Pascoal: A Specialist in ‘Universal Music’

Hermeto Pascoal, as iconoclastic with his thoughts as he is with his music, doesn’t mince words.

Take the lambada. The rotund, white-bearded, albino Brazilian multi-instrumentalist, who shares the bill with Egberto Gismonti at the Wadsworth Theatre tonight, has powerful feelings about the latest musical import from South of the border.

“The lambada? Ha! Let me tell you something about that. To me, the lambada is worse than a disease. This lambada,” explained Pascoal last week via his interpreter, keyboardist Jovino Santos Neto, “is not even Brazilian; it’s from the Caribbean. To do this music is criminal, because instead of hurting your body, it hurts your soul.”

Pascoal is well qualified to speak authoritatively about Brazilian music, and improvised music in general, for that matter: his work both sums up and reflects the remarkable variety of creative elements active in it. On any given night, he may play ballads, free jazz, Brazilian pop or a symphony on pots, pans and hubcaps.

“The only label I can apply to what I do,” he said, “is ‘Universal Music.’ In one moment, you might hear something that you might call classical music; in the next moment something that you might call Gypsy or Spanish music; in the next moment some purely Brazilian popular things.

“We see no distinction between all the different styles. We don’t want to specialize in one line; we want to play music that is good music, and absorb all these different styles and then play them our own way.”

Pascoal spent his childhood working in the fields of northeast Brazil with his father, playing wooden flutes and a beat-up old hurdy gurdy. After discovering the piano, he wound up in Rio de Janeiro as part of one of the seminal Brazilian music groups, Quartet Novo. In the late ‘60s, he moved to the United States, where he recorded with Miles Davis, Airto Moriera and Flora Purim.

After returning to Brazil in the mid-’70s, Pascoal formed the group which he has led, almost continuously, ever since. The players in the seven-piece band he will perform with in Los Angeles have been with him for an average of 10 years each--remarkable continuity for the sometimes ephemeral longevity of the music business.

“One of the reasons we’ve been together for so long is that we never get bored from playing the same programs,” he explained. “We don’t even make a song list before we go on stage, and we never play pieces the same way. Everything is a surprise, for us and for our listeners.”

Gismonti, in marked contrast to Pascoal’s romantic renegade, appears as the ascetic introvert--dark and inner-focused. His current group includes the unusual combination of his own piano and guitar, cello, bass and a second guitarist. A classically-trained concert pianist who once studied with fabled composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, he brings to his music an intense mixture of European logic and Brazilian spiritualism.

“We have many kinds of music in Brazil,” said Gismonti, “from the very primitive music of the Amazon jungle to very developed electronic and symphonic music. The music I do uses all these elements, and there’s no name for such a mixture, even in Brazil. The way the critics describe what people like Hermeto and me do is to say, ‘Oh, that’s Hermeto’s music,’ or ‘Oh, that’s Egberto’s music.’ ”

Gismonti has been especially affected by several visits to the Amazon and a long association with the Xingu Indians.

“The most important thing I learned from the Xingus was to be completely free,” he recalled. “It is their way, the way they use the music. To them, music is not just sounds, it is the voice of the spirits.

“Studying European music was important to me to learn about different instrumentations--different combinations of instruments. I try to combine what I’ve learned from the European information with what I experienced with the Xingus in the Amazon--to make myself free to play, to express, the voice of the spirit.”

As much as they may differ in style and manner, Pascoal and Gismonti both personify the tremendous range and complexity of Brazilian music--from Pascoal’s carnival-like feeling of celebration to Gismonti’s synthesis of European classical music and Afro-Brazilian rhythms, and from Gismonti’s expression of the Xingu Indians’ spirit of music to Pascoal’s emotional linkage of samba and jazz.