Marisa Monte: Portas (2021)
Portas reveals that the great Brazilian singer and composer has been working in her own unique and personal sound world for the last 20 years.
Marisa Monte’s latest record, Portas, arrived in early July--on her 54th birthday--more than a decade after her last album of new material. If she began her career jumping around, embracing and assimilating a variety of styles and genres--from samba to pop, jazz and psychedelia--Portas reveals that, with the benefit of hindsight, she has been working in her own unique and personal sound world for the last 20 years.
I first heard Marisa Monte’s Mais in the late 1990s, when I was living in New York. I’d already put together a decent collection of Brazilian pop music from the late 60s and early 70s, but was ignorant of any of that country’s music in the last several decades. At the time, one of my closest friends, Dougie Bowne, suggested I check out her record; he’d played drums on it alongside a few other Downtown musicians I knew, like John Zorn, Marc Ribot and Funakdelic’s Bernie Worrell.
Listening to Mais, produced by avant-garde noise and no-wave legend Arto Lindsay both in New York and Rio, was a bit mindblowing. The record was only a few years old--and even by that time it sounded a little dated--but somehow it didn’t matter. It was definitely a catchy pop album, but one that was made with real care and obvious love for melody and shimmering, chord changes. Some of the songs were almost achingly radio-friendly--if this was still the 1970s or 80s and catchy, earnest, well-crafted pop songs still did business on the pop charts. In 2000, I bought Memorias, Crônicas e Declarações de Amor when it was released, and have eagerly picked up everything she’s done since.
It’s clear that her celebrated 2002 collaboration with Arnaldo Antunes and Carlinhos Brown on Tribalistas saw the creation, for her, of a musical identity she’s continued to mine in different ways. The songs on the album were brilliant, unhurried masterpieces that seemed to be, for a super-group of pop stars, deliberately diminutive.
The two albums she released simultaneously in 2006--Infinito Particular and Universo Au Meu Redor--are justly considered start-to-finish triumphs (which finally received release on vinyl in Brazil this month). If anything, as time passes, her albums are becoming even more like Marisa Monte records: simple, unaffected, warm, and unabashedly beautiful.
She made Portas during the covid pandemic, taking advantage of modern technology that enabled her to collaborate with musicians like Marcelo Camelo, Arto Lindsay, Seu Jorge, Melvin Gibbs and others in Spain, the United States, and elsewhere. Most of the album’s 16 tracks are little gems of three-minute pop songs. The better tracks, however-- like “Medo do Perigo,” “Em Qualquer Tom,” and “Vagalumes”--are dreamy, hypnotic and sublime.
Portas, in fact, is her first record to not showcase her voice, placing it further back in the mix than it would ordinarily appear. That said, you’d have to do quite a lot to hide it. Monte’s voice has always been a thing of wonder, but there are a great many beautiful and striking voices in music. While she’s been naturally gifted with her voice, her genius comes in the exquisite way it’s deployed; from her first hit with “Bem que se quis” in 1989, her style has remained relatively consistent.
To be sure, as a vocalist, she’s made some stylistic detours--from her early explorations of avant-garde distortion and growls on Chico Buarque’s “Samba e Amor” to her evocations of tribal chat on Carlinhos Brown’s very catchy “Segue O Seco.” But it’s been 30 years since then.
Monte’s pure, unaffected voice blooms and swells in exactly the right places, always allowing the note to emerge with little or no conventional vibrato. She’s usually singing behind the beat, but not so much that you’d notice. In addition, her careful attention to breathing, too, and the way in which it appears on record is subtly important to her sound. She’s special because she ignores most of the conventions, like vocal histrionics and affectations, that have come to signify what it means to be a great singer.
It’s possible that, like Gal Costa, the secret to Monte’s style is that she’s a “smiling” singer, something that seems very foreign to the Anglo-American tradition. For many--though certainly not all--Brazilian singers, the end of a sung phrase is often accompanied by a grin. Perhaps the lineage of the blues that washed over the shores of most of the world’s pop music hardened into a pose of detachment--or perhaps there’s something mirthful about the Brazilian psyche, despite the saudade, that reveals itself in popular song. I tend not to look too deeply into these meta-explanations; the aesthetic choice, often, is just that, and can be codified into something approaching a style or a tradition.
In addition to her angelic voice, Marisa Monte was--and is, nearing her mid-50s--both beautiful and sexy. In a way that’s almost anachronistic as a popular cultural figure, she’s neither chaste nor too worldwise. It’s alluring because it doesn’t come off like a pose; it doesn’t seem like a calculated PR strategy.
Her father was a musical director for the famous and historic samba school, Portela. She grew up playing drums and singing with samba composers and musicians associated with Portela like the brilliant Paulhino da Viola, with whom she has collaborated often and whose songs she’s long championed and presented with great affection.
After deciding to become a singer as a teenager, Monte took off to Italy to study opera. While there, she grew home-sick for the music of Brazil, finding that performing the western classical canon wasn’t as satisfying. Upon returning to Brazil, she began putting together a repertoire and focusing on her live performances.
The Brazilian pop music scene of the late 80s was very much like what was happening in North America; the then-current aesthetic sensibility was seemingly built on a conscious rejection of what had come before. Not only had electronic noises generated by synthesizers and drum machines replaced the more organic sounds of 60s and 70s records, but the songwriters and bands of the psychedelic, folk and rock eras were considered distasteful.
Marisa Monte changed that, at least in Brazil. Her choice of covers embraced classic material by Jorge Ben, Novos Baianos, Os Mutantes and Tim Maia, introducing her young audience to some of the classics of Música popular brasileira. Outside the country, her performances and records presaged the later discovery and resurgence of Tropicalia and psychedelic Brazilian music outside of Brazil by people like David Byrne and his label, Luka Bop.
Here is a performance of Jorge Ben’s samba-rock classic “Balaca Pema” in the early 90s.
Where to start? You can really begin anywhere. But a good place to start with Marisa Monte’s music is what’s considered in Brazil to be her best record, 1994’s Verde, Anil, Amarelo, Cor de Rosa e Carvão—known in the US as “Rose and Charcoal.” It captures nearly the whole universe of Brazilian music.
From there, look forward to an excellent bootleg from the 2006 tour, which followed the release of both Infinito Particular and Universo Au Meu Redor. As is customary in Brazil, an abbreviated live album appeared following the release of the studio albums; that one is called Infinito Au Meu Redor. But this video is better.
On the Turntable
Verve’s Acoustic Sounds series just released a beautiful vinyl repressing of Bill Evans’ classic Trio 64, with Gary Peacock and Paul Motian—who would shortly leave the great pianist for Paul Bley’s more adventurous (and far less lucrative) trio. The sound of that stylistic conflict can be heard on these recordings, even as it makes stirring listening. Hearing Peacock and Motian subvert their roles in this piano trio—famous for subverting the trio form with bassist Scott LaFaro only three years prior—is fascinating. It’s enjoyable, too. You can buy the LP at Amazon or elsewhere while it’s still in print.
Very nicely done. Thank you.
Oh man, discovered Marisa from your later post that linked back to this page, thank you so much! And then bam, totally unexpected to discover the Trio 64 | Bill Evans! Bought it off Amazon while it was still playing! Bravo!