Wooing With Brazilian Rhythms

Brazil has always stretched out and made itself comfortable on these shores. In a free-trade agreement of the musical spirit, Brazilian musicians and American listeners (and vice versa) have exchanged stories about exotic elsewheres--whether it is the riches of the material world or the riches of spirit.

For many musicians, the pull of the North American dream still looms in Brazilian culture--fostered by the mega-success stories of artists from now-kitsch icons like Carmen Miranda, to movement architects like Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim, to the chameleon powers of Sergio Mendes--all of whom either climbed charts and/or into hearts of U.S. listeners.

That alluring possibility is what lured singer-composers Ana Gazzola and Sonia Santos away from Caxias do Sul and Rio de Janeiro respectively; away from busy, solid but--to their growing disillusion--momentarily unrewarding careers in their homeland to take a chance at wooing U.S. ears.

“You see, they’re not impressed in Brazil if you say you’re a musician,” says a lounging Gazzola on a recent summer afternoon, one seemingly endless long leg splayed across a couch hand-painted the colors of a cloud-dusted spring sky. She rakes back her mane of honey hair, explaining, “There, everybody plays a little bit. There’s lots of musicians. Soooo,” she lifts and extends the vowel as if it were a note, “it’s like saying you’re an actor in L.A.”

In seemingly worldly Los Angeles, both singers have been deciphering a different set of idiosyncratic challenges and contradictions. With so many cultures converging, one might think that cosmopolitan L.A. plays open-armed host to a vibrant palette of indigenous musics. Though that is most certainly the case, what is probably more overwhelmingly true is that in a city swimming in divergent strains of “world music,” the key is arresting attention.

What Gazzola and Santos have found while logging time along the supper-club circuit is that their uniquely imbued and luminous voices open doors--not just professionally, but culturally. “We began to understand that when we performed we were not just singers, but ambassadors,” Santos says. “People always had questions about Brazil. About the instruments, about the rhythms that they were hearing. They were unusual. Different from what they expected or what they were used to.”

But after roughly six years of balancing a string of ends-meeting jobs (from limousine driving to coaching local singers interested in gilding their repertoire with Brazilian crowd-pleasers), while waiting for word on their floating demos, they knew it was time for a more proactive plan.

Gazzola and Santos believe their company, Yellow Green Productions--Peace Through the Arts, which is named for colors in the Brazilian flag, will set them apart from the ubiquitous struggling artist trying to make a bigger splash.

The company is run out of their spartan West Hollywood apartment, simply appointed with instruments, sentimental CDs and a bank of bleating cordless phones and two workhorse computer dinosaurs; its mission is not just to record, market and promote their own music, but to create an educational, hands-across-the-borders tool that better fleshes out Brazil’s intricately diverse gradations of indigenous culture and musical styles--with Bahian percussionist Lula Almedia as the grand arbiter of beat.

They’ve been perfecting the concept (not coincidentally) since 1994’s World Cup fever, when interest in Brazil was at a media spin zenith. “We were working like crazy back then,” says Gazzola, who has been in L.A. since ’91. “We were playing clubs, parties, cultural events around the games. So, since we were doing so well, finally we decided to put our money together and get started building something. Something larger than a show.”

Since pooling their resources, collapsing two households into a tiny single one, organizing, agonizing and praying, the two women just a few weeks ago giddily tore open cardboard crates filled with their first Yellow Green-produced CDs--Santos’ “Sorte” and Gazzola’s “Brazilicious” (POW Records).

Already, the CDs--wildly different in style and approach--are finding their way onto various validating, local global-music playlists--from Sergio Mieleniczenko’s “Sounds of Brazil” and CC Smith’s “Global Village” on KPFK-FM (90.7) to Tom Schnabel’s “Cafe L.A.” on KCRW-FM (89.9).

The women are thrilled, but are certainly not ready to rest quite yet. The larger plan, says Santos, who first came to L.A. in 1990 as part of the provocative Brazilian review Oba Oba, is to draw from the assets of the ripe local musical community she’s come to call family.

