Sao Paulo
Chico Buarque received unremitting applause at the premiere of his current tour “Que Tal um Samba?” in São Paulo. The singer performed in the first of 18 soldout performances at Tokyo Marine Hall, a venue in the south of the city, on Thursday night (2).
Chico remained virtually silent throughout the show until the very end, when he introduced his band and decided to poke fun at a recent controversy. A judge doubted he was the true author of the song “Roda Viva” after singer Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, was sued by the PL for using the song in a video posted online.
At the show, he joked, as he had done in Rio de Janeiro, about the way he played the guitar and that he sometimes forgot his own lyrics. He explained he wanted to set up a teleprompter to help him on stage, but was told that wasn’t a good idea after all, they would suspect he wasn’t actually the song’s composer. “How am I supposed to prove that?” he said.
Afterwards he said that he had read terrible things about him on the internet, but what really amazed him was this story that he bought his compositions. “I don’t buy music. But I can sell it,” he joked, pulling the refrain from “Bankruptcy Blues.”
The entire show was split between Chico and singer Mônica Salmaso sometimes together, sometimes separately. She started on stage singing a sequence with “Todos Juntos”, a track by Saltimbancos, “Mar e Lua” depicting a tragic lesbian romance, “Bom Tempo” and “Beatriz” before the star of the night in “Paratodos.” “.
The song, which marks the urbanization process of the country’s major cities and is an ode to the Brazilian artist, was highly acclaimed and Chico welcomed the audience. It was a shy “good night,” which the singer avoided interactions with the public.
Like many of his poems, “Paratodos” celebrates the hybrids that make up Brazilian culture, an idea repeated throughout the repertoire. In “Sinhá” the character in the text weeps in Yoruba but prays to Jesus.
Together, Chico and Salmaso starred in moments of pure harmony, their voices complementing each other in the same verse or singing different things. It was the case of “Sem Fantasia” and “Biscate” sung one after the other.
Accompanied by an extremely technical band, Chico alternated moments of contemplation with others of greater balance. The percussion, minimalist for most of the show, was sometimes multiplied, with the tambourine serving as a reminder of the classic samba beat the basis of bossa nova and much of its repertoire.
Even at the liveliest moments, it was difficult to see the audience in ecstasy. That’s due to the structure of the show, with just people sitting at tables, waiters moving between them and scolding people who want to shout or sing louder. It’s an atmosphere that’s somewhere between theater and restaurant, as you’d already know from tours of MPB giants.
The screams, mainly those of “beautiful” and “delicious”, were left to the pauses between performances. The applause came as he joked with the judge questioning his authorship of “Roda Viva” and in the final segment of the presentation.
The audience sang along to “Choro Bandido” and “Sob Medida” with Chico sitting down and swinging the guitar. Also in “Bastidores” and “Mil Perdões”, a composition by Chico that Gal Costa, who was honored with her photo on the screen, recorded in the 1980s.
On stage, each song was accompanied by a photo with names like Sebastião Salgado and Thereza Eugênia speaking on the theme of the song. Either because of the stage architecture with geometric shapes in the background or because of the lighting, it was mostly difficult to understand what the picture was about.
The universe of intense and confusing romances, a multifaceted Rio de Janeiro and a colorful Brazil, appeared in “Samba do Grande Amor”, “Injuriado”, “Futuros Amantes”, “Assentamento”, “Tipo um Baião” and “As Minhas Girls” . “.
The racist horror of “As Caravanas”, softened by a funk beat, came right after “Meu Guri”, a memoir of Elza Soares who recorded the song, and changed into the disturbing “Deus lhe Pague”.
“Que Tal um Samba?”, the single released last year that gives the tour its name, opened the final sequence, which also included quotes from Vinicius de Moraes, with “Samba da Benção” and Dorival Caymmi, with “O Samba da My Land “. Miúcha, Chico’s sister who died in 2018, was remembered by him in the song “Maninha”.
Although they behaved very well, the audience even got up and sang “João e Maria” at the top of their lungs, which ended the show. Chico walked out and greeted the portion of the audience that made their way to the stage.
Chico, a friend and constituent of President Lula, of the PT, left political innuendo to the repertoire, and the public did not even raise cries in favor of the PT or against his predecessor. He left the stage to a standing ovation, as if his samba had eliminated the trick, the waterfall and the dementia, as the current tour’s motivational song announces.
Since last year on the road with the show “Que Tal um Samba?”, Chico plays another 17 shows between March and April at the Tokyo Marine Hall. His first tour since 2018 has already passed through ten capitals before arriving in São Paulo.