A sad and beautiful journey – José Mauro speaks
The Wire, May 2021
For decades, the most pervasive theory as to the whereabouts of the enigmatic Brazilian musician José Mauro was that he was dead. Speculation varied as to how: a motorcycle accident, shortly after the release of his staggering 1970 debut, Obnoxius; ‘disappeared’ by the censorious and authoritarian military junta sometime in the 70s, perhaps owing to the nature of his music and lyrics. Ultimately, all these rumours have proved fanciful – Mauro is alive and well, living a quiet existence on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
In 1970, Mauro, with the help of producer Roberto Quartin, co-writer Ana Maria Bahiana, also a prolific journalist and author, arranger Lindolfo Gaya and future luminaries of Brazilian music such as Wilson Das Neves and Azymuth’s Ivan ‘Mamao’ Conti, recorded two brooding, idiosyncratic, beautiful records in Rio’s Odeon Studios that sounded – and sound – like little else, from Brazil or elsewhere. “It was wonderful,” Mauro tells me. “They [Das Neves and Conti] were giants already, real pros… Roberto Quartin taught me a lot: how to sing, more than anything else. He was a great master to me.”
That year, Obnoxius, the partial result of these recordings, was released, but it took six years for its successor A Viagem Des Horas to appear, despite being recorded concurrently. By this time, Mauro seemed to have disappeared completely, and for a long time this remained the case. Obnoxius was reissued by London based Brazilian music specialists Far Out Recordings in 2016, and it’s taken them about as long as it initially took Quartin’s label Forma to put out the latter record, which is released in May. “I really wanted to track him down before we carried on doing anymore of his releases,” Far Out head Joe Davis tells me. “When we released Obnoxius after all those years, we had people contacting us saying they knew where José was and it gave me a strange vibe.” Eventually, “we managed to track José down. Over the years people have contacted us and they turned out to be a bit phoney, or very aggressive and strange. I couldn’t understand it. We had heard, contrary to what we’d been told, that he was still alive, but with all my contacts in Brazil no one knew anything about José, it was a real mystery.” Now, with Mauro’s whereabouts finally accounted for, “to be able to release his work today is amazing, especially this never properly and fully released record.”
A Viagem Des Horas, which translates roughly to Journey Of The Hours, is as remarkable as its predecessor, which has built up a cult following, earning accolades from Flying Lotus and Floating Points and providing sample fodder for Madlib. Both records share an air of mystery befitting their creator. Psychedelia, soul, orchestral music and folk mix with MPB, Música Popular Brasileira, the style most pervasive in Brazil at the time. The results are something entirely unique. Mauro’s own omnivorous tastes informed his approach. “Jazz and classical music influenced me a lot,” he says. “As for Brazilian music, I was always into Edu Lobo, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Dorival Caymmi, and [Heitor] Villa-Lobos. I went to the studio thinking about my own style, in order to do my own thing without emulating anyone, even though we always take something from our musical education.”
He reflects on the strangely stirring sense of melancholy that runs through these records, saying “most of my music is also sad, and I’ve tried to apply beauty to it.” His and Bahiana’s shared interest in Candomblé and Umbanda, amalgamations of traditional West African religions and Roman Catholicism, was also instrumental. “I used to attend Umbanda centres from time to time,” says Mauro. “I was also fascinated with the musical side of it, with its percussive dimension.” Bahiana picks up the theme: “I had a close encounter with, let’s say, a very powerful energy, some years before meeting José Mauro. He had been involved in Umbanda and Candomblé around the time we met – again, this is a generation looking for options… [those of us] that grew up under the dictatorship wanted, at the time, to escape.’
The search for something transcendental runs through Mauro’s mournful vocals, the haunting opentuning of the acoustic guitar and the soaring orchestration. Mauro and Bahiana both shared a sense of searching, of yearning for something better, when they eventually came to work together.
Bahiana was already prolific, having “been writing essays, short stories, articles, poetry, since forever”, alongside contributing to the major Brazilian newspapers, O Estado De S Paulo, Folha De S Paulo, O Globo and Journal De Brazil. “One of my closest friends from school introduced us,” she recalls. “He was a constant presence in the informal musical meetings that were common in the south neighbourhoods of Rio… [and] was looking for someone who could work with him for lyrics.” In Mauro’s telling, she caught his eye “while she was defending a song as a composer at a University Song Festival. I fell in love with her lyrics, and I said to myself, that girl is going to be my musical partner.
“Three days later, we were already composing Obnoxius together,” he continues. “We created about 100 songs in little more than a year.”
Bahiana’s elliptical lyrics, in translation, are full of surreal, haunting, at times violent imagery, replete with images of broken bodies, lonely winds and quasi-religious lamentations, drenched in despair, regret and solitude. A sense of some sort of spiritual quest links all this, the Journey of the title. It’s perhaps unsurprising, given that these records were made against the gloomy backdrop of military authoritarianism, with Mauro staying put unlike the many musicians who fled or were, like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, exiled.
“There was a shared dream of creating an alternative way of life, an alternative country, maybe,” considers Bahiana. “Some dropped out and created communes by the beaches or up in the mountains, or forests. Some embraced drugs, and, for many, it was a dangerous option. And some, like the two of us, and many of our friends, optioned for focusing on the arts, music being something that runs deep in Brazilian culture.”
The management of all sectors of public communication at that time was overseen by the Special Counsel of Public Relations. For Bahiana, the indirect nature of lyric writing may have been the best way to tackle an oppressive and authoritarian regime that otherwise made dissent very difficult. “Music, visual arts, cinema, poetry, writing – it’s almost ironic that a pretty horrendous period of Brazilian history was also one of the most fertile on the cultural front,” she says. “The challenge was – how can we share this and not be arrested or worse? After 1969 – the year when the extreme military right wing took power, in a coup within a coup, showing your work in public was highly dangerous. Options were created – house parties, concerts in semi-abandoned theatres, at all hours. The goal was to survive, in spite of it all.”
