Just To Keep This Brasilian's Beautifull Colors Here

This Interview with Viva Brasil Bandleader Claudio Amaral Silva
was conducted on Jan. 24, 1999

7BR: Claudio, you are, of course, a Brazilian, when did you first come to the San Francisco Bay Area?
CA: That was in May 1972. It's been twenty-seven years since I came here.
7BR: What made you move here?
CA: Well, I was playing music in Brasil already with Rubens Moura, the drummer who later played on the first VIVA BRASIL Album. We used to play in a rock, rock-pop band in Brazil. But I wanted to leave Brazil. I wasn't sure if I was going to go to Europe or the United States. Then I met a friend, actually my sister's boyfriend, an American guy, who invited me and said, "If you want to come to the San Francisco Bay Area, you can stay with me". He was going to Stanford University at the time, so I said, "Okay." And then I flew directly to San Francisco and he picked me up at the airport. I lived with him for about 6 months at Stanford campus and I took the time to learn English and I went to a music school in there, not as a curriculum at the University, but just classes that they had there. Then he finally moved to the East Coast, he was from New York, after he finished Stanford, and I stayed around and ... pretty interesting, I was a street musician for a long time.
7BR: In San Francisco?
CA: In San Francisco. I used to go to Fisherman's Wharf, go downtown, just take my guitar and play on the street. And that's how I made money at that time, street musician. Playing on the street, I met this Portuguese guy who said, "Oh, I know about this club," A German place, matter of fact. It was a German coffeehouse. He said, "Oh, I think you can get a job there". So I got my first playing job at this German coffeehouse in North Beach. Peta's was the name. It was at the corner of Union and Columbus ... it's no longer there. It was a coffeehouse, but they had music five nights a week, just solo people or duos, stuff like that. I worked there for about 10 months or a year.
7BR: This was the mid seventies then?
CA: '73, yeah. And playing in that club I started meeting musicians, I started going to auditions and so on. It was around '76, I was still doing solo gigs and people started sitting in and bring the drums and stuff and that's pretty much how VIVA BRASIL started. More of a jam session thing, kind of playing solo and these guys would come in and play drums and there would be piano player, the club had an acoustic piano, some guys would come and sit in, so...it was not liked a planned band at that stage. It developed to be one though, we started to draw a lot of people into the club. And we decided to finally turn it into a group. So we got the people and started playing regularly at this club.
7BR: Is this how you met Jay Wagner (Keyboard player and Songwriter on the first album)?
CA: Yeah, Jay and I met when I was playing solo at this German place. There was a guy, Victor Meshkowski, who was interested in my music, he had a Brazilian band here in San Francisco, a band called MADE IN BRASIL. I auditioned for his band and Jay was already in that group. We rehearsed and played 2 or 3 gigs together. It was a Sergio Mendes type group, Victor had 2 girls singing, but they didn't gig that much. So, eventually, Jay and I started playing on the side, because we wanted to do some of our original material. We wrote tunes together, cooperating with each other. We decided to break away from MADE IN BRASIL and start our own group. We auditioned and found players, but what we were missing was a Brazilian drummer. No matter what we did, we had all these great drummers, but it never felt right. That's when I wrote to Rubens in Brazil, that we were starting a band over here and if he would like to come and join us and he did. That was around 1976. When we got Rubens, we definitely knew that this is it, we have the rhythm going. So around 76 we were playing nightclubs and then we had the band together. Kent, Eddie, Jay, Rubens and myself, the same people, who were on the first record. We were playing regularly, 5 nights a week, six nights a week.
7BR: What kind of clubs, still at the German place?
CA: No, no. Then we were moving around. We had one steady place on Lombard Street in San Francisco, called SNEAKY PETE'S that we played for years. That's basically where the band really built up a following.
7BR: When did you decide to make the first record?
CA: By then, we really had a great following, people asking if we had any recordings, if we had anything they could take home. There was this guy Bill Hooks, who used to come around the club all the time. He loved the music and everything and he offered to finance the recording if we were going to do it. And that's how the project started. So we got a producer, Marc Rosengarden, who used to be our first drummer before Rubens came in, so he knew the music, he knew the band and he had made recordings before. So he produced it. He brought the budget to Bill Hooks, who approved it. Then we went into the studio. It didn't take long to make that record, we knew what we wanted to do. We had the repertoire. We were playing five nights a week.
7BR: The material that you recorded back then was all stuff that Jay and you had written.
CA: Right.
7BR: When did you write Skindo-Le-Le?
CA: Before we did the record, we went to L.A. just to check out the scene for about ten months. We did do a few good gigs there. We all lived in the same apartment complex and we rehearsed a lot. We stayed around the house and rehearsed and that's actually where we developed Skindo-le-le... We had the song, we sort of rehearsed and forgot about it.
CA: We did the record and Skindo-le-le was pretty long. On the long version that we recorded, we did all sorts of things, um, the Producer just decided to cut a bunch of parts that we had on that song, it was just too long. It was not the song, none of us thought it would do anything.
7BR: What does Skindo-le-le actually mean?
CA: Skindo-le-le it's a phrase, that does not have a meaning per se, but it's a rhythm, a samba rhythm, just like sha-la-la-la-la, you know, you'd say, Skindo-le-le. It has that samba break, skin-dosh skin-dosh, skin-dosh, chuggatug chuggatug (mimicking a samba rhythm), it stands for the rhythm, but it doesn't have a real meaning.

