Biography
Hermeto Pascoal came into this world in 1936 in the town of Lagoa da Canoa. Volumes of pages could not define him better than Elis Regina when she proclaimed, “He’s a god who was born in Alagoas.”
According to estimates, the musician from Alagoas has composed more than ten thousand songs. The musical scores in this monumental oeuvre feature a broad universe of instrumental formations, from solo instruments to symphonies, big bands, and chamber music.
Hermeto’s production covers the widest possible range that a compositor could achieve in the history of sounds, revealing the continuum between what we could call “elementary” phenomena (water, voices of animals, noises from the human body itself) and “complex” structures (atonalism and polytonality). Between these “extremes” his music includes Northeast Brazilian folklore, forró, choro, bossa nova, jazz, and any object from which this improvisor’s volcanic determination produces sounds.
When Hermeto was still a young boy, his musical aptitude appeared in highly unconventional ways. He extracted sounds from his grandfather’s scrap iron yard and whittled fifes out of castor plant stems to “converse” with the songbirds.
When he was just eight years old, he secretly began to play his father’s eight-bass accordion. When Pascoal realized that Hermeto had the musical knack (and not only him, but his older brother Zé Neto, too), he sold a cow to buy the best accordion he could afford. This soon led to the duet that would come to be known as “Galegos do Pascoal”, drawing enthusiastic crowds in the local dance halls. The youngest “Galego” was already experimenting with different combinations of notes.
Still in their teenage years, the two brothers went to work for the Jornal do Comércio radio station in Recife, where Hermeto joined the regional choro band under guitarist Romualdo Miranda, brother of the legendary mandolinist Luperce Miranda and uncle of Ilza, who became his wife and lifelong companion.
At the Jornal do Comércio radio station, Pascoal’s sons met the prodigious Sivuca (an accordionist and albino like them), with whom they formed the trio O Mundo Pegando Fogo (The World on Fire). Sivuca, who was a little older, was a key influence in expanding the brothers’ repertoire.
The trio disbanded when Sivuca moved to Rio de Janeiro, and Hermeto began playing the pandeiro on the radio (“Little Sivuca of the Pandeiro”). Although he performed well, the instrument failed to meet his restless expectations.
The legendary Jackson do Pandeiro encouraged the young lad to insist and stick to the accordion. Hermeto took the advice, but he was suspended by the radio manager as a result. The station sent him to their branch in Caruaru and dispatched his brother Zé Neto to another town.
Hermeto was still in Caruaru a year later, and by now he had mastered modern harmonies, impressing the veteran Sivuca, who happened to be passing through town. When Sivuca returned to Recife, he was so emphatic in his defense of the rebellious young musician that the station’s administration brought Hermeto back and even gave him a wage increase.
When Hermeto and Ilza moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1958, he joined the Pernambuco Regional Pandeiro group on Radio Mauá, where he recorded the album Batucando no Morro (Drumming on the Hill). For anyone who understood his music’s revolutionary power, it was curious to note the organicity with which the accordionist blended with a traditional choro group.
With an increasingly solid repertoire (fundamentally self-taught), Hermeto now began to play the piano in the Carioca night scene, first with violinist Fafá Lemos’ group and later with flutist Copinha’s orchestra.
The multi-instrumentalist’s self-didacticism merits a more in-depth analysis, beyond this article’s scope. Due either to his near blindness, which prevented him from reading sheet music in his childhood, or for other reasons, the need to teach himself contributed greatly to his development of a new and complex compositional system, open to the world’s random sounds.
The musician migrated in 1961 to São Paulo and the flute, and with it (and the piano) he recorded the album with his new group, Som Quatro, featuring a samba-jazz sound. He soon formed the Sambrasa Trio, which included his composition Coalhada in the album Em Som Maior in 1965. The drummer for Sambrasa was Airto Moreira, whom Hermeto joined in 1966 (along with Theo de Barros and Heraldo do Monte) to form Quarteto Novo, initially to accompany the composer and singer Geraldo Vandré.
