I’ll be one of the first to admit this: intriguing album designs draw me in. Even in the age of digital artwork, nothing quite says “listen to me” than a singular, creative, point of view. I mean, what else would explain how I stumbled upon Miguel Braga’s haunting nocturnal ambient jazz album, Ritual?
Our earth. A door. A floating head. A keyboard. A night time aerial photo of Francisco Sá Carneiro Airport. In peak ‘90s aesthetic, Ritual adorns itself with simple clipped art working together to paint a scene that can’t help but paint a mood. In this case, it was of an exploratory vibe Miguel Braga stumbled into.
As a musician, Miguel Braga went back and forth between two continents and countries. Simply being born of Hungarian father and Portuguese mother wasn’t enough. From his native Portugal, the Porto-born pianist absconded from a lucrative engineering education to take up musical composition and performance. From Brazil, he’d link up with visiting musicians, expanding his creative vocabulary to include Brazilian MPB, jazz-funk, and other South American latin jazz styles.
Early on, Miguel transitioned from singer-songwriter to keen session musician for Portuguese artists at the front line of Portugal’s New Wave scene, notably working with the incomparable Paulo De Carvalho and joining others exploring jazz fusion. It was with Paulo’s “Quinteto Paulo de Carvalho” that Miguel would befriend fellow keyboardist, André Sarbib. This friendship would yield a stunning side project they’d dub, Via Nort.
In 1986, Miguel Braga’s short-lived Via Nort would help craft a brilliant single, “Greenwish” – one part Weather Return, other part Paul Hardcastle – a spirited work mixing dancefloor post-disco with modal jazz-funk. A fortuitous encounter with Portuguese-Brazilian musician, Fernando Girão, would present him with a new opportunity to expand his musical vocabulary.
Miguel’s creative encounter with Fernando would yield the revelatory album, Indio. Unlike anything else in both’s oeuvre, Brazilian folk, New Age, and African music blended together with ideas from soul and experimental realms, taking both musicians into territories that remain quite pioneering, as heard on tracks like “Deixem O Índio Viver” and “Índio Não É Só Quem Vive Na Floresta”. So, a year later, when it came time for Miguel to put his name onto an album, you could say this “fourth world” fusion was still heavily lingering in his headspace.
It was an idea of a “Trans-Atlantic” fusion that fed the spirit of Miguel Braga’s Ritual. You’d hear it on songs like the opener, “Quando Eu Era Pequenino”. Rather than run from the global expanse of his Portuguese roots, Miguel prodded – here’s my Africanness, there’s my Brazilian root, these are all the waypoints touched by Portuguese music. Recorded under the Numérica label, Ritual’s vision made sense. Much like the like-minded explorations of label mates, Ricardo Fabini and Via Nort fellow, Andrè Sarbib, their shiftless Portuguese jazz was different. To those hearing it, it sure sounded like pleasure music with multitudes of meaning.
Fernando Girão’s contributions to the record, on tracks like “Da Sara” and “O Meu Ritual”, let the neo-romanticism of Miguel Braga’s compositional chops just sparkle in the night time. Wonderful melodicism makes complex arrangements – like those heard on “Vira Virado” and “Profissão Em Beiriz” (feat. André) – render themselves positively timeless in a different way. “Adult” music like this works because this kind of sophistication is couched in lower “c” class and upper “C”complexity. This is jazz that breathes in the intimacy of delicate spaces – swaying you through each syncopation.
You’ve heard this kind of mature music before, in the ideas of Toshifumi Hinata, in the atmosphere of ECM, in the quiet ideas of Miles, but as much as history rhymes, (in the expert fingers of someone like Miguel) sometimes it’s much easier to see where something took off, simply by lifting off.