Alex Henderson

Thiago de Mello

Another Feeling
 
JSR Records President Arnaldo DeSouteiro, who is among Brazil’s most accomplished jazz and pop producers, exalts Thiago de Mello and Dexter Payne’s Another Feeling as “one of the best, most sophisticated and musically rewarding productions I ever made”—and considering the caliber of musicians DeSouteiro has worked with, that is high praise indeed. Over the years, the 42-year-old DeSouteiro has worked with a who’s-who of Brazilian music, including Antonio Carlos Jobim (widely regarded as “the George Gershwin of Brazil”), João Gilberto, Dom Um Romão, Eumir Deodato, Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Claudio Roditi, Mario Castro-Neves and Luis Bonfá. In fact, DeSouteiro describes the late Bonfá as this album’s "spiritual godfather"; it was the legendary Bonfá who introduced DeSouteiro to veteran percussionist/composer/guitarist/pianist de Mello back in the 1980s.

“I became very impressed by all of Thiago's qualities as a writer, arranger, bandleader and multi-instrumentalist,” recalls the Rio de Janeiro-based DeSouteiro, who first worked with de Mello when the master musician played percussion on Bonfá’s The Bonfá Magic (which DeSouteiro produced) in 1991. De Mello and DeSouteiro went on to work together extensively, and Another Feeling is their most recent collaboration. DeSouteiro has seen de Mello perform in a variety of settings—sometimes with his large Amazon ensemble, sometimes with smaller groups—but for Another Feeling, he envisioned something de Mello had never done before: a Brazilian jazz album excluding both bass and regular drums. On this intimate, accessible, highly melodic effort, the basic format consists of Brazilian percussion, clarinet or alto saxophone (which are provided by the swinging yet delightfully lyrical Payne) and acoustic piano. Another Feeling is mostly instrumental, although singer Ithamara Koorax—DeSouteiro’s wife since 1990 and a major vocal star in Brazil—is featured on four selections: “An Evening Prayer,” “The Exile Song,” the title track and an interesting, unlikely medley that combines de Mello’s Amazon-minded “Urumutum” with the traditional African-American spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (which de Mello was first exposed to when he heard Louis Armstrong singing the song on his album Louis Armstrong and the Bible).

“The idea was for this album to be different from everything else Arnaldo had done,” explains the 72-year-old de Mello, who grew up in the Amazon region of Brazil but has lived in New York City for almost 40 years. “The idea was to avoid the traditional setup of piano, bass and drums combined with a horn. To go from my band Amazon—which has 12 people—to just having a trio with clarinet or saxophone, piano and my organic percussion was a very different experience.”

The traditional Brazilian percussion instruments that de Mello plays on Another Feeling (which is dominated by his own compositions) are not instruments he purchased in a music store—they are instruments he constructed himself in his apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. De Mello notes: “I generally make my own percussions from wood, bamboo, clay and seeds. That's why I call it organic percussion--I get everything from nature.”

When de Mello enthusiastically approved DeSouteiro’s idea for a Brazilian jazz album without bass or regular drums, there was no question who the clarinetist would be. De Mello and DeSouteiro agreed that the ideal man for the job was Payne, who previously recorded with de Mello on their Inspiration session of 2003 and enjoys an equally strong rapport with him throughout Another Feeling. De Mello suggested that instead of using only one pianist, they would employ different pianists at different times—and the project’s acoustic pianists range from two Americans (Richard Kimball and Cliff Korman) to two Brazilians (Haroldo Mauro, Jr. and Helio Alves). The fifth pianist is de Mello, whose piano playing is heard on the “Urumutum/Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” medley. De Mello also plays a little guitar on this album, although his primary role is that of a percussionist.            

Similarly, the 54-year-old Payne is primarily a clarinetist on Another Feeling—the clarinet is his main instrument—although he is equally expressive when he switches to the alto sax on “An Evening Prayer,” the funky “What About That?” and the title track. Clarinet or alto, Payne’s warmth as a musician always comes through on this CD.

