station geared up for the home time rush. Ironically, the Museu da Língua Portuguesa language museum now housed on its first floor was not signed at all. Another time perhaps …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jardim_da_Luz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinacoteca_do_Estado_de_S%C3%A3o_Paulo

Human Canvas

from http://juliapetit.com.br/

On a recent visit to Sao Paulo, New York artist Deb Berman mounted her piece Human Canvas outside the Museu de Arte Sao Paulo (‘MASP-y’). It’s an invitation for passers-by to paint on her white clothes, and on her skin. She was concerned that they might not participate; little chance of that!

Underneath the MASP arches

MASP is suspended on two huge red right-angled arches. The cobbled open space beneath is a natural venue for public art. Street traders sell ethnic bracelets, artists show and sell their work, and buskers play, the building acting as their sound shell. A little dog wanders around, the occasional eccentric shouts and dances to the music. The space swallows it all.

Afternoon traffic streams by on Avenida Paulista

Avenida Paulista is at the heart of Sao Paulo’s business district, so there are plenty of passers-by. They gather in knots of ten or twenty to watch, and to pick up a brush. Most are travellers and tourists; the businessmen are still in their escritorios. People pose beside their handiwork, smiling and giving the camera the thumbs-up. Almost everyone joins in.

Eyes on the human canvas

More photos at http://brasilart.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/human-canvas-photo-post/

A Brasilian Eye

Soft Tree, Pinheiros, Sao Paulo

The Brasilian visual sense is very strong. Walking back from the supermarket, I came upon this novel way to advertise soft furnishings. Coupled with the jazz standards broadcasting from her pickup truck, this struck me as typically inventive Brasilian visual play, just as evident as in the murals and graffiti. And it works well as advertising too; I bought three cushions from la patronne, a carioca who lives in Sao Paulo away from her family for her business.

Soft Tree Close Up

P.S. Here’s what she does with the tree for Christmas!

Soft tree December

Bad Boy

The malandro or bad boy is a recurring figure in Brasilian culture, an anti-hero who lives by his wits, on the edge of the law. His standard costume is a white suit, collar and tie, and white Panama – ironic, and smart. Here he is in Rio street art near the Arcos viaduct – which you can see in the painted background – wearing a sardonic grin.

Malandro, Arcos, Rio centro

Malandro, up close

And here he is in the Museu Internacional de Arte Naif do Brasil, at play in the carnaval.

Carnaval malandro

In this photo on the back of David Byrne’s excellent O Samba compilation (Luaka Bop / Sire 9 26019 – 2, H Armstrong Roberts Inc) he’s a singer. I haven’t seen him in Sao Paulo yet …

Singer, O Samba (Luaka Bop 9 26019-2) back cover

Samba composer and carioca da gema Noel Rosa pursued the lifestyle and feted the role in his work. There’s a sweet side to this character – listen to a Rosa choro (Ione Papas, Ione por Noel, Dabliu Discos DB 0084) Choro mp3 and I can’t help but smile – though the illegality has a darker side, of course. How much of this bad behaviour (malandragem) and the related ducking and diving (jeitinho) is in response to the corruption in Brasilian society to which everyone alludes? Or IS it the corruption?

Updates on the changes occurring in Rio for the Games and the Cup at Julia Michaels’ blog give you reason to hope – she’s an American carioca with an axe to grind about it.

http://riorealblog.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malandro

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeitinho

Mermaid

Keeps turning up in Brasil, the goddess of the sea; here she is as a mermaid in the Museu Internacional de Arte Naif in Rio, at the foot of Corcovado, where Cristo Redentor above spreads his arms wide.

Mermaid, papier mache, Museu Internacional da Arte Naif, Rio

Inside the Cristo Redentor statue, a shrine to Nossa Senhora Aparecida, patronne of Brasil, expectant mothers, newborn children, gold, honey, beauty, rivers and … the sea.

Banner, Restaurante Sobrenatural

And here she is (twice) in the excellent Rio fish restaurant Restaurante Sobrenatural.

