MILTON NASCIMENTO / “San Vicente”
There's something very beautiful that happens with music. It's as if you are walking down the street looking at many different faces, and suddenly you feel strongly they have something in common with you. —Milton NascimentoMilton Nascimento is an absolute glorious monster, a perfect definition of awesome. To know his music is to know the world is smaller than we think but yet the world we create through living is large enough to hold everything, all our creations, all, everything we can do, can think to do, are able to do within the specifics of our circumstances and resources. Milton demonstrates that all of the world can be contained in each of us even though we as individuals are but a small part of the whole. Listening to Milton’s music both humbles me and expands me. Just like many Americans, Milton came to me via Wayne Shorter’s album Native Dancer. The first track, "Ponta De Areia," was pow; sucker punched me. I was looking for Wayne’s next ‘jazz’ album, with Herbie in tow I figured it would be good but, oh, my lord, what was, who was, that voice. I had never heard a man use his falsetto like that, and not just for an effect at climatic moments. It was like Milton was a down-side-up sky diver. He jumped out the plane and instead of floating to earth with an open parachute, he soared upward, and higher, and just zoomed around like gravity wasn’t nothing real. Who was this cat? Recorded September 12, 1974 in Los Angeles, “Ponta de Areia,” and indeed the whole album, is a remarkable synthesis of American jazz and innovative Brazilian music. The band was Wayne Shorter on soprano, Milton on acoustic guitar and vocals, Herbie Hancock on piano, Wagner Tiso on electric piano and organ, Jay Graydon on guitar, Dave McDaniel on bass, Robertinho Silva on drums. The song was composed by Milton Nascimento and his long time collaborator Fernando Rocha Brant. One song told the whole story.



I can sing in Portuguese and still communicate with people who don't know the language. You can get your own feelings and images from the music, and when people do that, it makes me very happy. Every time I sing a song, it will have a different feeling for me, because the music changes as I change in my life. I work from the heart, and the heart speaks for itself. —Milton NascimentoThe basic ingredients of Milton’s music are indigenous to Brazil. The earth, the hills and mountains; the water, the rivers and ocean; the people, African, European and Native American; but it is also everything that has ever entered Brazil, not just goods, but also technology, not just people but also sounds. Oh, all the sounds of the world that ever arrived in Brazil howsoever those sounds got there, all those sounds are in Milton’s music. So we hear these songs, these chants, these symphonies, these magic moments. He would name it: “a teardrop of sun in the mouth of the night.” Even though he sings specifically of Brazil: we all can hear ourselves in his music. Who has not had a student’s heart—the heart of someone who is growing by learning? Who has not so closely identified with someone that they felt themselves to be the other and the other to be them, the two of us are the oneness of us? One disappointing afternoon who has not momentarily remembered the beauty of a promising dawn? Within the specifics of his world, Milton gets to the anima, the soul that animates everything in the world. Everything alive moves and all movement has a sound.


Those of us who hold microphones become the voice of those who do not have microphones. We have to alert others to what is happening in this world. We have to talk about preserving our planet, the earth, green things, animals, human beings--talk about how people treat each other. —Milton NascimentoMilton Nascimento was born on October 26, 1942 in Rio de Janeiro. His mother Maria do Carmo Nascimento was a singer who earned her survival as a maid. She died before Milton turned two. I don’t believe he ever met his biological father. A couple (Josino Brito Campos, a banker, math teacher and electronic technician, and Lilia Silva Campos, a music teacher and choir singer) his mother had worked for adopted him. So when he was four and moved from the coast to the interior of Brazil, to a small town call Tres Pontas in the hinterland state of Minas Gerais, Milton was born again. We would say, looking at it with American eyes, first he was black, then he was white. He knows that he did not come from his parents. He knows his parents came to him. Next week we will discuss his formative years and Milton’s assessment of his own uniqueness. Let me walk you through my jazz-oriented classic selections. The collaboration with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock is key. I don’t just mean Native Dancer, I mean if you listen you will notice that either together or singlely, Shorter and Hancock are on all but one of the jazz oriented albums that I am highlighting. Wayne immediately strikes. His soprano sound in particular is a startingly twin to Milton’s falsetto—startling because the sound wakes us up from predictability to envision innovative possibility: it is possible for men to mate musically, even when they are men of different cultures. As beautiful as Native Dancer is, I believe Wayne rises even higher on the April 1986 Sao Paulo concert recording A Barca Dos Amantes, from which “Nos Dois” and “Tarde” are taken. It helps that both melodies are exquisite but it is also the sway of the rhythms fitted to those handsome arcs of sound. Rhythm is the secret sauce in all of Milton’s recipes and Wayne’s solos float with such delight we are mesmerized. On “Saldas e Bandeiras (Exits and Flags)” Wayne is more earthy on tenor, down and dirty, dancing as it were flat foot on the dirt floor, his moves are more carnal though nonetheless subtle in their mastery of timing and tone. Sort of like how polite society looks askance at dancers who publicly shake their ass but deep down all those tsk-tskers are (or ought to be) envious; they know they can’t bounce their derriere like that, the uptight stewards of propriety just can’t make their bodies make those motions. You could point a loaded gun at them and they still couldn’t but their backfields in appropriate motion. So listen to the tenor of Mr. Shorter, there is no shortage of rump bumping. On “Bodas” that’s Nivaldo Ornelas on sax (and flute) and Robertinho Silva on drums. When I heard that opening I knew that they knew. Then Milton follows with a full throttle declaration of independence from fear, from hesitancy, from cowardice. Milton confronts the world: here I am. “Outubro” (October) is one of Milton’s signature songs. Here he out sings a full orchestra of over thirty musicians. Man I wish I had been in the Teatro Municipal do Sao Paulo on the seventh and eighth of May 1974 to witness this magnificent merger of jazz and classical music. Especially since Milton was at the top of his prowess as a vocalist; don’t miss that last note on “Outubro.” And less someone think I am exaggerating, think I am just throwing words on paper as journalists do when they are trying to impress readers, check out what Milton had to say in an interview for Fader magazine about these times and that recordings. Milton starts of speaking about the album 1973 Milagro Dos Peixes and then references the subsequent 1974 concert from which the live album was taken:

