Clube da Esquina & What Came After
A half-century ago, Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges and their esteemed colleagues turned Brazilian music into a kaleidoscopic, genre-bending delight. The impact was monumental and immediate.
by Tom Moon
Credit: Keystone/Getty Images.
If it were possible to do contact tracing for inspiration, the scene that began at the corner of Rua Divinópolis and Rua Paraisópolis in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte sometime in 1970 would make an interesting study. There, during a particularly mean season of authoritarian rule, a group of writers, artists, musicians and thinkers gathered in the afternoons to talk, hang, smoke and sing songs.
Out of that loose revolving-cast scene came one of the most unusual double albums in pop music history: Clube da Esquina, which is credited to the singer-songwriters Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges, but in both its overall tone and tiny details reflects ideas that grew from a larger collaborative dynamic.
Released in March 1972 after a two-year gestation period, Clube turns up on all the Essential Records lists. It’s celebrated in books and academic papers for its diverse stylistic explorations and ornate arrangements. Still, even 50 years on, this album’s impact remains tricky to pin down — because of its sweep and scale, and because it influenced seemingly everyone making music in Brazil at the time.
Clube da Esquina was among the first big “statement” records to arrive after the rock-embracing Tropicália movement was quashed by the dictatorship in 1970. Its swirl of disparate fusions — samba percussion, rock song structure, the sleek chords of bossa nova, blissed-out vocal harmonies — became a primary catalyst for the flowering of diverse, globally aware Brazilian music that followed in the early and mid-’70s, much of which was tagged under the broad term Música Popular Brasileira, or MPB.
The LP’s wide, sometimes wild swings had few antecedents at the time in Brazil. The breathtakingly ambitious Clube music was closer in spirit to the late efforts of the Beatles, which, according to Clube member Márcio Borges, confounded the Brazilian critics who panned the album. “They wanted to compare Bituca [Nascimento’s nickname] with [the singer-songwriters] Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque. They didn’t understand a bit of the interracial, international, interplanetary ecumenism proposed by the atemporal dissonances from Bituca,” he wrote in his personal history of Clube. “They despised the findings of Chopin and the Beatlemaniac love from little Lô.”
Clube da Esquina’s narratives called to “those who want to break free,” and then offered multiple ideas about what that freedom might feel like. Its lyrics expressed the idealism of Woody Guthrie through the melancholy imagery of Pablo Neruda, and its lavish orchestrations and intricate arrays of vocal harmony, stirring by themselves, braided the ancient and modern together into a sound that was also a provocation. Clube da Esquina arrived at a moment in Brazilian cultural life that was defined by fear; in response, it radiated possibility. It challenged its listeners and it challenged other musicians to go big. To dream. To stand for something.
“This is a direct response from the artistic soul to the cruelty of the dictatorship,” says the cellist, composer and arranger Jaques Morelenbaum, who was 18 at the time Clube was released and credits it with cementing his decision to become a musician. Since then, he’s toured with Gilberto Gil and Antônio Carlos Jobim, and appeared on literally hundreds of classic albums. “It’s a complex thing to talk about because now it is so beloved. [But at the time] it seemed so different. Radical. It was speaking poetically to all Brazilians who appreciated freedom of creativity and speech. It was a big, big, big inspiration for all of the musicians of my generation.”
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The inspiration circuit that began in Belo Horizonte traveled in waves. First, it heated up among the album’s core participants, including Lô Borges and his songwriter brother Márcio, bassist and guitarist Beto Guedes, guitarist Toninho Horta, multi-instrumentalist Nelson Angelo, writer Fernando Brant and composer Ronaldo Bastos. Having jammed and dreamed up songs in low-key situations for so long, the musicians understood how to coax magic from each other — with an empathetic (and, crucially, egoless) approach to accompaniment.
This group settled in a house in Rio while the rehearsal and recording of Clube da Esquina progressed. There was downtime, and during it, other projects sprouted. Each of them blossomed as a direct result of the atmosphere the musicians had cultivated on the street corner. Borges recorded spare versions of songs he’d written alone and with others from the collective, situating them in a guitar-oriented singer-songwriter context. The resulting self-titled LP, often called “The Sneaker Album,” for its cover, distills the sprawl of Clube into an intimate, minimal soundscape that evokes L.A. acoustic guitar music of the period — as well as the watercolor idylls of the Beatles, again a huge inspiration for the Belo Horizonte crew.
Som Imaginário, the band that had accompanied Nascimento on previous tours and took part in the album sessions, made a rococo progressive-rock record, 1973’s Matança Do Porco, that’s notable for its derivative structures and bombastic peaks, and for its fiery, ruthlessly inventive improvisational excursions.
Guedes and Horta teamed up with Danilo Caymmi, the son of legendary singer and songwriter Dorival Caymmi, a multi-instrumentalist named Novelli and others for a hard-to-find Clube classic that, incredibly, has yet to be reissued. Titled with just the names of the four principals, it’s alive with the exuberance of Clube da Esquina and thrives on the mothership’s collective approach (Lô Borges plays bass). Different tracks have different songwriters and lead singers, each one striving for a subtle union of message and atmosphere.
Nelson Angelo called on many of the Clube musicians to help fill out the sounds on his collaboration with the singer Joyce. Their 1972 album is an unapologetically sweet set of songs that is a classic in its own right. With its languid, winding-lane melodies and pensive aura, it shows that the lavish musical devices central to Clube da Esquina could be transported to different moods and settings, even without the towering presence of Nascimento.
