Bang on a Can

"Hermeto Pascoal is a great instrumentalist and arranger, but also an eccentric personality, so people in Brazil have always tied his music and his person together very tightly," says Jovino Santos Neto, who for fifteen years played piano and flute for Hermeto's group. "He has always said he'd like to see his music separated from his person as a player and that one of his dreams is for people to take his compositions and dress them up with different melodies. In the early seventies, Hermeto collaborated with Miles Davis. People like Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Ron Carter, Hubert Laws, they would talk about Hermeto and pass around his tapes, getting people turned on to his music. His pieces are highly elaborate, sophisticated compositions, but they never lose contact with the earth and are always linked to the basic Brazilian dance rhythms.

When I gave Evan Ziporyn the score for Ilha Das Gaivotas, he looked at it and said, 'It's funny. When you hear it you expect to see one thing rhythmically, and when you read it you see something totally different.' It's because even though it's a strict 7/4 rhythm, which is kind of odd, the melody cuts across that and is very free. The phrases feel organic, very natural. In 1987, we played in Maceio, the capital city of Alagoas, which is a state in northeastern Brazil where Hermeto was born. Maceio is right on the coast, and we heard people talking about this beautiful island nearby--Ilha Das Gaivotas. It means 'island of the seagulls.'"