7BR: How does it feel being outside of Brazil and making Brazilian music?
CA: I never knew that I was going to feel this way about being away from Brazil. I wasn't too much into Brazilian music when I lived in Brazil. The music we used to play was more pop and rock oriented and the group did play some Brazilian music, of course, we had some Brazilian songs, but our real repertoire was mostly rock and pop. So when I came here, I knew that I was going to be playing some Brazilian music and I didn't much care for it. As I played the Brazilian material, it touched something deep inside my heart, the feeling of understanding Brazilian music, I guess for the first time, I started paying attention to how rich Brazilian music is. Being in Brazil, Brazilian music to me was something I heard everyday, I said, OK, this is what it is, but being here, away from home, I played or listened to records, I said, "Man, this is really good, there's some good stuff in here". The composers, the lyrics, I mean they started having more meaning to me than when I was still in Brazil. So that's when I started playing the songs and really singing, I used to play solo and sing Corcovado-Quiet Nights, I could actually visualize the whole lyric when he talks about Copacabana, ipanema, all this visual brazil. And it was really emotional singing then. I started to write, more Brazilian stuff, I started going Brazilian style chord changes, and the more I listened to Brazilian artists, classics like Jobim, I really understood about how rich the music is.

7BR: How do you approach song writing?
CA: Usually, my process is writing the melody first. I am always open to change later on though, how the lyrics tend to go... I have stacks of paper of ideas, I haven't used yet, all these ideas for lyrics, melodies sometimes. I walk around with a tape recorder and I sing a little line, I have all these stacks of ideas, a little line, its on the mind. But usually the approach is to write the melody first. And sometimes I do have an idea already what I want to project. Sometimes you can see the whole thing in your mind and you know "Man, this is it". The work is to put it down, how do I put it down, how do I go from here to there, how can I change it and everything.

7BR: How did you meet Marcos Silva?
CA: VIVA BRASIL already had a name in San Francisco, there was a Brazilian scene going here and of course we knew everyone who played Brazilian music. There was this female singer, Nicca, who first told me about Marcos. She said there's this piano player, who just came from New York and he is very good. I knew that he was playing with Airto. So it was one day that Jay couldn't make the gig so I gave him a call "Marcos, I have this gig, a casual, would you like to play and everything. He said "Sure, sure. What songs do you play?" So I sent him some of the tunes. He calls me on the phone, and says OK, I'm looking at this music over here and Hess got the piano on the one side and I had the guitar on the other line and that's pretty much how we rehearsed, on the phone. He goes, "what chord are you playing over here?" He would listen, he has the most amazing ear I've experienced over here. He hears things that only bats hear. So that's how we hooked up. This was the first time we played together.

