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 Milton Nascimento had a big smile on and the majestic posture when we entered the room for the interview. His big eyes smiled and we felt welcome. Milton likes to talk, and he is a good storyteller. It is evident that at this point in his life - he just turned 63 - the man who was once chosen as the best male voice in the planet, is in the mood to reveal a lot of things about his life.
About growing up and his deep love for his family, in particular, his mother, Lilia, and the importance of her role in his art He is doing that as he tours to launch his latest CD, Pietá, a tribute to his mother and women in general. And it is a pleasure to learn about the life of this artist and what moved and inspired him. As he talks, he feeds the next questions, as if he wanted to make sure you get it all. He is showing himself, opening up, which is something he does not often do. Not like this. There is a combination of frailty and strength coming from Milton. But the frailty of slow movement turns into strength through the words, which come straight from the heart. The loving way he relates to the band, all from a younger generation, the many artists he gave a hand to who became famous, his welcoming smile, it all tells you that here is a man who loves people. Those who work with Milton have a kind of adoration for him - Milton is not just the artist they work with, he is their guide, almost like a guru. And Milton seems to adore that. His entourage is very important for him. They become family. Milton Nascimento was in New York and did eight shows in four nights at the Blue Note. In the past he did bigger theaters, single performances at places like Beacon and Carnegie. So it was a bit surprising to find out that he would be at the Blue Note playing two shows per night. How would that work? But it did. 'The male voice of the planet' is still chilling. Here is what Milton Nascimento told us: You spent a long time without coming to the US. You have a good public who loves your work here. What is keeping you from more US concerts? Milton: In the beginning of my career I used to come to the US a lot and for a long time that's where I'd do all my touring. Then I was discovered in Europe, and then came Japan, and I started coming here only for special occasions, like the launching of my new CD. I confess I missed the US, mostly New York, I just love this city, always have and I've written many songs sitting on a bench in Central Park and I'm very happy to be here again. Wayne Shorter is the American musician who first discovered you and brought you to the US. What can you tell us about this passage? Milton: Wayne is in Brazil, doing a show in the Rio Jazz Festival. And he really is responsible for a great deal of things that happened. People would ask me what my music was about, what it was and I never knew what to answer. Then Wayne invited me to make a record, invited other musicians coming from all kinds of music styles, rock, pop, jazz and Latin. It was this record, Native Dancer, that opened doors for me all over the world and for different styles of music. It attracted people like Peter Gabriel, who attracted a whole bunch of other people. Something interesting happened at that time too. I was in this hotel in LA and was walking with a friend who told me that someone was calling me. When I looked I recognized Maurice White, the founder of Earth, Wind and Fire. He didn't waste any time, he said right out to me: "Milton, I have been trying to talk to you for years now to thank you." I looked at him and said, "What for?" "Because of Native Dancer," he said. "When I heard your falsettos in that record, I didn't even realize that voices could do all that, I was inspired and I knew to do something like that I would need to have a group of people." Then he told me he put ads in the newspaper for musician/singers and that was how he had picked the band that would become Earth, Wind and Fire. That was so crazy, so incredible to find that out from Maurice himself. It blew my mind. It was after Native Dancer and the impact caused by your voice that you were chosen The Best Male Voice of the World? Milton: I don't like talking about that, it's so not modest... but it was because Native Dancer, with Wayne Shorter's choices of diversified musicians, had reached all kinds of music and people throughout the world, and it called attention to my voice. But the really important thing about that time is that record stopped the division, that thing that those who like rock, will not like folk, who will not like jazz, and all that jazz, and it called everybody's attention, including South America's. It was through Native Dancer that my name became known here, in Europe, everywhere. I owe this to Wayne Shorter. In your new CD, Pietá, one of the songs is about the feminine voice of the singer, and it is about the falsetto that shook up singing and inspired so many, is it not? Milton: "The feminine voice of the singer." It's more than about my falsetto singing, actually. When I was a young boy I treasured listening to female voices. I thought women sang with their hearts, while men wanted to show their vocal power. I had that inside myself, from life. Was it your mother the inspiration for Pietá? Milton: She was not a singer, but she sang in a choir, the Villa Lobos choir. She was a housekeeper, didn't have a career, but she was the first female voice I heard. Pietá is for all women, but mostly, for her. She was the great inspiration for the title of the CD, Pietá - my mother, Lilia, that's her name. There is a story about that too. My biological mother worked at my other mother Lilia's house. When I was just a little over one year old, she died. I had to move to another city, Juiz de Fora, where my mother's family lived. Right after I arrived, even though I was so young, I started getting sick. I had banzo, you know, the African word to describe the melancholy from being away from home. It was common among the slaves, to develop banzo, and get very ill. Everybody treated me very well, but I couldn't eat or drink. Meanwhile Lilia, who lived in Rio with her family, started feeling that something wasn't right. She was so set trusting her feelings that she called her family and they headed to Juiz de Fora after me. When she arrived at my grandmother's house and saw me, she came running and picked me up in her arms. She then asked my grandmother to allow her to take care of me. She became my mother at that very instant. My grandmother said yes, she knew they would do their best for me. Now the Pietá moment. Every time I go to Rome I go to