Brazil, Bahia, Belgium... and Montreal

>> Monica Freire and Nico Beki sing Brazil to the world. Or is it the other way around?

by CHRIS YURKIW

"In Salvador, the carnival really happens in the street," says Brazilian singer and Montreal resident Monica Freire. "It's not like in Rio, where people buy tickets to see carnival shows."

Yeah, yeah--and the bagels suck in Toronto. But if Freire is invoking regional pride and a notion of cultural authenticity in regard to her hometown in Bahia, a couple of states up the Atlantic coast from the urban centres of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, she has some of the biggest names in Brazilian popular music to back her up.

The bossa-nova dynamic duo of João and Astrud Gilberto burst out of Bahia in the '60s, followed by Tropicália heavy-hitters like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and today its capital city of Salvador is represented by international stars like the crazy Carlinhos Brown or national samba-reggae heroine Daniela Mercury.

In fact, Freire got her break back home when she replaced Mercury in the Bloco Pinel, one of the large, percussion-based ensembles that play on crawling flat-bed trucks during carnival. She did what was demanded of her--samba-reggae, afoxé--but took off for international influence and a base in France.

"I've always loved to travel and I find that music is a good passport," says Freire, who's been in Montreal for five years now. "I loved France and all the history there, but I missed the kind of space that exists in North and South America that you can build something new in. There's just more space here--whether that's physically or culturally."

France was Freire's Montreal connection, and here she's trying to define her style in the jazz bars of downtown or the lounges of the Plateau. A Far-East tour singing with Brazilian-Montreal mainman Paulo Ramos led to her releasing two hit "pop" albums in Japan recently, and I ask Monica in which of her two career streams she's likely to swim.

"It would seem like I'd have to choose," she says, "but I think that it's all valid. When you make music and it touches on different styles, different influences, it always resonates somewhere in you. These days I like to make music that's more personal; I like to do samba, I like using Bahian rhythms. But I'd like it be a little more modern, whether that's in the sounds or the arrangements. I'd like to incorporate the stuff I did in Japan."

Nico Beki's contemporary heart

If Freire is a classic case of world-music miscegenation--of trying to reach out of her culture from within--then longtime Montreal-Brazilian songstress Nico Beki is going the other way: reaching in from without. Beki is fairly miscegenated herself: she was born in Belgium but grew up in São Paulo from age 7 to 18. Then she went back to Belgium for studies, where Europe proved to be her French-Canadian connection as well, but Beki has no identity crisis as she sits on her third continent.

"In Brazil they don't even ask the question," shesays of her "nationality," "because I grew up there. My way of living and thinking and moving and talking is Brazilian. But when people speak to me in French I have a European accent, and they ask me 'Where are you from? You're from Brazil? You're from France? You're from here?'"

Beki only began her professional singing career here in Montreal, albeit 14 years ago. And she too has found the music of Bahia, the region with the greatest concentration of descendants of black slaves in Brazil, irresistible. Her live sets in the Bobards and Maisons de la culture of the city are heavy on the classics--Veloso, Gil, Milton Nascimento--yet she and her band are a little more willing to dive into the contemporary heart of Bahia than an ex-pat like Freire, with nods toward axé music, a very African, soukous-influenced bounce buttressed by thrilling and instantly identifiable bloco Afro drums.

So what's the moral? The grass is always greener? The programmed beats are always sheener? The Other is always seemlier? When it comes to the hyper-hybridizing of "world music," it's probably best never to say always, and never to say never.

Monica Freire and group play Upstairs Nov. 12 & 19, Jello Bar Nov. 18, and Tokyo on Nov. 24. The Nico Beki Band play Montreal's World Folk Concert Series tonight, Nov. 12 (with Benoît leBlanc and Rob Lutes) at Le Petit Campus, and at la Maison de la Culture Plateau-Mont Royal on Nov. 20