SAMBA MUSIC / original music

I've been getting more and more interested in African and Brazilian music in the past few months so I've been experimenting a lot with time signatures, polyrhythms and phrasing in the new material I am currently working on. That's part of the reason my new song Small talk is actually the first ''sort of samba'' song I ever did.

A few months ago I had one of my ''let's scroll endlessly on Youtube to look for new music'' sessions. I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I wanted to stumble upon something new, something I hadn't heard before in ayn way. I started by playing one of my favorite movie soundtracks - Seu Jorge's brazilian renditions of David Bowie in The Life Aquatic. That was (alongside being one of my favorite movies soundtracks) pretty much all my knowledge of Brazilian music or Brazilian singer-songwriters. One guy doing some covers for a really fun movie.

However, that video suggested another video. An album called ''Minas'' by Milton Nascimento. The album starts with only some vocals singing a traditional tune and then a guitar slowly emerges, together with Milton's vocals. When I heard that song, I immediately started searching for anything and everything Milton's ever recorded as well as anything about that particular Brazilian singer-songwriter scene I knew nothing about. I was completely enchanted. Something like that has never happened to me before with world music.

After sitting through a couple of Milton's albums, I clicked on a video suggestion that said ''Nana Vasconcelos''. Nana Vasconcelos was a Brazilian percussionist, vocalist and berimbau player and he completely blew my mind. I had only then heard the sound of the berimbau for the first time and Nana is an exceptional berimbau player. He has a lot of different albums with different styles but every one of the albums is wonderful in its own way. One of my favorite Vasconcelos albums is ''Chegada''. This particular album is very interesting because it approaches pop music in a percussionist, instrumental way. It's an interesting approach and a very specific blend.

And there's one more singer-songwriter I've discovered at that time, although not by accident. My friend @Dimitrij was telling me about a guy called Caetano Veloso. He would just go on and on about how great Caetano was and how one of his latest albums Zii e Zie is absolutely fantastic, beautifully produced and without a bad song on the entire album. And he was right. When I first played Zii e Zie without any prior knowledge or idea who Caetano was, I enjoyed it like I couldn't remember. The songs are extremely well written, the production is just amazing and I discovered samba can be both gentle and very edgy and agressive. If you haven't heard Caetano before, do it now.

So anyway, I've written some lyrics for a potential song called ''Small talk'' but I never wrote the music so I put the lyrics aside and forgot about it. I revisited the lyrics a few days ago to decide what kind of music to write. Since small talk is a trivial thing, I wanted the music to also sound ''trivial'' but not be trivial at the same time. My reasoning went kind of like this - okay, you need trivial sounding music that isn't trivial. What can you do? So I thought about it while playing Caetano in the background and it occured to me that a lot of people in the West think of samba as ''elevator music'', mostly because of popular films and TV shows. There's always something samba like playing in an elevator to signify a trivial situation, boredom and a waste of time. And small talk is exactly that, an insignificant boring waste of time. So I combined the two ideas (I even added the noise of chatter in the background to mimic the situation), making sure that the music doesn't turn out trivial because my love of samba and Brazilian singer-songwriter scene is way to big to let that happen :D Anyway, this is what I came up with: