Pablo Gianera
May 2001

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By Pablo Gianera

Why is Marisa Monte (born in Rio de Janeiro in 1967) one of the greatest singers of today, and not only of Brazil? Let's see. In the booklet that accompanies Memórias, crÃŜnicas and declaraçoes de amor, her recent CD, it can be seen in nine photos. In two of them, handwritten labels with names of songs can be seen. In another one, books of Virginia Woolf, Machado de Assis, Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne. In a fourth one, a box set with discs of Tropicália and, slightly blurred, the names of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Gal Costa. Another book. And stanzas of a poem in English sprinkled of annotations and, specially marked the word “woman” and the phrase “no time to lose”. Another box set of discs, Tom Jobim’s now. And, in the last one, a PC monitor with the electrical evolutions of an equalization.

By chance or on purpose, those photos, taken by Monte, organize a constellation that with remarkable exactitude defines her way to come near to music. An equation (solved with mathematical rigor) of temporalities, languages, traditions, and sensitivities. There it is everything. Or almost everything. Maybe an image lacks: the one of Maria Callas.

She professed an extraordinary admiration for the diva. And although she listened and knew João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia and Nara Leão, when she was eighteen decided to study in Italy. Somehow, maybe because the distance procreates a closer proximity, that distance —geographic, generic— was the vehicle of the epiphany: with the music of the 60s and 70s behind (that new language that, with jazz and tango, was one of the greatest innovations of the 20th century), Monte thought herself as part of a generation which would prolong that sound, coined twenty years before, expanding and fusing it with other styles and timbres.

This wasn’t new. It could be almost thought that great part of the music done in Brazil —at least during the second half of the century— has as generating nucleus the investigation in other styles and sounds. It is common thing —and essential perhaps— that Brazil musicians take chances. The style of the MPB [Brazilian Popular Music] recovered a generous variety of genres —samba, jazz and rock— and articulated them with a strong social content, using poetry as hinge. It’s not accidental that already in 70s and 80s, category MPB (in which participated among other Milton Nascimento, Caetano Veloso, Hermeto Pascoal and Gilberto Gil) designated practically all the music produced in that country.

In that atmosphere, Monte could not be indifferent to the figure of Elis Regina and her expansion of the vocal possibilities and her colossal public notoriety. It is not that Monte has tried sometime, neither tries now, to sing as Regina (she was fifteen years old when she died, and she couldn’t have done it because her vocal power is clearly lesser). Marisa Monte’s voice is not unbreakable. It is delicate and invariably sad. Like Billie Holiday, Marisa Monte’s voice has no pathos, not in a tragic sense. Either, of course, the healthy sound of Ella Fitzgerald’s voice (whom anyway she listened assiduously).

Stylistically wide as composer and singer, Monte tries —and she does it— to avoid certain imposture implied in the fact of singing her own music in the other people way. Everything what she has listened to (pop, jazz, funk, R&B) affects her aesthetic universe, and emerges in her voice. In 1991 she released her first CD, Mais (where it can be listened to the percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, who was member of the Codona group with Don Cherry and Collin Walcott). The success of this CD drew Monte’s career towards a spiral of international tours, including a relatively glorious incursion in the Montreux Jazz Festival.

In 1994, Rose & Charcoal was released in a crucial moment of her still brief discography, and it was also an all-star production in which Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Gilberto Gil, Paulinho da Viola, Velha Guarda da Portela, Época de Ouro, Vasconcelos and Carlinhos Brown, have participated. Brown, a percussionist who has recorded with Steve Lacy among others left his sound in almost all discs of Marisa and a great part of the aesthetic success of the singer belong to him. Almost like a return, Monte produced Brown’s CD Omelete Man. Barulhinho Bom (1996), and a year later, Great Noise confirmed her exploratory attempts with versions of George Harrinson’s “Give Me Love” and “Blanco”, an Octavio Paz poem turned song. In Memórias, crÃŜnicas and declaraçoes de amor (2000), there are heavy names: the cellist and composer Jacques Morelembaum, Antonio Carlos Jobim, the guitarists Marc Ribot and Romero Lubambo, the bossa pianist João Donato, Brown again, drummer Joey Baron and the great Greg Cohen (responsible also for some adjustments) in bass. Intelligently using the musicians, the group combinations vary from a traditional rhythm section, elegant strings, and single guitar.

The CD, crossed by funk rhythm and electronic bursts, arose distrusts and objections. Some people say Monte has changed. However, it seems to happen the exactly opposite. As it has happened with post-electrification Miles Davis, if her sound is isolated it will be heard that those that changes is what surrounds her, never the center. She —the voice, the woman— persists unchanged and vaguely exquisite.