The change is evident from the opening guitar line of “De Noite na Cama” (“At Night in Bed”) a samba rock number composed by Veloso from exile in London. With Tropicália stars Veloso and Gilberto Gil in political exile, Carlos was inspired to change his sound further, aided by three members of psychedelic rock band Os Mutantes. Released in 1971 on Phonogram, Carlos, Erasmo… was his first record for a new label and a musical step forward, its title constructed to distinguish him from his “brother.” While Carlos’ previous album began to acknowledge the counterculture, this time he fully embraces it. Only the most well-versed aficionados of Brazilian music will recognize the references to other songs (I wasn’t aware of any of them), but this places the song and the album in an intriguing context: that of a man who made money singing songs about flowers but has grown tired of it. Despite such forward-looking flourishes, the album settles in with ballads like “Teletema” and even a version of the standard “Aquarelo do Brasil.” It’s a lovely album, yet underneath the gorgeous ballad “Saudosismo,” written by Caetano Veloso, is an indictment of a bossa nova scene that its writer feared had become too dependent on easy subjects like flowers.
Aquarelo do brasil from the movie series#
The album launches this next phase of his career with “Estou Dez Ano Atrasado” (“I’m 10 Years Late”), an Erasmo-Roberto composition that addresses the simple sidekick persona he adopted on “Jovem Garda.” “Espuma Congelada” (“Frozen Foam”) begins as a gentle ballad but quickly undergoes a series of transformations from Pepper-pomp horns to a final experimental montage that invokes the daring excitement of Tropicália. Still, it reveals a new ambition and experimentation, if only in fits and starts. The early ‘70s albums now reissued by Light in the Attic were commercial failures compared to his earlier and later work, but they present a Brazilian auteur who should be better known in the States.Įrasmo Carlos e os Tremendões (1970), the last of several albums he made for the RGE label that gave him his start, is the most conventional of the reissued titles. But after the show ended, a maturing Erasmo struggled to be taken seriously as a songwriter. “Jovem Garda” began a long partnership between Erasmo and Roberto, who wrote songs for each other throughout a career that has lasted decades. The duo was part of the popular Brazilian musical television program “Jovem Garda” (“Young Guard”), the show’s name describing a subsequent movement of Brazilian musicians influenced by American rock ‘n’ roll of the ‘50s. It was a style he outgrew, but not without growing pains.īorn Erasmo Esteves, Carlos borrowed the name of his more successful musical partner Roberto Carlos to signify their kinship, but the gesture seemed to be a way of hiding his own gifts. In the mid-‘60s, he specialized in a kind of music that Thayer describes as the bossa nova equivalent of bubble gum. Carlos, whose own career was in transition, felt a kinship with his idols. Not even two decades after their prime, these classic rockers were playing to a nearly empty auditorium.
![aquarelo do brasil from the movie aquarelo do brasil from the movie](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_IivJgEMiR_M/S3_l30Wr3wI/AAAAAAAABDs/PBqoiKbw-sQ/s320/aquareladobrasil4.jpg)
For the first time, Carlos was seeing idols like Chubby Checker and Bill Haley and the Comets, rock ‘n’ roll pioneers that had inspired his early career as a television teeny bopper. “I wanted to discover new music, new harmonies, new people, people hairier than me.” Carlos described an epiphany that occurred when he and a fellow musician attended an oldies show in Las Vegas in the early ‘70s. Liner notes by Allen Thayer attempt to place him somewhere between a Brazilian James Taylor, Neil Diamond or Phil Collins, but other than the latter’s appearance on milestones like Eno’s Another Green World, Carlos was more willing than any of them to experiment with his sound. Carlos makes music that is perfectly accessible but harder to categorize.
![aquarelo do brasil from the movie aquarelo do brasil from the movie](https://www.basiaudiofisarmonica.it/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Immagine-519.png)
Unlike Tropicália legends like Caetano Veloso and Tom Zé, Carlos is less well-known outside his native land, even among American fans familiar with that politically charged scene. But a trio of reissues from Light in the Attic gives us the example of a musician who grew out of a lightweight early career to become one of his country’s most significant artists. What if Donny Osmond grew up to became Neil Young? That’s not exactly the North American equivalent of what happened to Brazilian singer-songwriter Erasmo Carlos.