A native of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, guitarist/composer Ricardo Peixoto spent part of his childhood in the United States, where he was intrigued by American music and listened to everything from Miles Davis and Wes Montgomery to the Beatles. Born into a musical family, Peixoto's first instrument was the piano, and in his early teens he taught himself to play the guitar. His family returned to Rio and he was soon playing professionally in jazz and rock groups, as well as accompanying well known pop singers Gal Costa and Macalé.
By the time Ricardo returned to the United States on a Berklee College of Music scholarship, he had already been very active in Rio's busy music scene, and had begun studying the classical guitar. While at Berklee he was able to hone his East Coast jazz skills gigging in and around the Boston area, and through his studies with Pat Metheny. Soon after graduating, Ricardo moved to San Francisco to pursue his study of the classical guitar at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Though grounded both in the jazz and Brazilian music traditions, Ricardo has ventured well beyond their borders. With influences ranging from Egberto Gismonti and Hector Villa-Lobos to Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane, Ricardo Peixoto's music combines rich melodies, unusual harmonies, and the unmistakable rhythms of Brazil.
Peixoto has recorded and toured with Flora Purim and Airto, alto saxophonist Bud Shank, percussionist Dom Um Romão, Marcos Silva and Intersection, and his own outstanding ensemble, Terra Sul. He has performed at many jazz festivals in Europe, South America, Japan, and the United States, including the Monterey, Concord, and San Francisco Jazz Festivals.
Ricardo has some interesting guitars. Click to see pictures.
Click here if you have a Macintosh Lands.aiff or here if you have a PC Lands.wav to listen an excerpt from "Lands" on the Terra Sul compact disk Kindness of Strangers, Motown/MoJazz Records, 1993. Note: these sound files are in 16 bit stereo at 44 kHz and are a very long download! For a faster download, but with poorer sound quality (8 bit stereo at 11 kHz) click on Lands1.aiff or Lands1.wav.
CMEA met with Ricardo in his San Francisco home.
CMEA: Let's start out with how you got attracted to the guitar.
Why did you chose that instrument?
RP: I remember my cousin played the guitar, and initially I played
the piano when I was younger. As I listened to different types of music,
I began hearing the potential of the guitar. The guitar fascinated me. This
was even before I had an instrument. Once I got a guitar, I began teaching
myself to play.
CMEA: So you primarily learned to play on your own. Did you ever
take guitar lessons from a teacher?
RP: Not until a few years later. Not until a few years later. I began
to take lessons in my late teens when I realized that I would be able to
learn faster with some guidance, so I started studying the classical guitar.
I also took a correspondence course from Berklee School of Music
in Boston. So when I came to Berklee, I already knew a fair amount.
CMEA: Were there any particular albums or artists that had an impact
on you?
RP: There have been so many. Wes Montgomery was a big influence
for a while -- when I first started listening to jazz. Before I got into
jazz, I liked rock and blues. I listened to Jimmy Hendrix a lot,
The Cream and those kind of period bands, and the Beatles.
I got to know a lot of that music. That was basically how I learned -- I
spent hours and hours sitting in front of the stereo with my guitar. That
was my "school" for several years. Then when I started getting
into more jazz, besides Wes Montgomery, I liked Jim Hall and John
McLaughlin. I also listened to Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans,
John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Eric Dolphy a lot.
Their music was very influential and also that of Miles Davis to
a certain extent.
CMEA: Were there any Brazilian artists that were important influences
for you?
RP: My exposure to Brazilian music had been actually prior to that,
before I started playing. The Brazilian music at that time, in the sixties,
was primarily bossa nova.
CMEA: What are you doing right now?
RP: For several years I had my group Terra Sul which was my primary project during the early nineties, but I haven't been working with that group for the last couple of years. I've been focusing more on writing music and developing new repertoire. I've been working with smaller groups lately. Terra Sul was very electric, and was a larger band, usually with six or seven people. I've been playing more acoustic guitar now, and not using drums as much. I've been enjoying playing with just percussion and acoustic instruments. So, it's a different area of emphasis for me. Besides my performances and personal writing, I've been doing an ongoing project with (singer and composer) Claudia Villela. We've been doing a lot of writing, and have begun a recording project together.
CMEA: How do you organize the music for a recording project? Would
you describe maybe a little bit of the process that you go through as you
develop a project?
RP: Both of these projects that I'm working on now came about from
my spending a fair amount of time writing. For a year, my primary focus
was just writing new material. After Terra Sul, I started to become interested
in doing something that wasn't band oriented, where I could experiment with
different instrument combinations. As the music develops it starts to develop
it's own face, so to speak, and then the production decisions come from
that.