Another Feeling gets off to a very congenial, good-natured start with “Rede de Caboclo,” which means “Indian Hammock” in Portuguese. Like the guajiros of Cuba, the jibaros of Puerto Rico and the campesinos, rancheros and vaqueros of Mexico, de Mello had a very rural upbringing—so rural, in fact, that he only slept in a hammock during his pre-adult years in the Brazilian Amazon. “Rede de Caboclo” was inspired by that part of de Mello’s life.

“I never slept in a bed until I went to Rio de Janeiro to study when I was 18,” recalls the trilingual de Mello, who speaks Portuguese, Spanish and English fluently. “For my first three weeks in Rio, I had a hard time getting used to sleeping in a bed because I was used to sleeping in a hammock.”

De Mello wrote “A Hug for Gil” in remembrance of the famous arranger/bandleader Gil Evans, with whom he became friends with in the late 1970s. “A Hug for Gil” celebrates Evans’ interest in Brazilian music in two different ways—first with a very raw, earthy introduction, then with an inviting samba groove. De Mello remembers: “Gil was very fond of Brazilian music—mostly bossa nova, but also, the more primitive sounds. So on ‘A Hug for Gil,’ I have both of these elements.”

It is no coincidence that “An Evening Prayer” has a gospel-ish soul-jazz flavor; the song was inspired by de Mello’s experiences growing up in a Baptist church. Like the rest of Latin America, Brazil is a predominantly Catholic country—Protestants are as much of a minority in Latin America as they are in Spain, Italy and Portugal. But de Mello explains that members of his family were converted to the Baptist sect when, in the 1890s, American missionaries from Mississippi went to the Amazon.

“When I was a young kid, my mother would sing all these Anglo Saxon church hymns,” de Mello recalls. “Every Sunday, I would go to church and hear all these hymns that had been translated into Portuguese but were written by Anglo Saxon composers in the 1700s and 1800s. Outside of the church, I heard Amazonian chants—and when I heard those Anglo Saxon hymns, it was interesting because their sense of harmony was so different from the folklore of the Amazon.”

The soul-jazz and gospel influence is equally appealing on the title track and on de Mello’s “Urumutum”/“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” medley. While Koorax (who de Mello calls The Divine Diva) sings in Portuguese exclusively on “An Evening Prayer,” “The Exile Song” and Another Feeling’s title track, the medley finds the Rio de Janeiro resident performing in both Portuguese and English (a language that—like de Mello and DeSouteiro—she speaks fluently). Payne comments: “As a vocalist, Ithamara has both a sweetness and a commanding presence. I love the way she made ‘Urumutum’ and ‘Swing Low’ fit together.”

“Another Feeling” is a song that de Mello wrote long before he met DeSouteiro, Koorax or Payne; he wrote the song in 1967 after learning that Argentinean doctor turned revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara had been killed in Bolivia. De Mello points out that this album’s title track was inspired by Guevara’s activities as a young medical student in the early 1950s--the pre-Fidel Castro part of Guevara’s life that was depicted in Walter Salles’ 2003 film “The Motorcycle Diaries” (which is known by its Spanish-language title, “Los Diarios de Motocicleta,” in Spain and Latin America).

“When Che Guevara was a young medical student,” de Mello explains, “he rode his motorcycle all the way from Buenos Aires, Argentina to the Amazon—where he treated the sick people in a leper hospital near the border of Brazil and Peru. Che Guevara was the only medical student who would go to that leper hospital. The lyrics of ‘Another Feeling’ are more than political; they are about a human being who decided to help people that others wouldn’t help.”

De Mello has a long history of political and social activism. He has been quite active in human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and UNICEF—and de Mello was the founder of VENTANA, which he describes as “an organization of writers, poets, journalists, painters, dancers and musicians helping the artists of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala during the Contra war.” One of the people who has inspired de Mello’s activism over the years is his older brother Amadeu, a well known poet who is now close to 80.

