Singer mixes bossa nova and reggae
Singer-songwriter mixes bossa nova with reggae, rap and hip hop, writes T’Cha Dunlevy.
How does a Brazilian singersongwriter based in Paris respond to pressure to play bossa nova? Releasing a debut album titled Bossa Muffin is a pretty good — and cheeky — way to start.
Flavia Coelho doesn’t have anything against the genre that made the world fall in love with the music of her homeland. She just doesn’t want to be bound by it.
“My musical approach is to take bossa nova, traditional Brazilian music like forró and samba, and mix it with the ‘muffin’ — reggae, ragga, rap, hip hop,” Coelho said, in charmingly-accented French, on the phone from France a few weeks before her Montreal International Jazz Festival performance, Tuesday at Club Soda.
“I like mixing traditional Brazilian music sung in the port with new sounds. People are used to Brazilians singing traditional music. Since I’ve been (in Paris) putting out albums, I’ve been trying to show that, au contraire, in Brazil, there is all kinds of music. You can’t put up barriers. You have to try to break them down.”
Though there are traces of bossa nova and samba on Bossa Muffin, and on last year’s vibrant Sonho Real, the dominant musical influence comes from a style of music known the world over, but not normally associated with Brazil: reggae.
“I grew up in the countryside,” Coelho said, “in São Luis de Maranhão, in the north-east, which is where my mother’s from. It’s considered the second capital of reggae, outside Jamaica.
“As a kid growing up there, I didn’t know I wanted to be a singer; but later, when I was writing my first songs, all those influences came back.”
Coelho’s family moved between São Luis and Rio de Janeiro, where she auditioned to sing in a band, at age 14, and never looked back. She would go on to perform with over 30 different groups before deciding, when she was 26 in 2006, to try her luck overseas.
“I arrived alone in Paris with my backpack and my dreams,” she said. “I had never written a single song or even played guitar. I said, ‘I’m leaving my country and starting over.’”
She bought herself a guitar and began writing. A few years later, she met producer Victor Vagh, who suggested Coelho follow her musical intuition, regardless of people’s expectations, and that she put out an album.
That album, released in 2011, was Bossa Muffin. She followed three years later with Mundo Meu. And now, with Sonho Real, Coelho feels she is getting ever closer to the hybrid sound she hears in her head.
Again, the title is two-sided: “sonho” means dream, in Portuguese, and “real” — well, you can figure that one out.
“The idea is simple,” Coelho said. “I came here to France to try to make my first album. I’ve grown as a woman and as a human. In the past five years, I’ve played 500 concerts, travelled the world talking music and living on music. I’m so happy.
“Sonho Real means to dream reality. I’m living my dream, my passion. The lyrics are centred around real life in my country. Having lived there for 26 years, I have lots of things to talk about — life, family, love, friendship, and I can’t forget society and politics.”
The songs back her up: shimmying opener Se Ligue speaks of social injustice to a syncopated beat that is part samba, part dancehall reggae; Paraiso is a twinkling forró hymn to those who are gone; Na Favela finds Coelho delivering rapid-fire lines about the ups and downs of life in the ghetto; while Mulher is an Afrobeat-driven tribute to women.
But there is one topic she wasn’t ready to broach. Asked for her opinion on the current political upheaval in Brazil, Coelho replied, “I’d need a whole other interview for that.”