see the Pietá. I've always been attracted to Michelangelo's work but I always spend a lot of time in front of the Pietá. So many beautiful things, but it was the Pietá that got me for the longest times. So when I decided to make this CD, paying a tribute to women, that's when it occurred to me why I spend so much time looking at the Pietá. And then, just like that, I knew it. It was that moment when my mother Lilia came and picked me up at my grandmother's. She was my Pietá at that moment. The difference is that I was still alive when she came and picked me up. After that she got married and took me with her to live in the city of Três Pontas, in Minas Gerais, where I grew up. The truth is that even if I could have prayed to find the best of families, I wouldn't have found a family as good as mine. How did you make your way to music? How did you know this was going to become your life? Milton: When I was still in Rio around two years old, there was a piano in the house. It was my godmother's piano, which happened to be my mother Lilia's mother. She used to sit me in her lap while she was playing and I would start playing, I liked it. They would then say I was going to be an artist. I fell in love with the piano. But my mother couldn't buy me a piano. Then I discovered the accordion, and fell in love with it too, because of the similarity of the keys with the piano. We couldn't afford an accordion either. We had moved and my godmother sent me a little accordion from Rio, as a gift. I started playing the little accordion; it wasn't easy because, unlike a regular accordion, these little ones played different notes as the air breathed in and out. It also didn't have all the keys so when I was trying to accompany my mother's singing, I would make up for the sounds the instrument lacked with my voice, imitating the sound, so that it wouldn't become noticeable. Did you do any church singing? Milton: Not church singing, but my mother sang in church festivals. I would sing along, and as I grew up I had the idea of singing in me, of being a singer. I had a very high pitch and I tried to imitate the women singing. This is how I developed my falsetto, because I tried to sound like the women I heard. I had a naturally high pitch and I forced to be more like theirs. The truth is I learned how to sing with women. Were you aware of this? Milton: Yes, because I thought only the women sang with their hearts, while men just showed the power of their voices. There is an interesting story here too. One day I was talking to some friends and all of a sudden I heard that strange sound coming from me. It was a big scare and a realized that my voice was changing, that it was becoming thicker, graver. I was in my teens. I went crazy. I would run around the house crying and saying that I didn't want to lose my heart, a big drama. My parents would just ignore me, they knew that would go away and I would find myself. I spent some time with that struggle bothering me inside. One happy afternoon I was at my father's workshop window listening to the radio, staring at nowhere, when the radio started playing "Stella by Starlight," with Ray Charles. This was it. I jumped and thought "Oh my God, men can also have hearts!" This is exactly what I said. I was between 12 and 13. By the time I was 14 I had discovered not only Ray Charles, but other singers, even some singers whom I didn't like before, I started liking, seeing them from a different light, understanding what they were all about. And that's when I started my professional life, at 14. What instrument did you play at the time? Did you play the guitar too? Milton: No, the guitar came only later. At that time it was just the accordion. I would play with my friend Wagner Tiso in clubs, from 10 pm to 4, 5 am in the morning, even though we were so young. Wagner and I have always been together, we always played together; we just weren't born together. Lately Wagner has been working on sound tracks, which is something that I like very much too, so sometimes we do something together, we will do a whole song together or he'll do the melody and I'll write the lyrics, like I wrote "Coração de Estudante" (Student's Heart), which we did for the film Jango. The song was for a scene when President Goulart (Jango) appeared in the solitude of a farm he had in Uruguay. I had been working with students, during those political times in Brazil. And I felt how that scene related to that whole thing, the entire political moment, Jango, his downfall, us, the military coup. Those were really hard times with all the military repression... Milton: I was in Rio and they kept telling me the public wouldn't understand my music and so many doors, including television, were closed for me. It was the military dictatorship. It was through the National Students Federation (UNE) that I found a channel. They invited me to work with them. We would start traveling and sharing whatever money we made, just going to small towns and cities. And it was so beautiful, sometimes we would go to places where there would be a big crowd, about 3,000 people, and they would sing along with me. Then I would say: So, people don't understand my music? What is this? That was a very important thing in my life. But we are not here today to talk about these things, are we? No, we are not. Shall we go back to Pietá? Milton: Let's. At some point this hit me: Oh, my, women taught me everything, they've given me so much and I never did anything special for them. So I knew these two new singers, one of them is here with us, and I decided that I was going to make a CD for women. I don't like even numbers too much so I waited around for a third singer. One day I was rehearsing with Gilberto Gil in Rio and I saw this girl, whom I knew. It was Maria Rita, Elis Regina's daughter. She gave a CD that she had put together for me to listen and she said 'listen to this and see what I'm going to do with my life... Her mother had been the first singer to record my songs, she was the one who really discovered me. I believed she sent me her daughter. We all knew what was going to happen when Maria Rita did her CD, and it did. The success was immediate. And I had my third singer. After the show we did in Rio, I told the press that was it, because the girls would leave to follow their own careers. One of them right there asked not to have her name on that list, because she was going to stay on with us. It's been three years now, and she's been the flower of our garden: Marina Machado, she's sitting right there. You can talk to her... How do feel to have this opportunity to be so close to someone like Milton for