Made in Americas

THE dreadlocks/cornrows are a little bit Stevie Wonder and Bob Marley. The do-rag brings Eminem to mind. And the shades add a nice Hollywood touch. But the design imprinted on Max de Castro’s T-shirt is pure Brazil: a close-up of soccer god Pele.

Then, of course, there’s the guitar, a Key lime-green Ibanez. Though De Castro has owned Les Paul and Fender Telecaster electrics, among others, he says that he used the elegant Brazilian-made instrument on his latest recording and took it with him on a recent European tour.

“I like it because it’s semiacoustic, so there’s body in the sound,” says De Castro, strumming a few chords as he chats in a hotel bar in this city’s swanky Jardins neighborhood. “I like guitars with heavy sound, but this one is heavy but also jazzy, so I can get the best of both worlds.”

Straddling two (or more) musical universes at once is a hallmark of De Castro’s music, which in true Brazilian fashion is a stylish synthesis of the imported and the home-grown, the urbane and the proudly parochial. Four years ago, when De Castro released his debut album, “Samba Raro,” a Time magazine story declared that the then-28-year-old singer-songwriter “just might be the most original musical talent to have come out of Brazil in three decades.” That assessment might’ve been premature.

But with his new release, De Castro is inching closer to the ranks of his American idols, ground-breaking performers such as Wonder, Prince, Sly Stone and Quincy Jones. This is surely De Castro’s most complex and original record.

Like the artist’s two previous albums, “Max de Castro” mixes classic American R&B;, jazz and hip-hop influences with samba and tropicalia, the Brazilian pop-rock hybrid that emerged in the 1960s. Funky bass lines, colorful Hammond organ flourishes and raucous percussion create a buoyant musical atmosphere.

Floating over it all, gently insistent, is De Castro’s soft, sensual voice, singing always in Portuguese. Though his music pulses with pleasure-loving wit, it also evinces the artist’s thoughtful temperament. “There’s this image of Brazil of the party, of the very excitation type of thing,” says De Castro, speaking through an interpreter, “but I’ve also got this side of the more introspective, mellow side. So this is kind of a side that I explore also.”

Several of the songs flow together in a single melodic stream reminiscent of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” and Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life.” A quiet self-confidence marks the musicianship and the songwriting, which favors plain language and thoughtful imagery over fancy wordplay.

Overall, “Max de Castro” has a seamless quality, a precision and coherence that reflect its creator’s deep involvement in virtually every stage of production.

“I always like these kind of artists who have complete control, like Stevie Wonder, Prince, Quincy Jones, where they write the songs, make the arrangements, produce, but also take care of the business side,” De Castro says. “I never had a Jimi Hendrix poster in my wall, but I always had a Quincy Jones poster. I always preferred this kind of artist that can play, arrange, produce, all the processes of the record.”

Music in the house

DE CASTRO’S artistic aspirations, though high, should come as no surprise. The son of venerated Brazilian singer Wilson Simonal, a pioneer in blending Brazilian bossa nova with American soul, De Castro grew up in a house where world-class musicians often stopped by and something interesting was always playing on the family stereo.

During high school, while his friends were brooding over such mope-rock acts as the Cure, De Castro was grooving to George Clinton, the master of booty-shaking R&B-funk.; “We had these high school balls type of thing, and parties,” De Castro recalls, “Walking with a George Clinton record was a statement, saying like, ‘Here I am!’ ”

De Castro has been making his iconoclastic musical presence felt ever since, and more people outside Brazil are taking notice. He has received strong support and international exposure through Trama, a savvy Sao Paulo label whose other acts include Patricia Marx, Mad Zoo, Fernanda Porto and avant-garde rocker Tom Ze, as well as De Castro’s brother and fellow musician Wilson Simoninha. Trama put together its first major European tour for several of its artists in 2002.

De Castro says he caught an important break when one of his recordings made it onto a “Brazilian Groove” compilation issued by the Putumayo label, the hipster’s arbiter of world music. The song, off De Castro’s second album, “Orchestra Klaxon” (2003), is set to an insanely catchy polyrhythmic beat and tells the story of a morena woman who danced naked, but for head-to-toe body paint, at Rio’s famous carnival, captivating the crowd and the judges. “It helped a lot, especially in the United States,” De Castro says of the Putumayo sampler.

As a musically curious adolescent, De Castro did plenty of sampling himself, rummaging around in record stores for the American discs he coveted.

“It was pretty much a family thing, because my father got a lot of soul music, jazz, funk, Motown, James Brown,” he says. “So it was kind of a heritage. And then as soon as you get into this world of black music, let’s say, you start to dig into the record covers, and you notice that this one guy is playing with another guy, and the producer. So you start to go deep[er] and deep[er].” Today he still prefers vinyl LPs to CDs, and his collection numbers in the thousands.

While he was mastering Holland-Dozier-Holland and Miles Davis, De Castro also was absorbing influences from pioneering Brazilian fusionists such as Baden Powell, the bossa nova guitar virtuoso, and funk innovator Jorge Ben.

His father never actively encouraged him to become a musician, De Castro says. He didn’t need to. “In my house the music was always present. So for me it was very natural to become a musician.”

It would be wrong, however, to imagine that De Castro simply hopped a ride on his father’s coattails. Tragically, in fact, the opposite was true. In 1972, during the paranoid era of Brazil’s dictatorship, Wilson Simonal was accused of having ratted out his accountant to the police. Though the charges never stuck, Simonal was publicly pilloried for the alleged betrayal, his career declined and in 1991 he walked out on his wife and children. De Castro was 18 at the time.

Max’s success has been of his own making, and in Brazil, where music is regarded as being nearly as essential for sustaining life as air, he has a small but passionate fan base. Sales for his first two records, “Samba Raro” and “Orchestra Klaxon,” were small change by U.S. pop star standards but impressive in a country that nurtures its lesser-known native talent, even in the face of a globalized, corporate music industry.

According to Time’s story on De Castro, “some 70% of CDs sold in Brazil are by Brazilian artists -- a higher percentage of local music than is sold in France, Italy, Britain or any other European country.”

Despite Brazilians’ adventurous musical tastes, De Castro says that the Brazilian radio market has grown blander and more commercialized over the years. Brazilian music also tends toward a certain insularity vis-a-vis Spanish-speaking Latin America, De Castro says. Brazilians pay more attention to what’s going on in Europe and the United States than to what Argentines or Mexicans are listening to.

“Because Brazilian music is so rich, it’s really hard for us to communicate with music from the other countries of Latin America, because apart from Cuba we can’t see anything really fresh” being made in the rest of Latin America, he says.

But in a country whose cultural minister, Gilberto Gil, is a professional musician, the artistic urge to keep experimenting and exploring is never far removed. Over the next few months, De Castro will be touring Brazil. Then in the fall he’ll be off to Europe and maybe, by year’s end, the United States. Is Los Angeles on his itinerary?

“Ah,” he says, cradling his guitar, “I’m dreaming!”

And making at least a few of those dreams come true.