Shrine to Iemanja, Restaurante Sobrenatural

Altar, exhibition on Mario Andrade, Museu Afro-Brasil, Sao Paulo

Blog followers may recall that she turned up at the Sao Paulo exhibition about Mario Andrade in a previous post.

http://theproverbial.org/2012/06/26/brazil-1920s/

http://www.museunaif.com.br/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iemanja

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Aparecida

http://www.restaurantesobrenatural.com.br/index.html

Mark Knopfler’s guitars …

“Inspired by his uncle Kingsley’s harmonica and boogie-woogie piano playing, he wanted to buy an expensive Fiesta Red Fender Stratocaster just like Hank Marvin’s, but had to settle for a £50 twin-pickup Höfner Super Solid. … One night while spending some time with friends, the only guitar available was an old acoustic with a badly warped neck that had been strung with extra-light strings to make it playable. Even so, he found it impossible to play unless he finger-picked it. He said in a later interview, “That was where I found my ‘voice’ on guitar.” …. Knopfler has estimated that he now owns “around 70 guitars”.”

Adulatory (compare with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Knopfler ) but informative BBC documentaries on You Tube. And doesn’t he look so 1979 in this picture?

Bass Saxophone, Adrian Rollini!

At the Madeleine Jazz Bar in Vila Madalena in Sao Paulo  http://www.madeleine.com.br/ on Thursday they were trying a new programme last week: five (yes, five!) saxophone players, with an upright bass and drums for a rhythm section. Two altos, two tenors and a baritone made a glorious wall of sound. It was as if the horn section of a big band had broken off and floated away. Standards both jazz and Brazilian were set out with exemplary elan.

Adrian Rollini playing bass saxophone

I was pleased to be able to direct the baritone player to Adrian Rollini’s playing. It suggests he is still less well-known than he should be; time to spread the word! And to help, here’s the man’s Orchestra, with Adrian himself on bass saxophone and on vibraphone, in March 1936, when he was playing the Tap Room at New York’s President Hotel. The tune is his too, Swing Low .

Praça da Sé

In the middle of the Plaza of the See of Sao Paulo stands the Catedral Metropolitana. Outside the cathedral is a recent statue of St Paul; sightseers like to sit at his feet.

“The church is Mark ‘0’ in city which all streets in city has a reference to it, beginning all count numbers to the nearest point to this square and increasing to farest outside point. ”

http://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=10918

“The crypt has the tombs of all bishops and archbishops of São Paulo. Of special note are the bronze tombs of two important historical figures: Father Diogo Feijó and the cacique Tibiriçá. Feijó was regent of Brazil during the infancy of Brazilian Emperor Pedro II. Tibiriçá was the cacique (chieftain) of the Guaianaz tribe who, in the 16th century, welcomed the first Jesuits to the Piratininga Plateau and whose aid made the foundation of São Paulo possible.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Paulo_Cathedral

Traffic grinds past, the destitute pause on the cathedral steps, the city cleans the pavements with a power wash truck. A line of palms march away down the hill. In the distance, tiny figures squat on an abandoned half-built block, perched at the top of an unfinished stairway.

Brazil 1920s

Saw an exhibition at the excellent Museu Afro Brasil showcasing Mario de Andrade, one of the pivotal figures in the Brazilian modernist art movement Semana de Arte Moderna. The piquant contrast between the 20s deco style and the Afro-Brasilian objects such as this carnival ‘altar’ furnished with pearls, roses, blue dolphins and a figure of the godess (Deusa dos Orixas in the candomble pantheon) gives a flavour of the rich mix which continues in Brazil.

Reading Compulsive Architecture

Drinks at the fashionable (or as they say here, “chic-y”) Hotel Unique. By day it alludes to a slice of watermelon – Japanese Brasilian architect Ruy Ohtake also used an ‘inverted’ solid for his Instituto Tomie Ohtake – but by night it’s more science fiction: overcast sky lit by apartment towers on the horizon, traffic streaming by in the rain, no obvious access – you just drive in over the gravelled frontage – and an army of men in dark clothes to park your car and direct you. In at the doorway on the right, you enter a dark space and a dim and sombre lift. City views from the lift as you ascend. You step into a short passage lined with back-lit panels of translucent stone, and into the bar.

You walk past the on-show kitchen where final prep is done, to the bar – copious spirits and mixed drinks. It’s like a busy party; a booking of businessmen having a drink before dinner, Australian travellers, Paulistanos, staff threading their way through. Past the bar you step up through glass doors to a glass-walled rooftop terrace with swimming pool. Beyond the glass walls, spotlit planting suggests desert.

The view is Sao Paulo impressive – set in a little valley crammed with buildings to the horizon and beyond. Communications towers wink and glow. The decking gleams in the rain, table umbrellas offer shelter.