This album was a cry against the violence against our lives and it was conceived at the worst point in my life. We lived under a very cruel dictatorship and many artists were forced to leave the country. I decided to stay and that was very hard to deal with. I just received a copy of some footage from two concerts we did in Sao Paulo for a live version of this album in 1974. One night I played with a symphonic orchestra and the next day I played for 50,000 students. It was magic.The legend is that when Milton first released Milagro Dos Peixes, he stripped off most of the lyrics as a protest against government censorship. What was left was mostly pure sounds, sounds that unmistakably declared opposition to government death and oppression. Is it any wonder that Milton was regarded as Brazil’s most important artist of his era? Milton’s voice was literally Brazil’s cry. Listen again to “A Chamada,” which first appeared on Milagro Dos Peixes; listen and understand what Milton meant when he told writer Pamela Bloom in an interview published in Musician magazine that the Nascimento solution to government censorship was to “tranform my voice into an instrument. We’d write something, the censors would send it back, stamped No Way. We’d have to write the same thing in a way that the censors wouldn’t notice but the people would understand.”


I'm used to being the friend of my songwriting partners. So I would get there to the United States, and first you had to talk with the agent, then the publishing company, then the lawyer. The last thing would be the person himself, and by then I'd generally be tired and discouraged. —Milton NascimentoYes, Milton lived in Brazil during most of the dictatorship but it was not because he did not have an opportunity to leave. In fact in 1968, less than two years after his career took off in Brazil, Milton was recording an album in Rudy Van Gelder’s famous studios for CTI records. A&M thought they had the next Jobim, the leader of the next Brazilian wave after bossa nova. The title of the album: Courage. Ironic, isn’t it? In some ways America drove Milton back to his comrades in Brazil, like Harriet Tubman returning south, Milton returned to Brazil to face the music of his life experiences and produce his masterpieces in collaboration with old friends. Oh, by the way, Herbie Hancock played piano on that 1969 session, recording with Nascimento long before Wayne Shorter did although Shorter’s Native Dancer is usually pointed to not only as Nascimento’s jazz introduction but also as Nascimento’s first major collaboration. The truth is far, far different from the conventional wisdom. Moreover, as far as Nascimento’s work with American jazz musicians goes, the brilliance of the Wayne Shorter collaboration notwithstanding, it is Herbie Hancock’s contributions that surprise me the most. I have not been a big, big fan of Herbie as a piano soloist. I love, respect and admire his compositional talents and his sensitive accompaniment to others, and recognize that he is an important band leader, but his soloing never rose to the heights of the masterful except when he is playing with Milton and especially every time Hancock takes flight on Miltons, the 1989 Columbia recording. If I had to take one Milton Nascimento recording to heaven (or wherever pleasant one goes after death—there is no music in hell, no music!), it would be Miltons. Listen to those gracefully passionate piano solos, especially on “San Vicente” but also on everything else on the record. The elegance of “Don Quixote” is extremely attractive and the stately abstractness and dexterity of Herbie’s staccato figures on "Like Us" reminds me of a straight up flamingo dancer. But on “San Vincente” Herbie is dancing, full out, using all his moves. This is possibly Herbie’s single best solo on record. Notice at the halfway mark how they drop out all the other musicians, just Herbie atop Milton’s rhythm guitar. You can hear them growling, literally, they are making those sounds one makes when you exert yourself with everything you have. Herbie’s hands dance with almost demonic exaltation. What a sublime duet. Damn.


I don’t understand longing for a path That ended long ago I still have unexplored lines on my palm And they are numerous, innumerable No one has yet unveiled the news Even the wisest of men Still asks himself Where did I come from? Teach me to feel! —from Don Quixote by Cesar Camargo Mariano and Milton NascimentoI’m going to make it easy to get your Nascimento on. Here are five albums (and their covers so you can see what your are doing), one for each finger on your hand. Here we count like little childen; one, two, three, four, FIVE!





This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 5:08 am and is filed under Classic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
2 Responses to “MILTON NASCIMENTO / “San Vicente””
August 10th, 2008 at 11:07 am
I remeber when “Miltons” was released, thinking ‘Why doesn’t Herbie play like this on his own records?’ Great selection of Milton recordings! Thanks.
July 12th, 2017 at 3:50 pm
I just learned about Clube da Esquina, which was introduced to me through our local jazz station in San Antonio, TX. As I’ve listed to more and more of the first, self-titled record, I have become increasingly a fan of Milton’s. And like you write above, through musical and emotive vibrations he speaks to my perspective on life. Thanks for the recommendations–I look forward to hearing more of his stuff.
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