WALDEMAR BASTOS
Angola/ Portugal brand new CD out on Worldconnection in Autumn 2004, former CD’s at Luaka Bop.

periode: Zomer 2004 + December 2004
With the open heart and clear eyes of an exile, Waldemar Bastos writes songs that beautifully entwine elements of African guitar pop — from Zaire to South Africa — with Brazilian and Portuguese influences. Sweet melodies whisper through the heat of sub-Saharan grooves, a longing for reconciliation soothes a righteous anger... rage and calm, innocence and experience, darkness and light... Blacklight... PretaLuz.

PRETA LUZ

by WALDEMAR BASTOS
My music arises out of a plethora of paradoxes. I am a professional musician who barely studied music, an African performer whose first album was recorded in South America, an artist from a war-torn country whose principal themes are peace and optimism, and a singer-songwriter who is considered to be the voice of Angola, although I presently live in Portugal.

My musical career began at the age of seven when my father, an itinerant nurse who had himself played the piano and organ when he was studying in the seminary, came home and found me playing the accordion he kept under his bed. To his astonishment, I was actually playing songs I had heard on the radio. So he and my mother offered me a choice between a bicycle and music lessons as a present the following Christmas. Although all of my friends in Kabinda, the town where we lived, were dying to have bicycles, I chose the music lessons. I studied with one of my brothers, and while he fastidiously learned to read music, I would simply hear scales once and repeat them with ease. One day the teacher’s daughter noticed I was not looking at the score as I was playing and when her father asked me to identify notes, I couldn’t. At first, I was traumatized, but I soon realized that I had been blessed with what in Portuguese is referred to as a dádiva, a profound gift or natural talent for music. More than twenty years later, when playing with a symphony orchestra in Brazil for my first album Estamos Juntos [We’re Together], it was no trouble at all for me to follow the conductor or other trained performers in spite of the fact that I could not read a note of music. I still play exclusively by ear.

In the ’80s, I lived in Brazil and recorded my first album with the help of Chico Buarque. I had met several years earlier when he had come to Angola as part of Projeto Kalunga [Project Sea], which was an attempt to put Brazilian artists in touch with the roots of African slave culture that form such an integral part of Brazilian culture and music. Chico sang with me on the album, Estamos Juntos, along with Martinho da Vila and João do Vale.

(In collaboration with C2)

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