And when you come back down to ground level, the world seems slightly duller by comparison. You want to go and stand by the giant upright, lit with colour and soaring up to the apex of the curve, sheathed with wood underneath, echoing the shuttering pattern on the ferro-concrete. The excitement of this architecture is compulsive.

Urban Life Soundtrack II

Pinheiros Street Life

Another, strange sound at 4:30 a.m. had me puzzled for a while. Not central heating pipes banging; don’t have any in my apartment block. Not sex; keeps coming back at intervals, but for too long. Got up to use the bathroom, saw the silhouette thrown by the security lights which explained it. Someone in my block gets up at 4 or so to exercise, in running gear, up and down the car parking area around the apartment block. Not in the uninviting streets, but running the length of two apartments, up and down. It’s their footsteps I hear, fading in and out. Even in the steady drizzle of Sao Paulo, Cidade de Garoa, as this morning. Dogs are walked on the streets by their maids, or on the weekends by their owners, but this human prefers to run a short circuit.

Rebellion Remembered

Finally got around to solving the problem of the unplayable CDs … two Joni Mitchells and a Kate & Anna McGarrigle, all reissues and from the Warner Bros US stable.  A Google search revealed that they are ‘copyright protected’ i.e. unplayable on my computer’s CD drive, or indeed on a Sony player I tried. With a firmware update download from Samsung, I was able to play some familiar tunes from the 1970s, at long last. Protection from copying still works, but here’s Joni with an early version of one of the tracks from Blue. The instrument is an Applachian dulcimer, with its origins in Europe. Easier to build than guitars or violins, without any complex curves. Legend has it that Bobby D was listening to this album a lot when he wrote Tangled Up in Blue.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQpZXUGRy1U Now she accuses him of plagiarism … is it serious? Who knows? Not even they do … but the reissue of Blue is worth a listen. I also like her nostalgia-for-the-1950s song on The Hissing of Summer Lawns, In France They Kiss on Main Street. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwwdh3mX9g Nothing quite as sweet as rebellion remembered.

Tango Platense

At the  Bárbaro Restaurante, an Uruguayan restaurant in Vila Olimpia in Sao Paulo, the meat is from Argentina and Uruguay, and so is the music. Bandoneón (button accordion), six-string guitar, bass guitar and a selection of singers (including customers!). The professionals know the repertoire well, and so do some customers, being able to distinguish Uruguayan from Argentinian tango, tango from its predecessor, milonga, and traditional tango from nuevo tango. 

As always in Brasil, everyone knows the words and sings along. The musicians encourage the audience to take part, with a roving radio microphone to help. It’s about the music, before the musicians, accomplished though they are. A melody I recognised was composed by the foremost nuevo tango composer Ástor Piazzolla; I knew it from the Grace Jones song, also called Libertango. In all, a gracious and musical evening which would, I think, stand comparison with the cabarets of 1910s Paris.

Piazzolla is an interesting figure, having studied under Boulanger and worked with Borges (pictured), and being responsible for a new musical direction in Argentinian tango. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astor_Piazzolla  Here’s his El Pillete  El Pillete

Urban Life Soundtrack

Woke at 4:00 a.m. but no more sleep was to be had … a compressor on a parked refrigerated truck, a couple having sex in an adjoining apartment, a baby crying, the chatty shift change for the porteiro, a neighbour in high heels, a police siren, the baby again, the truck driving off, a barking dog … and I live in a quiet part of town. I notice that it bothers me less than when I first arrived in Sao Paulo, but still … no, it’s rarely still.

Jazz standards

Sang a few at Bar d’Artur last night with John (woodwinds) and Bina (guitar). Audience seemed to like it; one tipsy customer told me I sang like Chet Baker. I THINK that’s a compliment.

Noticeable is how many (older) standards come from stage shows or more recently film. Who remembers the film The Sandpiper, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor? Only Wikipedia … but when you start playing The Shadow of Your Smile, from that film, the audience sings along.