The poignant “The Exile Song” was inspired by the challenges that Amadeu faced during his many years in exile. In 1964, Amadeu fled Brazil to escape the military dictatorship that the country had at the time; he took refuge in Chile but ended up fleeing Chile as well when the socialist government of the late Salvador Allende was overthrown by the infamous military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. After an extended stay in Europe, Amadeu was eventually able to safely return to Brazil.

“There were many military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s—Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile, the government in Argentina,” de Mello notes. “My brother’s books were banned in Brazil all those years. So I wrote ‘The Exile Song’ for my brother, who I love very much. For many years, he could not function as a poet or a writer in his own country because his rights were taken away. However, some of Amadeu’s best-known poems and books were written while in exile.”

De Mello wrote the samba-minded “Tal Como o Vinho” for another Brazilian: DeSouteiro. The veteran musician explains: “Arnaldo is one of the most loyal friends I’ve ever had even though we are from different generations and different parts of Brazil; he was born in the south of Brazil, and I was born in the Amazon. ‘Tal Como o Vinho’ means ‘Like the Wine,’ and I called this song ‘Like the Wine’ because a friendship is like wine—as you get older, it gets better. That’s the spirit of the song.”

A visit to East Hampton, Long Island (in the suburbs of New York City) resulted in two of the pieces heard on Another Feeling: the reflective “The Lonely Piano” and the free-spirited “Mar Aberto,” which de Mello wrote after walking along the beach. “The Lonely Piano” was written in the East Hampton mansion of his friend Merle Hoffman, who was trained as a classical pianist but quit playing. However, she kept her piano, and the title “The Lonely Piano” stems from the fact that she was no longer playing it. “I called her piano the lonely piano because it was just sitting there by itself,” de Mello says. “By writing ‘The Lonely Piano,’ my desire was perhaps to give my friend Merle the desire to go back to her piano so that it would no longer be a lonely piano.”

Other highlights of Another Feeling include “Kimbolian Dawn” (a piece that was written for pianist Richard Kimball—who he has known since 1967—and combines Brazilian jazz with hints of Thelonious Monk) and “Too Good Notes,” which de Mello describes as “sort of an answer to Jobim’s ‘One Note Samba.’” The percussionist originally planned to call the latter “Two Note Samba,” but when DeSouteiro informed him that their idol Luis Bonfá had already written a song with that title, de Mello decided to rename the song. De Mello considering renaming the piece “Two Good Notes” but went with “Too Good Notes” instead.

De Mello says of “Kimbolian Dawn”: “When I met Richard Kimball 38 years ago, he was playing not the piano, but an enormous acoustic bass—and I was on guitar. So when I asked Richard—who is now a respected pianist/composer—to record ‘Kimbolian Dawn,’ I overdubbed my ‘vocal bass’ on that track, trying to give a hint of our past and remembering when we met back in 1967.”

The only songs on this album that weren’t totally written by de Mello are “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and the optimistic “No Wolf at the Door,” which Payne co-wrote. Payne says of the latter: “If we look at the world in a positive light, there is no wolf at the door. Some of the happiest music comes from the impoverished hills around Rio de Janeiro, where the poorest of the poor live. There is a cultural and spiritual wealth there that people in the United States who scuffle for money all the time don’t have.”

Born in the Amazon on August 20, 1933, de Mello got his first taste of urban life when, in 1951, he moved to Rio de Janeiro at the age of 18. Musically, the ‘50s and ‘60s were a great time to be in Brazil; that era gave us the bossa nova explosion and saw the rise of Brazilian icons like Jobim, Bonfá, Vinicius de Moraes and João & Astrud Gilberto. But politically, Brazil was a very troubled country in the 1960s—and in 1966, de Mello moved to New York City to escape Brazil’s political turmoil. De Mello kept busy playing bossa nova guitar in Manhattan clubs in the late 1960s, and in 1973, he recorded his debut album, Amazon (which DeSouteiro has reissued on CD on his JSR label). Over the years, de Mello has played with a long list of Brazilian heavyweights—including Laurindo Almeida, Carlos Barbosa-Lima, Claudio Roditi and Airto Moreira—and he is also known for recording with famous non-Brazilian artists ranging from guitarist Sharon Isbin and saxophonist Paul Winter to the late jazz/cabaret singer Susannah McCorkle. De Mello first met Payne in 1997, when both of them were visiting the Amazon for a Brazilian music festival; they hit it off immediately and have stayed in touch ever since.

