Canção da América – style and emotion in Brazilian popular song

Abstract

During the 1960s bossa nova was the trademark of Brazilian popular music. In the 1980s a second wave of Brazilian popular artists, such as Milton Nascimento, Djavan, Ivan Lins and Caetano Veloso, has emerged on to the international popular music scene. These artists have been issuing and distributing their records through international labels, and have also had their music recorded by other artists and groups like Pat Metheny and Manhattan Transfer (recipient of a Grammy for their album Brasil). Milton Nascimento, who since 1968 has been playing in concerts around the world with jazz musicians such as saxophonist Wayne Shorter, also receives good reviews in Europe. The Observer describes Milton Nascimento as ‘one of the top musicians in the world’, whose poetry ‘… fuses emotion, feeling, experience, dreams, [and] hopes’ with ‘a burnished voice … tempered with a taut edge at times’, and ‘beautiful melodies which are deceptively intense and powerful even when surrounded by funky keyboards or lush strings’. For the reviewer: ‘His songs have summed up the collective feelings of a nation’. And for Brazilians what is the meaning of Milton Nascimento's music?