Loyal to Brazil, While Sampling Pop Beyond Its

12/07/13
Marisa Monte Performs at the Beacon Theater - NYTimes.com
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MUSIC REVIEW
Loyal to Brazil, While Sampling Pop Beyond Its Borders
Marisa Monte Performs at the Beacon Theater
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Marisa Monte: The Brazilian singer and songw riter performed to a sold-out audience at the Beacon Theater on Wednesday
evening.
By JON PARELES
Published: June 27, 2013
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On Wednesday night the Brazilian songwriter Marisa Monte told a
sold-out audience at the Beacon Theater (where she returns on
Friday) that she was “very happy to be in Brazil last week.” That was
when protests spread across the country, first over bus fare increases
and then over far more widespread discontent. “I was able to see
something that maybe means a new way of democracy in Brazil,”
she said.
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That led her into a new unrecorded
REPRINTS
song that she wrote in December with
her frequent collaborator, Arnaldo
Antunes, and her band’s guitarist,
Dadi: “Dizem (Quem Me Dera),”
“They Say (How I Wish).” It’s a
utopian vision of progress and hope
with a touch of the late Beatles: “We have the
intelligence/To bring an end to violence,” it vowed.
That aura of benevolence runs through her songs,
A sortable calendar of
burnished by one of the most exquisite voices in Brazilian
noteworthy cultural ev ents in
music. Poised and serene, honoring melodies by gliding
the New York region, selected by
Tim es critics.
through them with a minimum of embellishment, Ms.
Go to Event Listings »
Monte cradles each word and makes each phrase glow
from within. In Brazil, she is a superstar; “Tribalistas,” her
2002 collaboration with Mr. Antunes and the Bahian hit maker Carlinhos Brown, was a
million-seller.
www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/arts/music/marisa-monte-performs-at-the-beacon-theater.html?ref=music&_r=2&
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12/07/13
Marisa Monte Performs at the Beacon Theater - NYTimes.com
Although Ms. Monte grew up with Brazilian tradition — she produced an album for the
Velha Guarda of Portela, one of Rio de Janeiro’s most respected samba schools — her
songs also hint at pop outside Brazil’s borders, from flamenco to Motown to the soft-shoe
swing of “Verdade, uma Ilusão” (“Truth, an Illusion”), the name of her current tour. At
the Beacon, she was backed by a rock band — including three members of Nação Zumbi,
a renowned band from Recife — and a string quartet, sharing burnished arrangements in
a set that relied on ballads. But simple pop prettiness is not all she’s after.
Go to Complete List »
Ms. Monte, who released her debut album in 1989, follows through on the modernist and
postmodernist ideas that have infused Brazilian popular music since the 1960s. She opened
the concert by herself, singing “Blanco,” a Portuguese adaptation of an excerpt from a
complex major work by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz: “Perception is conception,” she
purred.
Through the concert, she was surrounded and enfolded in video imagery from leading
Brazilian visual artists (whose names she took pains to list at the end of the set):
abstractions, cityscapes, cascades of typography, a rush of blurred faces. And her love
songs often come with a twist, like “E.C.T.,” in which a love letter is opened by a postal
clerk who turns it into a hit song, or “Beija Eu” (“Kiss Me”), which toys with its rhyming
Portuguese syllables while its meter shifts between 3/4 and 4/4.
But the intellectual underpinnings of Ms. Monte’s songs are always subsumed by the
pleasures of melody and by the comfort of her voice: the poised tension and release, the
delicacy and yearning. For most pop musicians, such alluring surfaces would be
achievement enough; for Ms. Monte, they lead deeper.
A version of this review appeared in print on June 28, 2013, on page C5 of the New York edition w ith the headline: Loyal to
Brazil, While Sampling Pop Beyond Its Borders.
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Marisa Monte Performs at the Beacon Theater - NYTimes.com
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