The military dictatorship, which took power in a coup d’état in 1964, issued Institutional Act 5, the fifth and most infamous of 17 decrees, in 1968. This gave Artur da Costa e Silva, the dictatorship’s second president, power to dismiss the National Congress, strip politicians of their powers, and repress left wing activists and groups and any other forms of opposition. This oppressive apparatus was continued and expanded under Costa e Silva’s successor, Emilio Garrastazu Medici, who ruled from 1969–74. The so-called Brazilian Miracle was a period of rapid economic growth alongside harsh repression, which mainly benefited the country’s wealthy elite whilst the minimum wage was lowered.
It was out of this fractious milieu that Mauro and Ana Maria Bahiana emerged, recording their often dark and foreboding yet defiantly beautiful music at the apex of the regime. For Mauro, unlike Bahiana, the conditions under which they made this music were incidental. “My music is non-political, as far as I can see,” he says. “But, well, I was not a writer of lyrics. I don’t have all the answers.” Bahiana concedes that, “our songs were dealing with existential issues, emotions, memories. None of this captured the attention of the censors – they were worried about what they called protest songs, songs dealing explicitly with what was going on.” It’s notable that while none of Bahiana’s lyrics were ever censored, “most of the pieces I wrote during those dictatorship years got either mutilated or barred for publication. Keep in mind, this includes articles about, say, The Who’s Quadrophenia – it came back to me with huge Xs in most pages, and a note in bright red saying that the album and my review were ‘a call to civil war’.”
Despite Mauro’s insistence that his work is apolitical, rumours still persisted, over the decades in which Mauro vanished from sight, that the regime had something to do with his unexplained absence. After Obnoxius, it took six years for A Viagem Des Horas to be released, about which Mauro simply says “it took too long… the Odeon [record label] director at the time called me to his office once and said: ‘Your songs are wonderful, but I doubt that they end up selling more than ten records. Your music is not that popular.’”
After that, nothing. “My body pushed me away from music, health became a stumbling block for me,” says Mauro by way of explanation. “If I had the strength to carry on with composing, I would have... always focused on achieving a sense of beauty, a sense of wonder.” He spent the next few decades ”giving guitar lessons and making music for theatre… all kept me connected to music.”
He remained in Rio, living now on its outskirts. His attitude towards his musical past remains contemplative: “I still think about some of my songs, like “Exaltação E Lamento Do Último Rei” and “Tarde De Núpcias.” Sometimes, problems distract me from music. I still listen to a lot of music, from Liszt and Bach to Dionne Warwick and Frank Sinatra. And always Danilo Caymmi, Edu Lobo and Milton Nascimento.”
Bahiana, on the other hand, has remained prolific, continuing to write books and articles. I ask her how, as a journalist and writer, she reckons with the legacy of the dictatorship, in particular the idea of a widespread cultural amnesia about the crimes of the regime – partly a result of the 1979 Amnesty Law, which absolved the government and military of political crimes committed during the regime. “Most of it was completely lost and banned from the collective memory,” says Bahiana, “for a substantial amount of people, everything that happened between 1964–85 was really good – ‘we had progress and order’, etc.” She recalls a particular moment in 2014, touring Brazil to promote her book The 1964 Almanac, “a massive collection of facts, ideas, personages, and the arts” from that year, during the research of which she “became fascinated with the correspondence between the leaders of the coup and high authorities in Washington DC. At every single event, I had a substantial group of young people, who bought the book and then would ask me ‘wasn’t 1964 great?’ … It was rather difficult to answer that without being extremely rude.”
Throughout all this time, Mauro’s music languished in obscurity. In 1991, Joe Davis, then a young DJ from West London a few year’s away from founding Far Out Recordings, stumbled upon Obnoxius on one of his record digging trips to Rio. It was in the $1 section, and a combination of the cover and his recognition of the producer Roberto Quartin led to him buying two copies. “Definitely what makes these records unique sounding is the musicians first and foremost, and the arrangements of Gaya,” says Joe. “You’ve got the A-Team working on that record: Wilson Das Neves, Ivan Conti, Rildo Hora, Dom Salvador, Paulo Mora, Geraldo Vespar. Roberto, being a great producer, he could call them in.” Nearly three decades on, between reissuing Obnoxius and its follow-up, “a young guy whose record we’re about to release, Guilherme Estevez, contacted me out of the blue and said ‘look I’m living close to José, I can help you if you need anything from him, I love his music.’ From there, we managed to get straight to his doorstep because, until then, he hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone.”
“I feel gratified because my work is being recognized,’ reflect Mauro. “I did not expect it to last that long. I do think that my music is contemporary, but I never imagined a comeback.”
As Mauro and Bahiana reflect on the perilous era that saw the creation of their twin masterworks, the political situation once again looks bleak in Brazil. The country is currently one of the epicentres of the Covid-19 pandemic. The notorious right wing president Jair Bolsonaro continues to oppose any measures to curb the outbreak.
Thinking about the situation in Brazil now versus then, Bahiana says “I don’t think it’s the same because there’s still freedom of the press, and the basic freedoms and human rights are technically available. But we have an extreme right wing, maniacal, ignorant individual in power, surrounded by an extraordinarily stupid, greedy and corrupt group of minions. It’s a disaster of a different brand, but still a disaster.” Mauro meanwhile asserts that “Brazil is still fertile ground for music. Yet the pandemic casts a shadow over everything. It’s hard to make music apart from the audience.” If anyone knows about producing remarkable music without much of an audience, it’s Mauro.
Read on The Wire here