Quarteto Novo proposed an advanced treatment of Northeast Brazilian modal material, avoiding the samba-jazz trend among instrumental groups at the time and embracing typically Brazilian improvisation, uncompromising with the music being produced elsewhere in the world.
Speaking of “elsewhere in the world”, rumor has it that the Beatles heard and admired the album by Quarteto Novo, even when here in Brazil, rock ’n roll was still viewed suspiciously by some circles in the cultural left. Based on their nationalist ideals, Quarteto Novo accepted the invitation to accompany Edu Lobo in Ponteio, the prize-winning song of the legendary 3rdNational Song Festival, and to turn down Gilberto Gil in Domingo no Parque, runner-up at the same festival.
However, the fact that Hermeto remained aloof to pop/rock should not be read as a sign of xenophobia. His move to the United States in 1969 at the invitation of Airto and signer Flora Purim was part of the circuit in the vanguard of American jazz. Of course, the musician from Alagoas was even more progressive than the most progressive performers.
When Airto introduced Hermeto to Miles Davis, Miles wanted to record all the Brazilian’s songs, but the reply he heard was, “No, I’m going to record my album, I’ll just let you have three.” Miles thought that was funny, and from then on, he referred to the Brazilian affectionately as the “crazy albino”. He later called Hermeto “the most impressive musician in the world”.
In New York in 1970, Airto and Flora produced Hermeto, an album of orchestral exuberance, ground-zero in the solo discography of that little-known prodigy (who didn’t tell Airto and Flora that those were his first arrangements, because he knew they wouldn’t believe him).
Released by the Buddah Records label, Hermeto featured participation by legends Joe Farrell, Thad Jones, and Ron Carter, who even recruited the orchestra.
In Los Angeles, Hermeto participated in the albums Tideby Tom Jobim and Cantiga de Longe and Mendes Presents Lobo by Edu Lobo. He also composed and arranged most of the tracks on two of Airto’s LPs: Natural Feelings in 1970 and Seeds on the Ground – The Natural Sound of Airtoin 1971.
Miles Davis launched Live-Evil in 1971. The album included the three songs that the “crazy albino” had granted him: Igrejinha, Selim, and Nem um talvez, all credited to Miles! The Brazilian would later refer to the episode with absolute abnegation: “If he said the music was his, it was his.” (Let us recall Hermeto’s more than 10,000 compositions …)
Hermeto, who had never wanted to live abroad, returned to Brazil in 1972 with great fanfare, both lauded by the São Paulo Association of Art Critics as the “Best Soloist” and censured in the performance of Sereiarei at the International Song Festival, due to the presence of an uncommon pair of musical instruments brought onstage to play with the orchestra, namely two pigs. Alaíde Costa, who was performing the song, had her microphone cut off, and she proceeded to hurl it into the audience.
Sereiarei is featured in A Música Livre de Hermeto Pascoal, an LP from 1973 that opens with Bebê, one of the master’s classics, and closes with O Gaio da Roseira (The Rosebush Branch), composed for his father, “Seu” Pascoal, and mother, “Dona” Divina.
In A Música Livre, we can hear Hermeto’s first group (drummer and pianist Nenê, percussionist Anunciação, bass guitarist Alberto, and saxophonists and flutists Mazinho, Bola, and Hamleto) and two orchestras, one with strings and the other with animals. The São Paulo Association of Art Critics acknowledged the genius again as “Best Arranger of the Year”.
The pigs “sang” again in Slaves Mass, the LP Hermeto recorded at Warner USA in 1976. The tracks, all authorial, featured another classic, Chorinho pra ele.
Hermeto’s growing international projection following this work provided him with such memorable events as his show at the 1st International Jazz Festival, in which Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, and Stan Getz insisted on participating.
We’re talking about 1978, the year he released Zabumbê-Bum-Á, recoded with a new band, including not only Nenê, but also Itiberê Zwarg (bass), Pernambuco (percussion), Zabelê (percussion and voice), Jovino Santos Neto (keyboards), and Cacau de Queiroz and Nivaldo Ornellas (saxophone and flute). The participation by Seu Pascoal in São Jorge and Dona Divina in Santo Antônio show that the musician’s cosmopolitanism never overshadowed his down-home roots. It was as if he had found, in sound, the point of convergence for all levels of experience. A kind of aleph.