CMEA: You're talking about how the projects seem to be generated
through writing.
RP: Yeah, I've been developing a body of music that is more personal.
I did a lot writing for Terra Sul, but the focus on that project was never
the guitar, per se. It was a band type of approach with vocals. There was
some guitar. Now I've been developing a body of music constructed more around
the guitar.
CMEA: Would you describe your writing process a little bit. For instance,
what tools do you use? Are you a purist -- can just sit down and put things
on paper, or do you like to work everything out on the guitar?
RP: I don't think I have a very defined method. It's quite haphazard.
I don't consider myself a composer, in the conventional sense of someone
who has broad compositional training and methods. I don't have those kinds
of skills. I write out of a need to have something to play. At the same
time I've been trying to get away from writing only things that I can play.
I want the writing to dictate what I play rather than the playing dictate
what I write. I've been getting a little better at that. Actually, what
I like to do, what seems to be the most effective way for me is to turn
on the tape recorder and improvise for a while. Then I listen back sometime
later, with fresh ears, and pick what I think is most interesting and try
to develop it.
CMEA: I see you have computers here. Do you use notation software
at all?
RP: I use Finale. I don't write on the computer. I usually put things on the computer after I have them written down. I don't use the computer to compose.
CMEA: So you're actually notating by hand?
RP: Yeah, I play things, then write them down.
CMEA: Let's talk a little bit about the Terra Sul album. You said,
"Well I'm not really a composer," but the orchestrations on this
album are particularly interesting. I'm thinking especially about some of
the things you do with muted guitar strings and percussion sounds. The first
cut on that album, "Lands", has this really clever comping that
has a real tactile sound to it.
RP: Those kinds of things are what I would call an arrangement more
than anything. I wrote that song with my partner at the time Mauro Saldanha,
and then I came up with the guitar parts afterwards.
CMEA: What procedure did you use to record "Lands"?
RP: For this particular record, the basic tracks for the entire album
were done very quickly, in less than two days, with usually two or three
takes per tune. Of that, we kept mostly bass and drums. Most of the other
part were redone later. Some of the guitar parts we kept. Then there was
a whole period of just recording percussion.
CMEA: So, in other words, the process was to play out the tunes with
the basic band, but with only the intention of keeping the most basic elements
in the bass part, and drums.
RP: And, hopefully, keep some of the guitar, if possible, and maybe
keep some of the first passes on the synthesizer. But, no percussion, no
voice.
CMEA: So that gives you the basic outline of the song and then you
start polishing the individual tracks.
RP: The next layer on that song was the percussion. That was done
by two different people working out everything and figuring out what was
going to go where. That's a whole orchestration process in itself.
CMEA: That's very important because a lot of people think that percussion
is just something you might create in a jam session. Whereas here it seems
like it's very well thought out.
RP: It depends on the kind of project you're doing. There's a place
for that type of playing, but this record certainly wasn't conceived that
way. And once the percussion was all done, the synthesizer tracks were worked
out similarly -- finding the right sounds and parts. Most of that Frank
Martin and I did, and the method was just to try various ideas. I usually
had some concept, ideas for musical lines and types of sounds. Many of the
synthesizer tracks had layered sounds.
CMEA: And then after that, you would add the lead tracks?
RP: Yes, the vocals and solos. Some of the solos were done with
the basic tracks, but I did all of my solos last. It's hard to produce and
play on a recording because at the end you have the least amount of time,
and that's when I had to do most of my tracks.
CMEA: Let's talk a little bit about Brazilian music. It is a very
fascinating style because of all the styles that are popular today, it's
one of the few to use advanced harmony and be innovative, be contemporary,
and not just use triads and simple seventh chords.
RP: The first thing I would say about Brazilian music is that it
really covers a lot of ground. There are many different types of music in
Brazil. There's the "Brazilian jazz", popularized by Airto
and many different people here, and there are a lot of Brazilian pop music
styles, as well as various folk styles. One thing that's characteristic
of much of Brazilian music is a certain harmonic approach; I mean, Brazilian
composers tend to be very harmonically oriented. And then the rhythm that
comes from the popular styles of music, the sambas, and the different
regional parts of Brazil which have distinct percussion traditions and instruments.
So from a compositional standpoint there's a large body of material as a
frame of reference.
In terms of popular music, the harmonic vocabulary used in the song writing
is about as sophisticated as you'll find anywhere. People like Dori Caymmi,
Jobim, Milton Nascimento, or Ivan Lins have a style,
a certain vocabulary that they use, which maintains a very high standard
of harmony.
CMEA: How is that harmonic tradition disseminated, or how did it
become sort of a standard? If you look at popular music in the United States,
it usually changes over the years by a new rhythmic craze or something like
that.