all this time? Marina: I just didn't want to miss the opportunity to spend all this time with Milton. It's been a great learning experience. I was a local artist from Minas Gerais, but with Milton I've been out in the world, it's great singing all over the places, it's really like a dream and I could not have stopped there, after that first show. I just had to go on. I told him, "I will sing, dance, anything you say, play percussion, do backup vocals, massage, I'll do anything, as long as I can stay around you." So I've been doing this show with him since May 2003. We've been to Europe four times, Japan, Africa, all over Brazil. It's been wonderful, I've matured a great deal as a singer and I have many new ideas. I think this is an enormous privilege, to sing with the voice of the planet. Milton, you also toured with a children choir that you put together, could you say a word about that? Milton: There were two choirs. the Rouxinóis, who were trained and had formal choir voice technique, and the Curumins, the black children who came out of the streets to sing. That was quite a challenge, it had never happened before to put together choir and street children singing together. The formally trained voices and the high pitch street voices together was fantastic, that along with the symphony orchestra, it was wonderful, and people loved it. The choir became a most important part of the show. How do you write? Do you do the melody and then the lyrics, do you just get them all together, do you do it at night, alone, the more you hurt the more you create, how does it happen? Milton: All of the above is true. I don't have one way or another. I've written music in a cab, typing in my office, sitting on a bench in Central Park. But there is one thing I hate, and that is silence. If you want me to stop creating, give me silence. There has to be people around, children making noise, life. But for me the most important thing is the stage. A lot of people I know don't seem to like the studio, but what I feel is when I go to the studio, I am getting ready to go to the stage, which I love, so being in a studio makes me creative, gives me an urge to create more because I'm going to take it to the stage. I'm not too hard. How did this thing of shy Milton came about? Because you don't hit me as a shy person at all... Milton: This all started with the press. When I first happened, I would give an interview, and then I would read it and be surprised by a totally different thing, and every time it seemed to get worse. A lot of journalists came with stones in their hands, ready to throw them at me, to hurt me. It got to a point that things were hard. Journalists would approach me and they would be afraid to talk to me, because I would just sit there silently. Then time went by and today things have changed, the military repression is over and it has become a lot easier for me to speak. I'm not shy in life. Never been. Tell us about your plans. Milton: I've started this new record company and the first thing I want to do when this is over (the Pietá thing has been taking too long. When we thought it was over, after all the traveling, we were requested to do it here in the US), is to produce a CD for Marina Machado. There is also new talent in my hometown that I recently discovered. I met 30 new musicians, I went crazy, and I want to make a CD with them, Milton and the new ones. This means you are going to spend more time in Brazil? Milton: For these projects, yes. But this is not really going to change my life much because I don't want to stop making shows. The stage is this crazy thing for me. I have a story with the stage that explains this relationship. I was raised Catholic, then after a certain age I stopped going to church and didn't want anything to do with religion. When I was around 20 I moved to São Paulo and I was one of the many unemployed musicians around. Hard times. One day a friend took me to this spiritual center to take some candy, because it was Saints Cosmo and Damian's day. I went outside for a while, watching the scene inside, as some entity appeared. I felt a little strange and part of me was in the room and part outside, very suspicious. But the person with the entity started walking around the room and came straight to me, who was standing outside. He tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to go to a separate room. He then told me I was very sad and for the mission I had been prepared for I couldn't be that sad. He said that in three months my life would have a major turning point, on that very day, "check the calendar," he said. Three months later, on that day, I was singing "Travessia" at the Maracanãzinho stage, at the Festival. That was huge. Any other experiences related to that? Milton: After that, some friends of mine got married in a spiritual center. Another entity came to talk to me and said that it didn't matter if I ran away, but I was to have an spiritual center. I thought that was crazy, I didn't get involved with religion and I was going to own a place like that? Then, at another point in my life I had a problem and Nana Caymmi told me she was going to take me to her holy mother (spiritual leader from the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé) for help. The woman took me to this beautiful place, where I now live. There was a waterfall, she lit candles, displayed food and started singing. I almost passed out with the beauty of her singing, the sound of the water, the entire scene was very touching. When she finished she told me to stop running away, because I was going to have a "terreiro" (Candomblé temple), and that was written. It was like every time I was around these spiritual leaders they would tell me the same thing. Did you find your "terreiro?" Milton: I was singing one night for students and started seeing this greenish and yellow light coming from the audience in my direction. It was very strong and made people's eyes shine. I kept on playing, not really knowing what was happening. After the show, I rested myself against the wall and I bumped my head a couple of times, saying, "how could I be so stupid?" My spiritual center, my communion, my everything, is the stage. From that moment on, the stage became the most important thing in my life. Yes, I found my "terreiro." Clara Angelica Porto is a Brazilian bilingual journalist living in New York. She went to school in Brazil and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Clara is presently working as the English writer for The Brasilians, a monthly newspaper in Manhattan. Comments welcome at
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