Live in Montreux, his LP from 1979, captures a moment of consecration of this Northeast Brazilian/universal sound with the audience at one of the world’s prime jazz festivals. It became increasingly obvious that Hermeto’s approach to forró was at least as revolutionary as that of Astor Piazzolla to tango, unveiling a deep Northeast Brazil to the world. For example, the surreal litanies he babbles in Remelexo sound like Antônio Conselheiro receiving the gift of tongues from the top of the Empire State Building. (The simile is insane, but not preposterous: the album from 1984, Lagoa da Canoa, Município de Arapiraca, includes a composition on the War of Canudos).
Hermeto’s unconventional figure gained unavoidable prominence in Brazil’s 1970s cultural scene. The image was that of a Wizard, a Sorcerer of Sounds, or in the words of Elis Regina (who had just shared the night with him at the Montreux Festival in 1979), a “god born in Alagoas”.
Several of the most daring albums launched in the 1970s (Imyra, Tayra, Ipy by Taiguara, Orós by Fagner, and Robertinho no Passo by Robertinho de Recife) were partially or totally arranged by the Wizard. Decades later, Hermeto would claim that “Brazilian popular music needs to go back to ‘playing ball’,” critiquing what he perceived as widespread fear of experimentation.
He demanded experimentation with the authority of somebody who had once transformed his own home in the Jabour neighborhood into a 24/7 creative workshop. Even before his album Cérebro Magnético (Magnetic Brain) of 1980, the home of Hermeto and Dona Ilza had consolidated the group that accompanied him until the early 1990s. In the same neighborhood, Itiberê raised his daughters, Jovino, flutist Carlos Malta, and drummer Márcio Bahia rented their homes, and Pernambuco hailed daily from Madureira. The group-family rehearsed six hours a day, and the master composed without stopping. The home was called the “Jabour School”.
This routine was documented by filmmaker Thomas Farkas in Hermeto Campeão, from 1981.
There was something truly messianic, a certain cult atmosphere around the Champion. His musicians seemed to form an apostolate in a joyous trance. His concerts could last five hours, and nothing prevented them from leaving the concert hall playing wind instruments and continuing to perform on the streets, turning corners, boarding buses, with part of the mesmerized audience trailing behind. As Caetano Veloso sang, they’re the “pascoal hermetisms”.
Hermeto Pascoal & Grupo (1982), Lagoa da Canoa, Município de Arapiraca (1984), Brasil Universo (1985), Só Não Toca Quem Não Quer (1987, when they won the Sharp Award for Best Instrumental Group), Mundo Verde Esperança (1989, not released commercially), and Festa dos Deuses (1992, Sharp Award for Best Instrumental Album), not to mention the film Sinfonia do Alto Ribeiraby Ricardo Lua, are rich examples of the group’s communion.
We find recordings of what Hermeto called the “Sound of the Aura” for the first time in the album from 1984: the harmonic-melodic fixation from excerpts of speech, a procedure he later developed in Festa dos Deuses and subsequent projects.
Since childhood, the speech of people, animals, and objects sounded to Hermeto like atonal music, a determinant factor in his original way of assembling chords and developing harmonies. Suffice it to hear the theme Ferragens (in the album Planetário da Gávea, recorded live in 1981 and released 41 years later) to understand this phenomenon.
As Aldir Blanc and Guinga sang in Chá de Panela, “Hermeto Pascoal gave me the gift to understand that there’s a tone in everything, from trash to an airplane.”
The solo piano album Por Diferentes Caminhos won Hermeto the Sharp Award for Best Instrumental Album of 1988. Pixitotinha, the opening theme, won Best Instrumental Music that same year.
