Once again I turn towards an old love of mine, the music of Brazil. Where else can one get that special emotion of saudade – evoking the bittersweet, mixed up flights of fancy we all share – than through the genuine deal, as today’s album by Vital Lima does? All the touchstones and waypoints that I’ve spoken about before, that of dream-like musical ruminations (as heard of in the music of Flavio Venturini, Beto Guedes, Diana Pequeno, and that of Edson Natale, this album’s closest sonic companion) make their way here. Yet, like each of these artists one can sense something unique to their experience.
Vital Lima’s story begins, as he stated in his own bio, in the small river boat town of São Domingos do Capim in the northwestern Brazilian state of Pará. There at the entrance to the Amazonian rainforest, Vital grew up in a household where music permeated every part of their life.
While hearing the roar of the nearby Capim River, a young Vital would catch his mom playing guitar, singing along to pop music of the day. Somehow, nature’s music intertwining with the very human one struggling to be heard. As he grew up (and his family moved closer to the capital of Pará, Belém, he’d continue in the tradition of his mother and maternal grandfather, picking up the guitar, learning to play along to the burgeoning songs of the Jovem Guarda movement. By the age of 14, Vital would befriend Nilson Chaves, a fellow Paráense songwriter, with whom a platonic relationship would spur them to write original music for various performance venues in and around the capital.
By the time Vital was old enough to complete collegiate law studies, he realized that Belém might not be the best place to foster his other, creative side. Out there, as was in that time, every part of modern Brazilian culture seemed to filter out quite slowly to his side of the world. Records and record labels were scarcely found in Pará. Little to no recording studios and facilities existed. Television and music broadcasts would transmit months after they ran elsewhere. At that moment as much as Belém was his home, Vital had to head “elsewhere” to follow that creative itch.
It was in 1974 when Vital met Hermínio Bello de Carvalho, the noted poet turned sambista and producer. It was Hermínio who saw some potential in this young kid who submitted a song to the Festival of Music and Poetry at the University of Pará. Hermínio would challenge Vital to step out of Belém, head to Rio, and to bring the music, ideas, and atmosphere of the Amazon with him.
For almost four years, Vital would take it upon to immerse himself in the study of Nordeste music masters and master the guitar itself. By the time he’d record his first album, 1978’s Pastores Da Noite, Vital had hit upon a sound (if only he can get outside of other’s shadows). Inspired by the Clube Da Esquina vibrations of its lineage groups like Boca Livre, 14 Bis, or singers like Joyce and Erasmo Carlos, Vital’s first album co-written with Hermínio Bello De Carvalho hinted at some quiet brilliance just waiting in the wings.
1980’s Cheganças showed Vital taking his first full step as a songwriter. Influenced by the soul music of Brazil and America, and the quasi-MOR of the burgeoning MPB genre, Cheganças was a tentative move in a direction of his own choosing. A few years thereafter he would once again team up with old friend Nilson Chaves to launch Interior, an album written as a duo that found them exploring fusion pop and adopting a more minimal, traditional tone. In a way, songs like “Tum Tá Tá”, “Muruci”, and “Seu Jeito” from 1985’s Interior would serve as hints to just what they were both just starting to be capable of. Somehow, this lark of an album became a hit.
So, one wonders why it took Vital so long to come up with 1990’s Vital. In the music, especially on tracks like “Tudo Era Mentira” one can feel that Vital was searching for a way to revitalize the increasingly dated-sounding, faceless contours of MPB. Exploring ideas gleaned from jazz, New Age, and ambient music, Vital (wisely) took his time to create music that felt of a place, that sounded of a future.
Working with like-minded forward-thinking musicians from Belém, he’d turn to artists like Almirzinho Gabriel, Walter Freitas, and Marco Andre to flesh out music that was coming back increasingly more atmospheric and mercurial. Songs like “Coração De Doido” would use brushes of Brazilian country music as strokes to color synthesizer-led ambient balladry. Others like “Amor De Lua” take on nocturnal soul music as boilerplates to quest his now wonderfully elegant falsetto over. Out of all of Vital’s albums and music, this one, for once, had a special air that was rarefied.
Album highlight “Estado de Espirito” perhaps does its best to express the impressionistic Brazilian soul music Vital Lima wandered into. Music that impresses about infinite love, traversing infinite boundaries, equally traverses the “spiritual” music of groups like Talk Talk who understood the spirit stands in the spaces of such movements. It’s what expresses the wonderful build of Vital’s cover of Joãozinho Gomes’s “Fruta Rachada”. It’s the same laconic air feeding the groovy, uptempo, “Safado”.
The album itself propels itself in a wonderful way to wind down. Joined by Nilson Chaves for “Bye, Bye, Linda”, Vital explores in sound, lyric, and voice their humble underpinnings at the eastern edge of the Amazon. It’s gorgeous, beautiful, stately songs like these that capture the overall mood of Vital. Imagine the Latin standard “Besame Mucho” reimagined as a gossamer, exploratory, ambient jazz ballad, that’s Vital’s “Noites de Verão”. “Mundano” takes bare bones accompaniment on a winding journey through even more sparse ambient jazz balladry (befitting an even sparser evolution from the previous track).
Then the album ends with the nostalgic, windswept, gentle soul of “Carnal”, with Vital taking that country-tinged underpinning the whole album into the heavens, searching for his most personal dream music yet. In the end, Vital remains this impressive album because it finally captures the soul Vital had always wanted express out.