RP: This type of harmony that we're discussing is representative
of a certain line of Brazilian music. Aside from that there are other styles
that are much simpler. For instance, there is a lot of two chord stuff --
the lambada, when there was that craze, Olodun, which has
become very popular in Brazil, and samba reggae, which are styles
that focus on various dances that come along. The bossa nova was
something that came up in a very specific time in a very specific place
-- mostly Rio in the late 50's, early 60's, and among a fairly small segment
of the population. It was pretty much a middle class phenomenon but it caught
on and become known internationally. People like Jobim and João Gilberto,
became famous. Actually, there were many other people involved in the creation
of the style, but Jobim and Gilberto were the people that became best known
and absorbed into history.
But if you delve more into the style, you see that a lot of the innovators
were people who had been listening to a lot of American music -- a lot of
jazz and singers like Frank Sinatra, or certain American standards popular
in the early 50's. They started to write music that incorporated the standard
ternary song form of popular American music. They applied Brazilian rhythms
to those types of harmonies, and that created the bossa nova.
And then others started to build on that. You take Jobim's harmony from
that time -- the classics -- The Girl from Ipanema -- things that
have been "muzaked" to death, it had certain structures which
set a standard for future developments. People built on those structures
and on that harmonic vocabulary. Although Jobim himself took things way
beyond that later -- he had three decades more of writing -- the music that
he's most known for are his early works he composed in the late 50's.
CMEA: Right, but even some of those simple songs are using primarily
ninth chords.
RP: That's the jazz influence. Many people developed the genre. People
like Milton Nascimento, Ivan Lins, and Toninho Horta
came along and took it a few steps further. Particularly Toni Horta -- his
music is very dense harmonically. And these types of elaborate harmonies
became very widespread in Brazil.
So, people, when they pick up a guitar for the very first time -- and this
is something I've seen -- instead of learning G major or C major, they learn
A minor 6, the first chord in Jobim's Corcovado, for instance. It's
the kind of thing that becomes the stepping stone, that becomes the frame
of reference for people who are learning.
The bossa nova is one style people are familiar with because it became popularized
around the world. But there are other types of Brazilian music. The samba
itself -- the more simple traditional forms of the samba that come from
the samba schools -- the samba can be actually very sophisticated melodically.
There's are certain types of samba which have long, extended melodies --
sometimes with many different sections that don't repeat.
Carnaval is another phenomenon in Brazilian culture. They have this
tradition that every year thousands and thousands of people parade on the
street, and each year they have a different theme. For the new theme they
have all new music. The samba groups -- the organizations that will parade
-- write a lot of music, and then they pick one that's going to be their
song of the year. They have a certain song that's going to go with their
costume, go with whatever their theme is for that year, and each year is
different. And then they have thousands of people that learn to sing that
song, by rote, and spend several months of the year practicing for the Carnaval
parade. So the music is a large part of the experience. And a lot of those
melodies are very sophisticated -- not in a 20th century modern style --
but it's a very solid melody. There's a tradition there -- within the people
-- of melody.
Another style of Brazilian music that kind of parallels all this which is
what they call choro, which is a predominantly instrumental style,
and is also very sophisticated melodically, and rhythmically. It had its
heyday in the early part of the century; now it's in a sort of revival in
Brazil. People are taking interest in it again as a viable form. It became
kind of passé in the sixties and seventies. Usually, most of the
choro material, the classic choros, is a three part form, A A B B A C C
A, and it often has a fair amount of modulation.
There's a guy from Rio named Guinga, who's been around for a long
time, but now, in the last few years, he's finally making his own recordings.
He's may be the most interesting musician to come out of Brazil in the last
several years. He is a songwriter and guitarist who has a very personal
style. He draws on a lot of the older stuff, but with a fresh approach.
CMEA: So we have the choros, and then there's the samba
tradition.
RP: The samba is a whole umbrella -- there are many types of samba.
CMEA: This is interesting because in this country, people are very
opinionated about what kind of music they'll listen to. They'll say, oh,
I don't want to listen to jazz, I want to listen to rock, or vice versa.
Yet, many of the Brazilian groups perform a fusion of all these different
styles. Everybody seems to like it.
RP: That's a whole other topic here that we could address. One of
the good things thing about Brazilian music, historically, has been that
it has always been a cross-fertilization, between the classical musicians
and the popular musicians. Probably the greatest Brazilian composer was
Villa-Lobos. He was a classical composer who had a prolific body
of work. But he was very steeped in the popular music tradition. He was
associated with a lot of the choro musicians of his time. And with many
other composers, it's actually hard to tell if they're classical composers
or they're popular composers. The difference is hard to distinguish. An
example is someone like Egberto Gismonti. He's classically trained,
in Vienna. He's a very skilled composer in the classical sense. But he uses
a lot of the popular tradition, and is primarily known in jazz circles.