Although the forays into symphonic music by the self-taught genius are virtually unknown, we can watch (on YouTube) the recording in 1986 at the São Paulo Art Museum, of his Sinfonia em Quadrinhos, with the São Paulo Youth Orchestra, and the performance by the Campinas Municipal Orchestra of his Suíte Pixitotinha, launched by the Copenhagen Symphony Orchestra and performed in Brazil by the São Paulo Municipal Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Isaac Karabitchevsky. No recordings can be found of other pieces, such as Sinfonia do Boiadeiro, Suíte Paulistana, orSinfonia Berlim e sua gente.
The uninterrupted orchestra movements that reverberate inside Hermeto’s head can be grasped in widely varying ways, as in the CD Eu e Eles, released in 1999 by the Rádio MEC label, where he recorded all the instruments: a one-man orchestra.
Speaking of orchestras, that same year Itiberê created the Itiberê Orquestra Família – a gathering of young instrumentalists around a new repertoire created by the bass guitarist and anchored in the compositional principles he learned at the “Jabour School”, of which he is the oldest “student”.
The second CD by Orquestra Família is Calendário do Som. Released in 2005, it features 27 of the 366 compositions Hermeto wrote between 1996 and 1997 (one per day, including February 29), as “birthday presents to all human beings”.
Published in 1999 by Editora Senac, Calendário has facsimiles of the 366 scores, with writing that merges drawings with commentaries full of spirituality and a completely original coding method. One notes how self-didacticism led Hermeto along paths where the playful and the densely structured are never at odds.
Before Orquestra Família polished Calendário, in 2002 Hermeto launched the dense Mundo Verde Esperança, homonymous with the album that had not been released in 1989. The group’s “hard core” (Itiberê and Márcio Bahia) was joined by Hermeto’s son Fábio Pascoal on percussion, André Marques on piano, and Vinicius Dorin on saxophone and flute, besides some members of Orquestra Família, like Joana Queiroz (voice, clarinet, and bass clarinet), Beth Dau and Mariana Bernardes (voice). Not by coincidence, the album features the meeting of the “musical grandchildren” with the “grandfather”: 13 of the 14 tracks are dedicated to Hermeto’s biological grandchildren. It’s the artist harvesting the fruits of time, looking to the future following the impact from Dona Ilza’s death in 2000.
His meeting in a music workshop with singer and multi-instrumentalist Aline Morena from Curitiba resulted in marriage. Hermeto moved to Curitiba, and in 2006 he recorded, in a duet with Aline, the CD and DVD Chimarrão com Rapadura. Later, in 2010, the two launched Bodas de Latão (Brass Wedding Anniversary).
Aline Morena witnessed one of the most libertarian blows to the commercial logic of the music market moguls: in 2008, Hermeto posted a handwritten statement on his site, that “from this day forward, I hereby relinquish, for musicians of Brazil and the world, the CD recordings of all my songs in this site’s discography [www.hermetopascoal.com.br]. (…) Enjoy!”
His position confronts the systematic attempt to catalogue his entire work, by Jovino Santos Neto, who left the group in 1993 and has since attempted to publish the scores from thousands of Hermeto’s compositions.
Thousands, in a never-ending creative flood. And he produced new albums: in 2017, the double No Mundo dos Sons (Sesc São Paulo), with his group’s most recent formation, and Natureza Universal (Scubidu Music), with pieces for big bands, in 2018, also on the Scubidu Music label, Hermeto Pascoal e Sua Visão Original do Forró, recorded in 1999.
Rocinante has still not managed to measure all it meant to release previously uncut work by Hermeto Pascoal.
Pra Você, Ilza (For You, Ilza) features 13 of the 198 compositions he wrote in a notebook dedicated entirely to his wife. Based on the scores’ outline, the Champion created all the arrangements in the studio for his group, which included not only Fábio Pascoal, André Marques, and the eternal Itiberê, but also Ajurinã Zwarg on drums and Jota P on sax.
Pra Você, Ilza (For You, Ilza) won the Grammy Latino 2024 in the category Best Jazz Album.
“In everything I’ve done, in everything I do, in everything I continue to do, Dona Ilza is wonderfully present to help me in every way.”