Also noticeable is how the standards are easy to sing – comfortable intervals, memorable melody – with usually one or two tricky intervals thrown in, to catch attention. Maybe that’s what makes a standard: good songwriting. Here’s the simple Astrud Gilberto version of The Shadow of Your Smile. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn3GA8jmGoU

Jazz Harp

In the 1930s and early 1940s Casper Reardon (1907-1941) was the most sought-after harpist in popular music. A classically trained son of vaudeville artists, he became first harpist of the Cinncinati Orchestra, and head of harp at the Cincinnati Conservatory. Some of his pupils persuaded him to explore jazz music, and he quickly fell in love with the music of W.C. Handy, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington and many more. Jazz on the harp was a previously undeveloped field. When he moved to New York City in 1931, he played in radio broadcasts, phonograph recording, vaudeville and cabarets. At first his name did not appear on records, even though he was the star of the 1934 Jack Teagarden recording Junk Man. He played with George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and others. Casper Reardon’s harp is also heard in some movies, notably dubbing for Harpo Marx in Go West. He was widely known as ‘the swing harpist’.

Here’s the Teagarden number

Casper Reardon

Jubilee

What a long way we’ve come from Derek Jarman’s version! http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2012/03/punk-reverance-jubilee.html Remind me, how did it go? “God save the Queen. Fascist regime … ”

Apart from the outstanding production values – lights, sound, projection, sets, pyrotechnics – and excellent BBC coverage, within the spectacle itself the most striking performances were from Tom Jones and musically from Stevie Wonder. And of course the worldwide coverage always impresses. An audience of millions / billions … now tell me what the message is. The crowd cheered the monarch and support the institution, but the biggest roar was for ‘being British’.

Restauration

Came home from work mightily tired, and not feeling up to cooking. Wandered out, thinking I would go to the local Japanese pizzeria (yes, truly), but it’s shut on a Monday, so I wandered down Rua Francisco Leitão to La Marie www.lamarierestaurante.com.br . Monsieur le patron suggested a dish (cassoulet, with rice), a glass of wine (Toscana) to go with it, flambé-ed my crème brulée, and pressed a digestif cognac on me. I felt like I was being looked after (yes of course, at a price) with skill and attention. I truly did feel restored, and at £30, I can’t complain. La civilisation contient certainement la cuisine. Je suis restauré.

Freddy King

One of the Three Kings of electric blues guitar – with BB and Albert – and also a great blues singer, Freddie King based his guitar style on Texas and Chicago influences.

Born in small-town Texas, he moved to Chicago with his family at 15, hearing Chicago blues played in the South Side clubs. One night he bet his friends that not only would he sneak into the club, he would sit in with the house band and play his box guitar. Freddie won the bet.

Realizing how young Freddie was, the club owner ordered the bouncers to escort him out. Howlin’ Wolf intervened, telling him “The kid is with me”. Howlin’ told Freddie “Young man, you pick that guitar like a old soul.” … “The Lord sure enough put you here to play the blues.” Howlin’ took Freddie under his wing, and taught him how to take care of himself on the streets of Chicago.

The instrumental Hideaway, recorded in 1960 with pianist Sonny Thompson, reached number 5 on the R&B Charts and number 29 on the Pop Singles Charts the following year, unprecedented for a blues instrumental. The title comes from Mel’s Hide Away Lounge, a popular West Side blues club. Freddie sold more albums during this period (1961-63) than any other blues artist, including B.B. King.

Freddie King was repeatedly rejected in auditions for South Side’s Chess Records, the premier blues label, because he ‘sang too much like B.B. King’. He would later say that the Chess rejection was a blessing in disguise, because it forced him to develop his own vocal style.

King and Thompson recorded some thirty instrumentals in the early and mid-60s. Vocal tracks were also recorded, but often the instrumentals were marketed on their own merits. King toured with the R&B acts of the day such as Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson and James Brown.

Signed by player-producers King Curtis and Leon Russell, and playing alongside Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton, King often created guitar parts with vocal nuances.The years after 1970 were marked by a shift to a harder, rock-like style. He also largely quit performing new material, simply covering songs from other blues musicians.

King was in the habit of consuming Bloody Marys in lieu of solid food so as not to waste time when setting up shows. Near-constant touring took its toll – he was on the road almost 300 days of the year. In 1976 he began suffering stomach ulcers. His health quickly deteriorated and he died of complications, and acute pancreatitis, at the age of 42.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddy_King

http://www.freddiekingsite.com/

Here’s a 1962 vocal track on the boundary between soul and blues, written by the guitarist and singer from UK blues band Chicken Shack, Stan Webb. Look Ma, I’m Cryin’

And this is an inventive instrumental by King and Thompson from 1961. ­­San-Ho-Zay

Baluchi carpet

Baluchi carpets (or Baluch or Beluchi carpets) are handmade carpets originally made by Baluch nomads, living near the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. About 70% live in the main part in Pakistan. Smaller groups of Baluch nomads also live in Bahrain, and in the Punjab and Sindh provinces of India.