“Thiago and I met in a boat in the middle of the Amazon River in the heart of Amazonia,” Payne recalls. “The musical friendship and resonance we found there far overshadowed both my gig and the festival. It was actually that year, in Manaus, that we recorded our Inspiration album with guitarist Antonio Mello.”

The year in which de Mello moved from the Amazon to Rio de Janeiro is also the year in which Payne was born; Payne, who now lives in Boulder, Colorado, was born in Upstate New York on July 5, 1951. Although a generation younger than de Mello, Payne also boasts an impressive resume. For 16 years, he played with the late blues/folk singer Judy Roderick—and over the years, Payne has also been employed by artists ranging from bluesman Barbecue Bob to African artist Boubacar Diebate (who is from Senegal). Stylistically, Payne is not easy to pin down. Although he has strong jazz chops—a fact that is evident throughout Another Feeling—Payne doesn’t consider himself strictly a jazz musician and is quick to point out that he has no problem playing blues, folk, R&B, Latin music or African pop.

“It’s hard for me to sit still musically,” asserts Payne, who grew up in the United States but lived in Latin America for over two years and speaks Spanish as well as some Portuguese. “I like so many different kinds of music.”

The engineer on Another Feeling is Robert Auld, who spent 15 years playing trumpet in de Mello’s band Amazon. Payne observes: “Because Bob played with Thiago all those years, he knows a lot about his compositions. Bob has a great ear and a great dedication to Thiago’s music. What he did for us on Another Feeling went beyond engineering. He really put his heart and soul into the project.”   

In the 2000s, de Mello has received high marks from Downbeat Magazine readers on more than one occasion; he was voted the #8 percussionist in the annual Downbeat Readers’ Poll in 2000, #3 in that poll in 2004 and #4 in 2005. It was also in 2004 that Payne was voted the #8 clarinetist in that Downbeat poll. Meanwhile, Downbeat readers have been quite favorable to Koorax in the poll’s female singer category; she was voted #10 female singer in 2000, #4 in 2002, #11 in 2004 and #8 in 2005. And Downbeat readers voted JSR one of the top 10 jazz labels for five consecutive years from 2001-2005.

With its combination of Brazilian and American participants, Another Feeling exemplifies what Payne describes as “cross-cultural collaboration.” The union of Brazilian and American musicians has yielded excellent results in the past, ranging from guitarist Laurindo Almeida and alto saxophonist Bud Shank’s groundbreaking Brazilliance sessions of 1953 and 1958 to Stan Getz’ bossa nova encounters with Jobim, Bonfá and the Gilbertos in the early 1960s—and Another Feeling demonstrates that positive things can continue to happen when Brazilian and American players join forces.

“I have felt the pull of Brazilian music for many years,” Payne asserts.  “Brazilian music first attracted me in 1971. Following that intuition—that thread—brought me to discover a great friend and mentor in the person of Thiago de Mello.              

Thiago is the type of composer who can make a musical statement that is very familiar and very fresh at the same time. I believe that Thiago and I have achieved a very positive balance between surprise and familiarity on Another Feeling, which is about composition as well as improvisation. There is a very warm, familiar feeling to Thiago's music, and yet, he always has a corner to turn. There is always a little twist, a little surprise coming up.”

De Mello adds: “With music, there are no limits. A melody should reach your heart and your soul—and that’s my goal. My whole thing is the human experience. For me, family and friendship are very important elements in my life and elements of my music.”
 
—Alex Henderson, November 2005
 
        Alex Henderson is a Philadelphia-based journalist whose work has appeared in Billboard, Spin, JazzTimes, Jazziz, the L.A. Weekly, CD Review, HITS, Black Radio Exclusive (BRE), All About Jazz and numerous other well known publications over the years. Since 1996, he has written thousands of reviews for the All Music Guide’s popular website and series of reference books.