“We’re using our weapon, our different styles,” she says, rolling her small palm into a fist, gently pushing the English words across her tongue in her Portuguese-edged upswing. Culling from a busy network of Brazilian nationals--musicians, percussionists, dancers, singers, scenesters--their company’s main goal is to link the various strains of Brazilian music and culture in L.A. through live performance, by capitalizing on and exposing the range of expatriate Brazilian talent throughout the Southland.

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There is a bit of smoke and fairy dust about the whole affair, Santos admits: The idea, she explains, “is when you book us, you have an option. You don’t just book a band, or a singer, you can book a concept. A party. We bring Brazil to you.”

Though they both still make their bread-and-butter money doing traditional sets at clubs with their respective bands--Santos’ Obathala and Gazzola’s Brazil Sound--their combined party concept, called “Brazil North and South,” is the second and probably more important tier of Yellow Green productions. “People can have a taste of different kinds of music from Brazil--afoxe, forro, Brazilian reggae, funk. Some to listen to. Some to dance to. We keep the party going.”

They strive for not simply a concert, but more precisely a themed party with legs, or a “happening”--an evening of back-to-back bands, a soft-lit sampling of Brazilian cuisine, dancing, culture, personal history. But both women see it as a way to elevate a sinuous, undulating party to not just an experimental but also an educational level, Gazzola says, “so we can teach them about the music they are hearing. From band to band, singer to singer, they can develop their ear to hear the difference, the details.”

Together the pair provide striking counterpoint: Gazzola is long, graceful and gazelle-like; her voice is like a filmy silk scarf, lightly clinging around a note, a lyric. Her jazz-influenced selections mix in hints of African rhythms with classical, European harmonies. Santos is diminutive, disarmingly powerful; her declarative, percussive voice explodes, like the trademark spray of hair that rises from the top of her head like a geyser, as she strides through a repertoire of Afro-Brazilian jazz edged with her pet influences--funk and blues.

“Sonia is very knowledgeable and very aware of the historical relationships in Brazilian music,” says radio host Mieleniczenko, “not in a didactic way, but in the way she chooses music . . . a range--Afro sambas, music from Bahia. . . . She has a sort of world vision that makes her the most powerful performer in her area locally--singing a repertoire relevant to the history of Brazilian music.”

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In contrast, Gazzola’s voice travels the country’s interior, blending, starting from her southern roots. “To search for the heart of Brazil,” says Mieleniczenko. “The one thing that really strikes me is the voice’s quality. It’s unusually Brazilian. If you listen to the female voices from Brazil, they don’t have to be cute and perfect. Much of it is in the quality of a voice, its timbre. Maybe I’m being centric, but Ana’s voice is that sort of sensual, very unique, involving, embracing, warming voice.”

Those divergent approaches, combined with Almedia’s bristling carnival rhythms from his native Bahia, were the centerpiece for the kickoff of “Brazil North and South” at the Fais Do Do Ballroom in the West Adams district last month.

The next is scheduled for Sept. 27 at the same venue, but the concept is still free-form, evolving, open to whim and fancy.

Brazil lives hidden in so many places in Los Angeles figuratively and literally, Gazzola and Santos believe. The people, the rhythms, the melodies, the chord changes are surprising. The impulsive open-endedness of the presentation should, they hope, mirror the music’s own implicit mystery and seductiveness.

“It makes sense in the context of the community, the multifaceted life they lead,” Mieleniczenko says. “They are doing what many musicians have to do in Brazil--developing this grass-roots thing. It’s unusual in a city this big, with those resources already in place, but they have done everything--they’re the promoter, the designer, the lighting director. In essence, they’ve gone back home . . . trying to create the mystery, trying to reinvent the performance,” Mieleniczenko says. “I have incredible respect for them, and it’s very appropriate in a city where great magicians are born.”

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Sonia Santos & Ana Gazzola appear at LunaPark, 665 N. Robertson, West Hollywood, on Aug. 15 at 9 and 11 p.m. (310) 652-0611. Ana Gazzola is part of the “Brazilian Summer Festival ‘97” at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre on Sept. 6. For more information about “Brazil North and South,” call Yellow Green Productions, (310) 659-0220.