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MARIA DE MEDEIROS EMOTIONALLY PERFORMS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BRAZILIAN SONGS OF RESISTENCE

Maria de Medeiros, Frank-Portuguese muse of cinema, launched her first experience as a singer on February 12th in Paris: A LITTLE MORE BLUE (Universal Music). The album is a kind tribute to Brazilian pop music and its composers from the resistance movement during the military dictatorship in Brazil. Several promotional concerts around the world are being planned, which might make this album a great hit this coming spring in Europe.

Maria de Medeiros, actress and moviemaker, says the album is a natural consequence of her cultural background, as she has been exposed to Brazilian music ever since she was a child. Her father, conductor Antonio Vitorino de Almeida, introduced her to the classics, and during her teenage years she learned to read between the lines in the songs the resistance of composers such as Chico Buarque, Toquinho, Vinicius de Moraes, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Ivan Lins. All of them are sung by Maria de Medeiros in her album. Ten out of fourteen of the tracks in the CD are songs composed by Chico Buarque, with the exception of the last track, “A Noite do Meu Bem”, a classic of Dolores Duran in 1959, a memory of the time when her grandmother used to sing her to sleep.

Not only does Maria de Medeiros make a moving reverence to these artists, but she also orders the sense of these songs created in an environment of repression, political frustration, resistance and desire for new expression in a unique way. In her text for the CD she praises the musical research reminding people that these artists are contemporary of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and were as provocative and craving for new expression as those English groups.

“When my friends and I were adolescents in Lisbon, the Revolution was still in full swing. Brazilian artists celebrated the period of joy and liberty we were experiencing in Portugal, and on our side, we listened passionately to their songs… Because we were fortunate enough to share their language, we knew that not only were Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso musicians, they were also great poets, thinkers and supporters of the resistance movement. For us they were models. Listening to their music was a manner of being and seeing the world. But whereas we were living in freedom, they themselves were under a military dictatorship. They suffered censorship, they were hunted down and forced into exile. Their committed writing contained coded messages which we were able to decipher. Their songs were filled with hope, intelligence and courage. This is particularly true in the case of Chico Buarque’s lyrics, which are admirable in their poetic genius and their spirit of resistance. The young musicians of the “tropicalist” movement, contemporaries of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, were fired by a remarkable sense of provocation and desire for new expression.”

The album also does the audience a big favor by transcribing all the lyrics Maria de Medeiros chose to sing, not only in the original language, Brazilian Portuguese, but also in French and English. For more information (and samples of her songs and other unpublished work), access Maria de Medeiros’ official website (http://www.mariademedeiros.net) where the performer presents A LITTLE MORE BLUE (the title of a song Caetano Veloso wrote while in exile in London) as an intimate voyage to the heart of these great committed Brazilian artists’ repertoire. Let’s hear it for Maria de Medeiros, now a complete performer.