Marcos Paiva

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Born: March 2, 1974 Primary Instrument: Bass

BIO

Cited by music critics as one of the top musicians of the new crop of Brazilian music, Marcos was born in Tupã, São Paulo and grew up in Viçosa, in the interior of Minas Gerais. He began studying music at the city’s conservatory and his adolescence was marked by the influence of regional music by Toninho Horta and Milton Nascimento. He taught himself to play the electric bass at 16 years of age. At 20 he moved to Rio de Janeiro where he studied at the Uni-Rio Federal University and at the Centro Ian Guest de Aperfeiçoamento Musical (Cigam), important outlets for the dissemination of popular music. He moved to São Paulo in 2000.

There Marcos rose rapidly in the musical world, playing with important artists and sharing the stage with important musicians. Important names in Brazilian vocal music, such as Bibi Ferreira, Zizi Possi, Ná Ozzetti, Danilo Caymmi, Maria Alcina, Cauby Peixoto, Ana Caram, Célia, Lucinha Lins, Agnaldo Rayol, Fabiana Cozza, Virginia Rosa, Jamelão, Guga Stroeter, Verônica Ferriani, Carlinhos Vergueiro and Elton Medeiros, and international names, such as the pianist Tânia Maria, who now lives in France, the Portuguese singer Teresa Salgueiro (grupo Madredeus), the Mexican singer Magos Herrera and the Cuban singer Fernando Ferrer, allowed Marcos to travel Brazil and the world playing at the big jazz and world music festivals and in important theaters, such as the Israeli Opera Theatre.

In instrumental music he has worked with Yaniel Mattos, Marquinho Mendonça, Bob Wyatt, Michel Freidesson, Lupa Santiago, Alex Buck, Daniel D’Alcântara, Rubinho Antunes, Djalma Lima and Fabiano Araújo, in addition to participating in the most important bands of São Paulo, such as the Heart Breakers Orchestra and the big bands Sound Scape, Cacique Jazz Combo, Banda Urbana and the pop-orchestral group Nouvelle Cousine. He began to study the acoustic bass at 28 years of age, with Nei Corrêa (OSESP – São Paulo Symphony Orchestra) and Gilberto Chacur (Baroque Art Orchestra). And was a teacher at the renowned Tatuí Conservatory in São Paulo, in 2007 and 2008, where he taught weekly classes on the acoustic bass.

As a musical director and producer, Marcos was behind the production of the two CDs by the singer Fabiana Cozza – “O Samba é Meu Dom” (Samba is My Talent) and “Quando o Céu Clarear” (When the Sky Clears) (nominated for the Tim Prize in 2006 and 2008) with participation from Maria Rita and Rappin Hood. He began his solo career in 2007, with the release of the album “São Mateus” (St. Matthew) on the Sesc Brasil Instrumental program – Sesc TV Network. The CD made a real impact on critics and the musical world. In 2007/2008, in addition to doing shows for the CD São Mateus, he did a tour with the Portuguese singer Teresa Salgueiro around Europe (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Luxembourg and Serbia), the Americas (Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil and Chile) and Israel.

In February 2012, Marcos released the CD “Meu Samba no Prato – Tributo a Edison Machado” (My Samba on Cymbals—a Tribute to Edison Machado) by the Marcos Paiva sextet MP6, where he pays tribute to the Brazilian style of samba jazz of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the anthological album of the drummer Edison Machado entitled “Edison Machado is New Samba” (Edison Machado é Samba Novo). The CD was written up in the newspapers O Globo, Folha de SP, O Estado de São Paulo, Estado de Minas, and other important Brazilian outlets.

For 2013, he is preparing the release of the CD “Marcos Paiva Trio - Choroso Vol. 2,” a new perspective from the Brazilian double bass player and an original interpretation of one of the most important and creative musical genres in Brazil, the choro.

Last Updated: August 14, 2012

Jornal O Estado de S.Paulo January 28 - 2012 By Julio Maria

Marcos Paiva in praise of Edison Machado Double bass player releases exquisite album under the name of the number one drummer

A bass player remembers Edison Machado. One of the pivotal drummers to the existence of bossa nova, the man who reduced all of the parts of a samba school to the seven pieces of a drum set and gave it levity, teaching samba to speak English so it could flirt with jazz, Machado earns a tribute of the highest caliber from one of the specialists of Brazilian music.

Marcos Paiva, double bass player with a vibrant touch and impressive resume, along with his band MP6 (with Edinho Santana on piano, Cássio Ferreira on sax, Daniel de Paula on drums, Jorginho Neto on trombone and Daniel D'Alcântara on trumpet) celebrate one of the most important artists to come out of the seminal Beco das Garrafas nightclub district at the start of the 1950s. The show led by Paiva will be held next Thursday, at the Sesc Pompeia Theater. “Meu Samba no Prato – Tributo a Edison Machado” (My Samba on Cymbals – a Tribute to Edison Machado), the name of the album and the show, presents vibrant themes performed by virtuosos of a group that, in addition to abundant technical mastery, also know how to play off each other.

Remembering Edison Machado in itself would already deserve merit, but what is interesting is that the drummer is mentioned not only as a drummer, but as one of the most important thinkers of those Beco das Garrafas years.

The themes bring out a pre-bossa nova esthetic, from an era when instrumental groups were all the rage in São Paulo. The Brazilianness of the wind instruments shift from sounding like gafieira to a movie soundtrack, always backed with a pulsing beat. Confining it to just a single period of Brazilian music would be to limit it.

