Lula Lounge is a club that I find myself connected to here. I don’t work for them, although my partner does manage it. The two owners are friends, but for most of its four years existence, I’ve kept myself at a distance from it.
Coming back from Brazil last winter, my mind was filled with plans to maintain a connection both to that amazing country, and to the musicians that I heard and met there. I’m working on it.
Part of working on it is dealing with the reality that very few people here in Toronto know anything about Brazil, its culture or music. The culture when people do have a clue, is the drugs, guns and gangs of Cidade de Deus and the hypersexiness of Carnaval, both seemingly imagined as the dominant, permanent and pervasive mode of day to day existence there. Of course, there is a grain of truth in that, but my experience was of something far more nuanced, combinatory, familiar and unfamiliar all at the same time.
If you want to get people to see something as you do, the way to do it seems to be to show them. I’d love to spend my time developing video and audio recordings of what Brazil offers that isn’t part of the stereotypes. The way to do that seems to me to be through the internet’s ability to create viral, thin distribution of compelling media. And that seems to mean video, and something like youtube.
So this past week, I put together the first experiment that I hope will move me towards that goal. Maracatu is a percussion and voice music that thrives in the Nordeste of Brazil, and especially in cities like Recife. Visually like some aspects of Samba, it’s culturally and musically distinct, and here in Toronto we have a great Maracatu band, Maracatu Nunca Antes. They performed at Lula Lounge last week. I’d talked to Alex, one of the performers in Nunca Antes, last winter about my aspirations and ideas coming out of the trip. He’s been very supportive, and working with him and the club gave me the opportunity to go through the process of creating a record of their music.
Having access to a really good quality HD/DV cam made the difference. My brother in law owns and runs a hot little post effects company, Juggernaut, and he’d offered their camera for use in a project like this.
So it all came together. I feel really good with the result, even if there’s a long way to go. Having to deal on my own to create an audio recording that could serve as a base track to cut to and that wouldn’t sound lame, as well al keeping one fixed camera going, along with the mobile cam was a good way to appreciate the value of a crew. Having to try to sync video of people drumming, with each beat apparently like the others led to a lot of understanding of the techniques that work best for shooting for an easier edit. And getting my Final Cut Pro chops back after a while away was something else. Finally, learning something about how to rescue the master audio recording, which suffered from low levels that resulted in an imbalanced tonal range was another whole learning curve.
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But it was exciting. More will come out of what I have shot, and now that I know the real value of B-Roll footage, there will be more work with Nunca Antes to pull more together.
A portfolio of brazilian music, shot here – that’s the stage one vision. Then, see what I can make of that.
More to come.