7BR: So when did he officially join the band?
CA: This was in the eighties. I don't remember exactly, '86, '87. Jay couldn't make one gig and I called Marcos and what was happening at that time was that we were playing with VIVA BRASIL and also playing with Joyce Cooling, we had the two things going. Joyce had a steady thing on Monday and Tuesday nights at Pasand. The whole band, VIVA BRASIL, Jay and myself were all with Joyce. And Jay was actually working with Joyce a lot, writing with her and everything, so he couldn't make some of the gigs, so I kept going with Marcos. When Jay finally decided to go this direction, he still loved Brazilian music, but he wanted to get away and go more pop, and then without really making it official, Marcos slowly started playing more and more with the band and eventually he became part of the band.

7BR: It seems like the two of you turned out to be a great match. How did the music of Viva Brasil changed through Marcos joining in the band? Is there a change?
CA: Big change. As of musicianship, I think the musicianship between Marcos and Jay is compatible in a sense of what they can play. But the style is so different, totally different. ItÕs like black and white. Jay is more pop oriented, parts oriented, patches oriented. He's more backing up whatever is happening in the band, while Marcos is the aggressive type. He pushes everyone in the band from the drummer to the bass player. His imagination is wild. He's a man of a thousand and one ideas, all at the same time, you know what I mean? He's always challenging everybody in the band at all times.
He's always out there and his energy is very strong. He knows what he wants, how he wants it.

7BR: You can feel Marcos Silva's influence on VIVA BRASIL on your second album, FESTA.
CA: You sure can. The idea for FESTA, as the name suggests, is a party. On the gigs we had at the time, we were paying attention to the songs that the people liked the best, the requests and so on. So we thought, why don't we make an album of how we play live, instead of doing it all orchestrated with written parts and stuff. Just like we play in the clubs, the length and everything, do the same in the studio. The whole recording was almost live, we played and sang live, did very few overdubs. Some solos were taken live. We wanted a feel that was not perfect in a sense. But we did play all the songs live almost every night, that's why it sounds like it's been polished and worked on a lot.

7BR: The material for FESTA is musically a very deep selection, were you hip to Ivan Lins and Filó back in Brazil already?

CA: The only one that I didn't know was Filó, but Ivan Lins, since my days in Brazil, Ivan Lins was around already. Djavan was the new guy after '72 when I came here, actually late 70's, when Djavan recorded his first album or something. Basically, those were just the songs that we liked playing live. It fit VIVA BRASIL's style. It's all arranged to suit VIVA BRASIL. Marcos wrote some arrangements, Jay wrote quite a few of the arrangements too.

7BR: What you guys are doing now in the studio reaches that level of sophistication as far as songwriting and arranging, truly up there with those people that you were influenced by.
CA: I would hope so. The whole process is basically learning and growing, VIVA BRASIL is just growing mature, that's what it is. I think, lyrics and melody are becoming more conscious. It's a more mature kind of writing than on the first album.

7BR: Your music has reached so many places now, Skindo-le-le has been a hit in Japan, and in Europe it's an underground DJ favorite. Did you expect any of this?
CA: It's the surprise of my life that that song Skindo-le-le, biggest surprise, I never thought that song would go that far. Still going far. Definitely, I'm proud, I'm happy, I'm amazed at the same time, I'm surprised. And I hope I can write ten more Skindo-le-les. It feels really good.

7BR: What ever happened to Rubens? Did he go back to Brazil?
CA: He moved to Texas.

© 1999 7Bridges Recordings