In the end of May 2015 I did my first ever trip to Brazil! I have been listening to Brazilian music since the early 90’s and have played Brazilian music for quite some time too. See previous posts with a Brazilian content: Post 1 | Post 2 | Post 3 | Post 4 | Post 5 | Post 6 | Post 7 |
Finally being able to travel to Brazil was a very big thing for me!
The main reason for this trip was to visit schools and find out ways to set up some kind of exchange program between the school where I work in Sweden and schools in the capital city of Brazil, Brasilia.
I had a really busy travel plan with several visits booked for almost everyday of the eight-day trip. These visits were to different schools with arts and music focus. I’ll try to write more about this later. We’ll see what happens with these ”might-be” exchanges. It’s interesting to see how it unfolds and evolves.
Besides these visits I also got to play some Music! With me on this trip was my colleague, Eva Stenström. We had prepared some songs we could perform on only bass and vocals. To make the travel easy I brought my spruce Kala Ubass and the new Phil Jones Bass ”Double Four” amp I just bought just before the trip. Traveling with this setup was very nice and I was able to get both the UBass and the amp into the cabin of each flight we did.
I will write more about the Phil Jones Double Four in a future blog post. Until then you can check it out on the company’s webpage.
Me and Eva did a few workshops involving playing, different vocal techniques and I also did a short live looping workshop featuring the TC Electronic Ditto looper. If someone is interested in knowing more about live looping with the ubass (and other instruments) please let me know and I could make a series of posts on the subject! Send an email to ubasslessons@gmail.com [Older post featuring Ubass and the ditto looper!]
We met a lot of really great musicians and teachers and students at all three schools we visited. A very big thanks for taking such good care of us. Extra big thanks to: Lucas at Escola de Musica, Henrique at Escola de Choro, Antenor and Alexei at University of Brasilia, William and Barbara for giving us a great tour of Brasilia!
Besides playing as a duo we also got joined bit different Brazilian musicians and also got the change to sit in on a concert and also do a ”club” gig with two great Brazilian musicians that will come to Sweden this fall. I hope we will be able make some more music together. Stay tuned!
There isn’t that many recorded videos from this trip but I will let you hear some music bits and pieces. See this video! There is also a gallery of photos from our workshops, concerts and some scenic ones too!
It was a great trip with lots of interesting meets with universal language of music as a great common ground! Thanks to everyone that made our first trip so fantastic!
Some links you check out!
Lucas de Campos, guitarist and professor at Escola de Musica
One of his projects (Text in Portuguese)
Choro pra Cinco (A great Choro group!) Link to YouTube-video
Info about the great bass player Oswaldo Amorim (and also about the late great Nico Assumpção)
Great Facebook page about Brazilian bass: Baixobrasil
Lucas Fernandes, bass player, there is also a Ubass track on his Soundcloud!
Henrique Alvim, guitar player. Check out his band A Engrenagem
Paula Zimbres – a great bass player I met and heard in Brasilia
Paula played with Sergio Boré at Clube do Choro!
See video below!
The schools and some places we visited
Escola de Musica
Escola de Choro
Universidade de Brasilia
Clube do Choro
Play Music,
Magnus
Play UBass! 
Magnus, it would be very interesting to hear how you designed duets for just bass and vocal with Eva. Do you have any clips of this?
Susan
Susan Garrett Crowley sgcrowley@earthlink.net 541-386-2686
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No clips yet. Will make some later. At the moment I’m recovering from a hand fracture. So I’m not playing thy much at all at the moment. Stay tuned!