CMEA: That's a very interesting comment that you said because, in
this country, everybody has to be compartmentalized, and there's not a lot
of cross-over. There are university trained composers that stay in their
corner, and film composers in Hollywood. In a way, that's unfortunate.
RP: I think that's unfortunate because it's limiting. Take the great
choro composers, someone like Pixinguinha, who was not classically
trained but was very aware of the classical style. Musicians always had
their ears open and listening, and trying to incorporate sounds from wherever
they could. Another example is Ernesto Nazareth, who wrote a great
deal at the beginning of the century, mostly for solo piano. His music has
been recorded on solo classical recordings, and at the same time many of
his songs are classics in the choro repertoire. If you listen, a lot of
Nazareth's music sounds like Chopin. If you take certain pieces of it, you
might think it is Chopin.
What Brazil doesn't have, that the United States has, is the great tradition
of improvisation. There's no jazz in Brazil, per se; there's no traditional
soloing. Instrumental music was all written out. Not much instrumental music
was improvised.
CMEA: This is something that you do in your own concerts, when you
bring this music in. It was unusual to see a performance in a jazz venue
where some of the music was written out in detail as opposed to that kind
of performance that an American musician might put on, maybe just improvised
from a lead sheet. You might comment on that difference a little bit.
RP: I've always liked composition and improvisation, ideally a balance
of the two-- structure and freedom. That's certainly what I try to do.
CMEA: Let's move on to another topic. One of the sort of questions
that we've been discussing during these interviews is the issue of notation
for guitar. In most of the guitar music you buy, unless it is a classical
edition or note by note transcription, the guitar part, and what the guitar
player actually plays are completely different, other than maybe they're
playing the same chord changes. How do you deal with that issue in your
own work? Do you try to write out the complete notation of what you do?
RP: Yes.
CMEA: Do you find that very difficult?
RP: My guitar playing comes from a classical background. So, if I
want something specific, I'll write it out. If I'm playing it myself, I
may not write it out, if I have it memorized. But, I write a lot of it out.
CMEA: So, in other words, you feel that it's possible to notate most
anything, you can write music in a way that's readable by another person?
RP: Generally speaking, yes, although I find that certain things
that use Brazilian rhythms, if I have someone who is not familiar with Brazilian
rhythms play them, the inflections won't be right. That's always an issue.
It's a cultural issue. As far as parts that require comping from a lead
sheet for the rhythm section, those things are hard to write down. They
depend on an understanding of the style, which goes beyond the written notes.
CMEA: Do you ever work with tablature at all?
RP: No.
CMEA: If I was a young guitarist, just starting out, and in need
of some advice, what would you tell me to do in terms of what to learn or
study or procedure to follow?
RP: I think it's a double edged sword right now, because, there's
so much information available. There's a book on anything you can ever imagine,
transcriptions of every kind of solo, books on how to play this and that.
So it's great in the sense that you have so much available.
But, the flip side of that, the challenge nowadays is: What do you want
to play? Who are you? What can you play? What are your strengths? Those
are the things I think that any musician, at some point, has to grapple
with. The whole issue of identity and style. Those are big questions. The
problem is that there is just so much out there. So, in a simple nutshell,
you just have to follow your heart. I don't know of a better answer, just
find something you really like. Try to keep an open mind but don't stray
too much from what you like in terms of just learning things academically.
This is a societal issue. There's just so much information in so many different
areas. What do you do with it? How do you watch all the movies? How do you
tune into all the TV channels that there are; read all the books? This age
of information is a challenge for everybody. How do you keep up with all
the computer stuff? All the software? All the manuals?
CMEA: So, how do you find a focus?
RP: For me, it's been an on-going issue. Writing music has helped
me in that. Writing for me has become a way of personalizing what I do.
The idea is to develop as much as possible a personal aesthetic, or identity,
and to develop the ability to express it.
CMEA: Is there any particular advice you would give to music teachers?
A lot of music educators are very lost when it comes to dealing with guitar
parts in a jazz band, or when directing a musical.
RP: When you prescribe the limit of something, for instance, how
to approach guitar music for a jazz band or musical, then it becomes an
issue of developing the skills to fit that bill. The assumption there is
knowing how to do that. Within the context of advise for teachers, once
you can define what it is you're trying to achieve with your students, then
provide them with the information and skills to do that. Ultimately, I think,
that's how I learned.
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