The carpets are often small with lively patterns, and praying carpets are common. The dominant colours are red, brown and dark blue. The warp is made of wool or a mixture of wool and goat hair; some newer carpets have a warp made of cotton.The carpets sold in the city of Mashad in Iran are known as Mashad-Baluch carpets, and those sold in the city of Herat in Afghanistan as Herat-Baluch carpets. http://www.carpetencyclopedia.com/

Today I bought this 100% wool Iranian one in the city of Sao Paulo in Brazil, bargaining for a good price in the time-honoured fashion. My friend in the literary cafe www.albericorodrigues.com.br said it was a good colour to have in an apartment, a “happy” colour. It’s more red than the photo shows, especially in natural light, and it had the thickest pile of the smaller carpets the dealers had on their stall at the Praca Benedicto Calixto market. And I guess I know something new about John Belushi too.

Cockroaches again

Sao Paulo cockroaches are prolific, verging on plague proportions. You can meet one walking down the street, in your kitchen or bathroom, in the hall … thank goodness they don’t fly! Or perhaps they do … I leave my bathroom window open, but that will change.

One was spotted walking along the cloisters at school; war was declared, with chemical warfare, heavy machinery (well, alright, pumps, and levers for the drain hole covers) and the whole area bounded by a cordon sanitaire – black and yellow striped tape. Kids reacted with predictable “Euughh YUCK!” But you did get the impression of life literally teeming just below the surface, a tile and concrete civilisation with another, crawling world underneath. Apparently this procedure – or at any rate a milder version – is needed just about every week. And they would survive a nuclear blast …

The Bass Saxophone Swings – Adrian Rollini

Adrian Rollini was a jazz multi-instrumentalist who worked from the 1920s (including a year-long stint at the London Savoy Ballroom)  into the 1950s. First famous for playing bass saxophone with the likes of Bix Beiderbecke, he later moved to vibraphone – one of the first to employ a four-stick technique – before retiring to run his own hotels and do some fishing, in Florida.

Rollini introduced other unusual instruments to jazz too: the ‘goofus’ or melodica, and the ‘hot fountain pen’ or chalumeau, a cross between a clarinet and a recorder.

The electrifying effect of his swinging bass line can be heard on tracks like Bix’s At the Jazz Band Ball. Now there’s a gig to enjoy! At The Jazz Band Ball

Moonray (1939 Artie Shaw / Madison / Quenzer)

Moonray,
Cast your spell upon my lover;
Under this starlit cover,
Use all your magic charms.

...

Moonray,
Put an end to all my sorrows,
Bless me with sweet tomorrows,
Bring back my love to me.

This version Moon Ray by Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra (including Ben Webster on sax), and arranged by Wilson, with Jean Eldridge singing, is enthralling. She also sang with Ellington (but can I find a picture of her?!?) YouTube has Artie Shaw, who co-wrote the song, with Helen Forrest singing, but Wilson’s version – he taught at the Julliard  in later years – far surpasses it. It was the B side of a 78 Columbia foxtrot.

Moon Ray               on 78 rpm

P.S. Here’s some of Eldridge singing with what became the Ellington band, then under Cootie Williams’ leadership.

Like A Ship In The Night – Cootie Williams & His Rug Cutters

Mississippi Dreamboat – Cootie Williams & His Rug Cutters

 

Teddy Wilson, quiet jazz giant

Great jazz pianist, played with Krupa, Chu Berry, Ben Webster, Goodman, Lester Young, and especially great work with Billie Holiday. Pianist, arranger, band leader. Beautiful stylist, classically trained. At his best in my view early on, in the 1930s. Here he is with Goodman and Krupa playing in his Orchestra, in LA in 1937. The song -The Hour of Parting – is co-written by Gus Kahn and Mischa Spoliansky, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany.

Image from https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/tag/teddy-wilson/

West Side Story

Me, I get visits from cockroaches, big, fast ones. Scoop ’em up in a cardboard video box, and out the window. No mess. West Side Story Collectors Edition has never been so useful.

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