Troubles in Brazil Still Inspire a Master
Two centuries of his country’s rhythms flow through the fingers of João Bosco, one of Brazil’s most fabled guitarists, singers and composers. Now 70, he can still breeze through tricky meters, harmonies and beats from all over Brazil.
“João sounds like an orchestra,” said the jazz guitarist Lee Ritenour. “He’s got several things going on at the same time. He can be playing a very complex rhythm on the guitar, and at the same time he’s singing something completely different.”
In the 1970s and early ’80s, when Brazilians lived under a military dictatorship, Mr. Bosco and his lyricist, Aldir Blanc, delivered songs that stirred pride and fighting spirit. One of the duo’s hit sambas, “Nação” (“Nation”), lives on as an anthem of Brazil’s majesty.
For all the ease of Mr. Bosco’s playing, he practices relentlessly, he said. “I never studied music formally,” he said. “Everything came from my intuitive perception.”
During the late ’60s, he was an engineering student in his home state of Minas Gerais; away from school he experimented with guitar. He absorbed every rhythm he heard, from tribal Afro-Brazilian sounds to bossa nova to the time-bending meters of the pianist Dave Brubeck.
The singer Elis Regina became his muse, and he moved to Rio to take up music full- time. He and Mr. Blanc joined a vanguard of young, brainy, socially committed musicians and songwriters who emerged in the heat of the dictatorship: Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque.
Whatever they wrote, the censors had to approve. Mr. Bosco said he had to keep rewriting and resubmitting. “Sometimes it took you to an even higher level of creativity,” he said. “The censors lost and the song won.”
Four decades after the creation of “O Bêbado e a Equilibrista” (“The Drunk and the Tightrope Walker”), Brazilian audiences still sing along with this masterwork by Mr. Blanc and Mr. Bosco. The song’s beginnings can be traced to Christmas 1977, when Mr. Bosco heard that Charlie Chaplin had died and thought of writing a Carnaval samba in his honor. They spun that into an allegory of the political circus Brazil had become. Ms. Regina performed it “in a manner so soul- stirring and magisterial,” Mr. Bosco said, that audiences knew what the song meant, even if the censors didn’t.
The drive to help a troubled country has never left him. “Malabaristas do Sinal Vermelho” (“Red-Light Jugglers”) speaks of children who descend from the hillside slums and accost drivers stopped at a red light. Mr. Bosco deepened the pathos by inviting a choir of children from Rosinha, one of Rio’s most treacherous favelas, to sing with him on the record.
Recently, he said, “I went to a religious space in Salvador, Bahia, and in front of the orixás I told myself that if ever I cannot deliver the music in a way that meets my standards, I would rather become mute.”
He added, “Music is everything to me. I am alive because I’m singing and playing.”