Marcos Paiva moves in the same direction without copying. He creates a free interpretation of “Aquarela do Brasil” (Watercolor of Brazil), with fluctuating tempos. And attacks the themes of Edison # 3, 2, 6 and 5 with fury or sweetness. One of the great bass players of the new generation makes his mark with an original tribute, worthy of applause.

“Meu Samba no Prato - Tributo a Edison Machado” by Guga Stroeter At the end of the 1950s, bossa nova injected the harmonic complexity of West Coast Cool Jazz straight into a major vein of Brazilian music, and this path has been traveled and studied by many generations of musicians up until today. One of the special features of bossa nova was its sparing guitar groove, created and disseminated by the Baia native João Gilberto. The power of this rhythm lies in its simplicity, which enabled the genre to be exported and enjoyed around the world. The essayist José Ramos Tinhorão did a sociological analysis of the Bossa Nova and concluded that the white bourgeoisie who lived in the apartments recently built in the southern zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro had, at last, manufactured their own music. For Tinhorão, bossa nova was the fruit of the subservience of the tropical colony to the expansionism of Yankee Manifest Destiny, hastened by the property speculation that forced out the blacks from the city’s urban center, confining them to the steep hillsides. At that time, it was perhaps heresy to tamper with the chemistry of this winning formula. However, musicians from the outer spheres soon dared to do so. One of them was the Rio drummer Edison Machado. Born in 1934, in the Engenho Novo neighborhood, Edison worked in orchestras playing gafieira and, in his work, shouldered the burden of getting people to dance the samba in vast packed dance halls. This is how he developed his own aggressive and unusual style, bringing strident cymbals, full of harmonics to samba. With his liberating polyrhythmic approach, Edison introduced a sound that reminds the listener of an atmosphere of a samba school procession, making the style one of the pillars of the genre that was eventually christened samba jazz. Samba jazz, and in particular the album "Edison Machado é Samba Novo” (Edison Machado is New Samba, 1964), changed forever Brazilian instrumental music, which had consisted of choro and its derivations since the end of the 19th century. This happened approximately 50 years ago. Obviously, in all the respects that we can list, many things have changed. But the artistic accomplishments of any period, when cleverly combining the best available information, never grow old... and some of these old recordings still sound overwhelming for the instrumentalists of the new generation. They help point the way. Marcos Paiva, a double bass player raised in Minas Gerais and now residing in São Paulo, is one of these artists committed to the past and future of Brazilian music. He was gripped by a challenging question: in the end, who are we as musicians? What can we do to help along this transformation of tradition without becoming complacent and repeating established standards? Marcos used the free spirit of Edison Machado as the point of departure, recording this CD tribute that you have in your hands, to praise, compose, arrange, improvise, in a dynamic contemporary world, where there is no room for faux-naif. In Brazil, at the end of the 1950s, there was a fascination with the promise of progress, the comfort that domestic appliances had provided, the architecture of Brasília, and the magic of the first space voyages. In some way, the Newtonian model of the world, as a big finely calibrated clock, still populated the optimism associated with the cosmopolitan pretense, even if just an illusion. Today we live immersed in the complexity of a multifaceted world, characterized by an uninterrupted avalanche of information and influences. And it is up to the artist to create his own identity, within this so-called “liquid modernity.” It is not a simple process, but, at some point, Marcos Paiva’s sextet took a chance by diving in. In the span of a single track, the instrumental behavior embarks on and abandons different melodic and harmonic structures. In the left hand of pianist Edinho Santana, an introduction of Jobim-like synergy jumps to a progression of fourths, then embraces the atonal parameters proposed by the saxophonist Cássio Ferreira. The participation of the trumpet player Daniel D’Alcântara does not allow any false nostalgia to settle in. Until just recently, people would say that Brazilian music was intuitive and versatile, but could not be compared technically to the virtuosos of international jazz. This is no longer true! Like Daniel D’Alcântara, the trombone player Jorginho Neto demonstrates that we have constructed a radical style, founded on study and the respect of many instrumentalists of years past. The freedom is provided by the double bass of Marcos Paiva and the drums of Daniel de Paula. It is gratifying to hear the double bass player’s original album in which he does not try to be the lead player. Much to the contrary... it becomes clear that Paiva’s satisfaction is derived from facilitating the collective pulse, where what prevails is the harmony of the live group that reacts instantly and instinctively to the ideas and the stimuli proposed by colleagues. The concept for the album “Meu Samba no Prato” (My Samba on Cymbals) is also founded on pauses and empty spaces. From these silent gaps, sprout surprises. We perceived this in the opening track of the CD, in the dissonant but disciplined arrangement of “Aquarela do Brasil” (Watercolor of Brazil). The mantra like melody contrasts with the restlessness of the angular phrases of the drumming by Daniel de Paula, who today could be pointed to as one of the disciples of the investigative restlessness of Edison Machado. “Meu Samba no Prato” (My Samba on Cymbals) is one of those albums that prove that it is possible to be bold and pay tribute to predecessors that opened away so that today you can do something contemporary, without making any type of concession. Marcos Paiva never forgets the listener. After all music, and in particular samba, are expressions of the inclusive nature of this phenomena that is revitalized every time that people congregate and show that creative listening is capable of taking us to unknown places, where we can expand our vision of the world. Guga Stroeter is a musician and musical director of Sambata Label

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