After Clube da Esquina had been out and its related projects began to circulate, the sounds of the loosely connected collective — Nascimento maintained that Clube was not a “club” because it didn’t have an official meeting place — spread rapidly throughout the community of Brazilian recording artists. Musicians like Horta found themselves in high demand for recording sessions; keyboardist and arranger Wagner Tiso, who grew up with Nascimento and was integral to Som Imaginário, pursued a solo career while also writing arrangements for Flora Purim and others, and scoring for film.
The Clube inspiration circuit also includes established behind-the-scenes talent like Eumir Deodato, the visionary musician-arranger who’d created the atmospheres for Jobim’s hit early ’70s LPs and facilitated Nascimento records like 1969’s Courage, for A&M/CTI in the States, and Paulo Moura. The late maestro, who conducted the studio orchestra on Clube, enjoyed a career that traversed first-chair classical duties, the bossa-nova craze with Jobim and Sérgio Mendes, arranging for Elis Regina and João Bosco and making a series of acclaimed albums as a leader.
It’s impossible to credit Clube directly for all of the ornate, lavishly rendered music that followed, but Morelenbaum and others believe that the boldness of its music — and its decidedly uncommercial bent — inspired all kinds of experiments. The megastar Regina, who was the first to introduce Nascimento’s songs at competitions, was clearly moved by the tango and flamenco references on Clube tracks like “Dos Cruces”; among the audacious experiments on her 1972 LP Elis is the elaborately scored tango fantasia “Cabaré.” The bossa-nova pioneer João Gilberto was among the few noted artists who responded to the baroque eclecticism of Clube by going in the other direction. On his 1973 self-titled album, often referred to as his “White Album,” he replaced the studio orchestra settings of his 1960s recordings with hauntingly austere songs featuring just his voice, guitar and hand percussion.
Chico Buarque returned to Brazil from exile to deliver his most ornate and expansive work, Construção, which opens with a wry, pointedly satirical comment on the dictatorship set to a jaunty military-style march. Edu Lobo dreamed up a reinvention of the Catholic mass, Missa Breve, that featured Nascimento. Gilberto Gil’s Expresso 2222, his first statement upon returning from exile as well, reimagines Brazilian folk melodies with distorted electric guitars and squabbling Stevie Wonder-style clavinet. Veloso’s 1972 release Transa is built on a wiry, austere electric rock foundation. It’s as though he’s changed everything that previously characterized his art: In place of his typically image-rich verses, Veloso offers terse mantras that grow in intensity through repetition; a different slant on Clube modernity.
Even Sérgio Mendes, who became massively successful doing pleasant middlebrow samba versions of U.S. pop hits, dug deep: His 1972 release, Primal Roots, revolves around ancient drum patterns and solemn ceremonial chants. It remains his most creative work.
Composers and arrangers found themselves in high demand. One of them, Arthur Verocai, hired some of the musicians from Belo Horizonte to anchor his debut as an artist. His self-titled work glances at bossa nova and the roiling tumult of Charles Mingus’ larger bands and lots of music in between. Verocai’s agile, mood-shifting charts carry echoes of early samba and the works of a key influence on Nascimento, Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos; they’re crisply scored and dotted with disarming juxtapositions between plush pads and crisp metallic percussion. Verocai’s album, which had been out of print for decades, was championed by Gilles Peterson and other tastemakers. It’s been reissued several times since 2003 and is now almost too widely beloved to be described as a cult classic.
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There were not many live performances for Clube da Esquina in Rio after the album was released. But Wayne Shorter and his colleagues in Weather Report (which then included the Brazilian percussion virtuoso Dom Um Romão) managed to catch one of them. Transfixed by Nascimento’s poignant voice and graceful way with melody, Shorter proposed a collaboration, leading to a series of recordings in the U.S. the following year. One session became Native Dancer, the 1975 landmark of world fusion; another, involving some of the same musicians including Shorter and Herbie Hancock, became Nascimento’s 1976 classic Milton.
These projects sent the inspiration circuit of the “Corner Club” into a global gear: Suddenly jazz lovers were rhapsodizing about the singer with the skyscraping falsetto, devouring not just Clube da Esquina but Nascimento’s solo projects, like Minas. That 1975 LP found him leaning on gorgeous and elaborate wordless vocal melodies as an end run around government censorship.
By 1976 Nascimento had a U.S. record contract. Many of his late ’70s and ’80s efforts feature the contributions of musicians and writers from the Clube days, who, incredibly, remained unknown even in Brazil. The taunting playground vocals and wildcat energy of Clube da Esquina spread further via Milton’s guest appearances, electrifying collaborations with George Duke, Earth, Wind & Fire and others.
When Paul Simon began work on the follow-up to Graceland, among the first artists he sought out was Nascimento. “Spirit Voices,” off 1990’s The Rhythm of the Saints, has a moment of surreal time travel in it: After Simon sings the first few verses, Nascimento enters. It’s an interlude, especially distinct from what’s gone before. All of its elements are there to support the fragile, quivering majesty of Nascimento’s voice. He starts alone, but pretty soon, through the miracle of multitracking, there’s a Milton choir. They’re singing in overlapping waves, transforming Simon’s song with one of those astonishingly beautiful themes that dance in the air, conveying meaning beyond words. It’s a living example of an inspiration circuit, involving a sound first heard on a street corner in a Brazilian mining town half a century ago, resonating and reverberating and mutating still.
