BRAZILIAN LEGEND MILTON NASCIMENTO, STILL DREAMING IN HARMONY

 

 

 Mat Snow

A CULT HERO in the Anglophone
world but a giant in Brazil, at 81 Mil-
ton Nascimento is just four months
younger than one of his inspirations Paul Mc-
Cartney – Abbey Road is a particular favourite,
he tells MOJO. Debuting on 33rpm in 1967,
his own catalogue is similarly classic-packed.

His delightful new album Milton + esperanza
spalding, not only boasts a sensational version
of A Day In The Life, but such stellar guests
as Paul Simon, Dianne Reeves, Lianne La
Havas and Shabaka Hutchings. From early on
Nascimento has attracted jazz
and jazz-adjacent A-listers;
as myriad stars have found,
to hear him is to love him. The respect and
affection is mutual.

“Some of the biggest dreams I realised in
my career were because of Wayne [Shorter]
and Herbie [Hancock],” he tells MOJO.
“In the late 1960s I met Herbie at Marcos
Valle’s house in Rio, and when he saw me
playing, he recorded several of my songs.
A few years later, Wayne was in Brazil with
Weather Report and watched the show
Clube Da Esquina. In 1974, Wayne gave
me one of the greatest gifts of my life,
recording Native Dancer. Wayne and Herbie
are my blood brothers.”

He has an unmistakable singing voice
ranging up to ethereal falsetto – “in my
childhood head, only women sang,” he says,
“Ray Charles’s Stella By Starlight changed
all that” – and a no less signature way with a
tune, as his wistful, philosophical songs float, 

flutter and trill just above life's adversities a la 

Marvin Gaye. Yet he is inspired rather than
stiffled by colaborations. Having worked with
the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Carlos Santana and
Earth, Wind & Fire, he seems to bring out the
inner Milton in everyone he plays with, even
Duran Duran, whose 1993 song Breath After
Breath he co-wrote and performed on.

Friendship is key, he explains. Adopted by
a musical white couple who’d employed his
mother as a maid, Nascimento grew up in tiny
Três Pontas in Minas Gerais, deep in south-
eastern Brazil. Energised
by the bossa nova boom
spearheaded by Tom Jobim,
João Gilberto, Sérgio Mendes
and Elis Regina, as well as The
Beatles, he and friends would
perform covers of Brazilian
and foreign hits played by
Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo
radio stations which barely
made it through the Serra da
Mantiqueira mountain range.

When these transmissions’
harmonies were inaudible,
he’d make up his own, his
harmonic gift a musical
mutation inspired by creative
necessity and over the years
embellished by orchestral and
choral arrangements.

Yet for all his diversity over
the decades, his early songs
remain core repertoire, with
1967’s Outubro, as in his
birth month October, revis-
ited on the new album. “This
song is part of my beginning as
a national artist. My partner,
Fernando Brant, wrote the
lyrics and it was the second
song we wrote together,” he
says. “It’s a song that talks
about a kind of rebirth.”

MOJO