However, even if he was born on a carnival Tuesday, nothing predestined the young carioca to be part of this world. No musical parents, no repinique (typical samba percussion) or tambourine friends, nothing. Born in 1949, Jorge Aragão da Cruz grew up in Rio de Janeiro in the Padre Miguel neighborhood famous for its samba school, without participating in carnival activities. Like all pimply people of the time, he was more passionate about Roberto Carlos and the artists of Jovem Guarda, or for Latin studio orchestras like Românticos de Cuba, which were Cuban only in name but were a hit. on the radio. It is therefore as a perfect teenager, to imitate his idols, that he one day borrows a guitar and begins to scratch on the threshold of the family home.
In this middle-class district, this son of Amazonians with an imposing stature does not go unnoticed, and one day, it is he who is picked up to animate the balls on Saturday evening. To his greatest surprise, there he is propelled as a solo guitarist: a shame for him who has not even tamed his instrument yet! So, to hide his weaknesses, the young Jorge invented a very particular style, made up of dissonant and inverted chords which he still laughs at today.
Caught up by the samba
In 1967, the samba ended up crossing his path, in the person of Jotabê, like him, a young conscript from the Santa Cruz aeronautical base where he studied. His future musical partner made him discover the sambists of the golden age, bossa and Wes Montgomery, but above all the art and the pleasure of composing. ” I can’t speak well, but I like to write what I feel and have fun with words”, he said in a soft voice. Back in civilian life, the two young people began to write their first titles, including the famous tricksterspotted on a blessed day in 1974 by one of their neighbors, the captain of the Vasco football team, Alcir Portela.
The footballer has his entrances into the world of music: trickster ends up landing in the hands of the boss of the Tapecar records who entrusts it to its star artist, the singer Elsa Soares. It will be one of his greatest successes.
In the process, Alcir Portela takes his protege to the Cacique de Ramos, the carnival block of the neighboring district of Olaria where football and samba fans meet. In this huge space, some hit the ball while others play cards or cook. Jorge, who doesn’t know how to do either, is asked to liven things up by playing the guitar in a corner. The lover of soul, rock and international varieties also discovers with emotion the culture of the carnival there: when the other young sambists of the bloco join him, a roda (a round, a crowd) forms around a table, the beers pile up, we sing, we play percussion, the 7-string guitar, the cavaquinho and even the banjo, a peculiarity introduced by a regular of the place, Almir Guineto, co-director of the Salgueiro samba school and member of the cult combo Os Originais do Samba.
Soon, every Wednesday, it is a compact crowd that piles up at the Cacique to listen to what we will soon designate as pagodathis new form of samba inspired by weekend parties, when everyone gets together after work in bars or backyards, to drink and make music.
Forward the Pagoda
In the small world of samba, such effervescence could only reach the ears of Beth Carvalho. At the end of the 1970s, the undisputed star of the genre would play a decisive role in the rise of Jorge Aragão and his companions: seduced in turn by the freshness and spontaneity of young musicians, it was she who took them for the first time in the studio, with the aim of recording some titles likely to appear on his new album. “Vou Festejar” is one of the detainees. Written with both hands with Neoci Dias, the son of the famous João da Baiana, pioneer of samba, the song is a huge hit that still resounds today even in the stadiums.
To open his next album, cleverly titled at the pagodathe singer chooses daddy’s little thing. This song by Jorge Aragão, Almir Guineto and Luiz Carlos will go around the samba planet, and even the planet Mars, since in 1997, interpreted by Elba Ramalho and Jair Rodrigues, it is one of the musical signals chosen by NASA to activate Sojourner, the first Rover to land on the red planet!
By imposing Jorge Aragão, Neoci Dias and the Cacique sambists, Beth Carvalho had a nose. Rildo Hora, his producer, goes even further, encouraging them to form a group and record. The Grupo Fundo de Quintal (the bottom of the court) becomes the first official orchestra of pagoda and will dominate record sales in Brazil from the 1980s to the 2000s, opening the door to a multitude of formations, most of them more commercial than talented, which invade the airwaves and television sets.
But Jorge is having a hard time with this new start. While the greatest interpreters of samba, Emilio Santiago, Alcione, Roberto Ribeiro, snapped up his compositions and the money generated began to come in, the unexpected success of Fundo de Quintal began to weigh: ” we never thought of ourselves as a group, which was going to record and appear on TV, but rather as a state of mind, he acknowledges. I wanted to compose, not do shows and find myself on stage with them, in the same uniform ! He left the group after recording the first album, traveled through Brazil in search of his roots, settled in Manaus for a while, and wrote with a vengeance.
“Kamikaze”
Le style de Jorge Aragão s’inspire du party high, a rather slow popular genre of samba that became the black musical expression of Rio in the 1970s. Made “by the people for the people”, it gives pride of place to percussion and its representatives are called Candeia, Nei Lopes or Wilson Moreira . Aragão takes up its most cherished themes: ancestrality (Denies Santana), religiosity (God sends) and negritude (skin thing), even if his greatest hits remain above all introspective, intimate and romantic songs accessible to all Brazilians (bread paper, clarity, Third Person, War and Peace…).
Asked to return to the road and the direction of the studios, Jorge Aragão finally gave in and embarked on a solo career, interpreting his own songs, in the style of his models, with great simplicity. Between two LPs, he becomes the official musician of Martinho da Vila, whom he accompanies on his Angolan tour in the midst of the civil war, failing to transform his pleasure in treading African soil into panic fear. ” Knowing where the slaves came from was very important to me. “, he says, evoking the anguish of the daily air raids. This quest for identity is precisely at the origin ofIdentityanother of his titles that made him famous, released in 1992.
Jorge Aragão enters the twenty-first century as a samba star. Synthesis live of his greatest hits, his album Live (live) sold over 800,000 copies. People flock to attend his recorded concerts and the formula will be renewed many times. Requested from all sides, he will have been present on countless public recordings, sharing the stage with Zeca Pagodinho, Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben or Ivete Sangalo, but also with the various members who have passed through the Fundo de Quintal, with whom he never never stopped writing.
The secret to its longevity? To try ” like a real suicide bomber to maintain old-fashioned popular writing at all costs. ” I have been composing samba with the same force for almost 60 years, always with the same musicality that has been transmitted to me”, he points out, when asked about the title of his last tour: “Joy and Resistance of Brazilian Popular Art.” Lasting that long is not common in the samba world. That’s why I feel quite at peace to continue in this way. The proof, at 74, here I am singing in France! »