Brave New Mundo! The Midoestes, and the origins of A Viola No Espelho

My journey into Central Brazilian music began unexpectedly in 2018. I had been visiting my girlfriend in Spain for the new year, and at the end of the trip I went to Lisbon on my own for the weekend. In the kitchen of my AirBnB, a kind of bunkhouse style arrangement, more like a hostel than an apartment, I met two people that have altered the course of my life and career. Adriano and Flávia were in the process of communally making homemade pasta with another Brazilian woman who was staying in the apartment. Our conversation quickly veered toward music and within a short time we were sitting together drinking wine and playing songs for each other. While this may seem like a very ordinary thing to happen among travelers, for me, this experience in that moment, with these new friends, triggered something deeply rooted in my dreams.

Adriano, fluent in English, was immediately apparent as a talented guitar player and singer. We bonded quickly as we shared our original songs with each other. Flávia, an influential scholar and writer on music history and aesthetic theory of Portugal and Brazil, was in Lisbon doing research for her dissertation. The spouses were spending the month together during Adriano's summer break from his own academic work in Brazil. We spent the following day together exploring some of the cultural history of Lisbon, visiting the tomb of a famous Fado singer and having a wharfworker's lunch of boiled sausages. On parting they, in true Brazilian fashion, invited me to visit them in Goiânia. I said, OK, but I want to start a band.

The idea of "starting a band" together continued to percolate in our minds over the next several months as we stayed in touch and began collaborating on recordings together by sharing audio files via the internet. I had wanted to find a way to collaborate creatively with others outside my own culture for many years. For me, these new relationships were dreams come true. Finally, in Fall of 2018 I disembarked from a plane in Goiânia, Goiás State. We named the band "The Midoestes" because it represented our combination of the center, less well known, geographical and cultural regions of both of our countries.

I had never set foot in South America before, and the culture shock I felt arriving in Brazil the first time was intense. My friends were kind and took good care of me as I gradually became more comfortable in the city. We worked every day, playing and writing and recording. During this time I felt for the first time what it was like to travel in a place where very little English is spoken. I was wildly inspired by the experience, as difficult and frustrating as it felt at times being completely dependent on my hosts to translate my surroundings for me. "Brazil is not for amateurs," I was often reminded. I often made glaring social mistakes out of ignorance and my inability to interpret the complexities of the dynamics around me. Thankfully, my hosts were (and still are) compassionate, understanding people who take the gringo in stride.

During the 10 weeks I spent in Goiânia, Adriano, Nicholas (Adriano's close friend and fellow musician and songwriter) and I wrote and recorded much of the music that eventually became our album, Brave New Mundo! We were recording up until the very last nights we all spent together in a hostel dorm in Chapada dos Veadeiros (we put Flávia's last backing vocals on the tracks in that dorm). My plan then became to return to Saint Louis, to record the rest of the parts (drums, bass and leads), and then to return to Brazil to rehearse and perform while we all prepared to embark on a US tour together. It was the first time in my life that I had been part of a music project that shared a palpable dream. We wrote songs together with the excitement of children who still believe their art will make an impact on the world. When in reality, the world was making an impact on us.

The defining moment for me happened one day while we were staying at Nicholas’ home in Anápolis, Goiás when I was introduced to the viola caipira, the 10 string iconic instrument of traditional Brazilian music of many styles, none of which I had ever heard before. Before I traveled to Brazil, like many North Americans, I never understood that Brazilian music was more than the African descended sounds of the Northeast that are transmitted to us through high school and college jazz bands (and old Disney cartoons) such as Samba and Bossa Nova. I was completely overwhelmed by the wild abundance and surprising variety of Brazilian music. That particular evening Nick showed me some videos of what he called “roots Sertaneja,” and he let me play his viola. It was a transformative experience. I had no knowledge yet of how to play it traditionally, but I immediately bonded with it. As I began experimenting with simple rhythmic ideas and little riffs and strumming patterns, I was transported. The jangly sound, the ease with which complex rhythmic ideas can be expressed and rich heritage of this little guitar was exactly the thing I was missing in my musical life. I spent my final weeks in Brazil traveling to Salvador and then to Rio de Janeiro. In my last few days in Rio I bought an old viola from a man on Mercado Livre with the help of my new found friend Sydnei. I carried it back to Saint Louis with me like a holy relic.

So it went that I finished the album in my studio in Saint Louis with the help of some talented horn players who generously donated their time. I was beginning to experiment with writing songs on the viola. I then returned to Brazil. We rehearsed our songs and performed some shows. To me it was the coolest thing in the world to be playing gigs in Central Brazil, as rough as our group was. Led by Adriano's boyish charisma and the inescapable question of "why is that gringo even here?" We were able to draw people's interest. Our largest and most well attended performance was at Universidade Federal de Goiás itself. I remember commenting that I had never been in a dressing room back stage before. Everyone else was nervous, but I was just amazed to be there, in a sea of language I didn't understand, playing a song I wrote in that language, on an instrument I was an absolute beginner at, to an audience of professors and musicians. In that moment I felt as though failure was impossible, because simply being there was already so incredible.

I left Brazil again and returned to the USA with our tour set to begin a month later. I borrowed some money from my dad to buy a cheap minivan, and I began making preparations, finalizing tour dates and getting the gear organized for the trip. During this time we learned that Nick wasn't going to be able to join us in the USA because he was unable to secure a visa. So we had to plan for an entirely different show than we had rehearsed in Goiás. Thankfully between Adriano and Mateus they could perform hours worth of covers of Samba and MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) songs in addition to quickly reimagined versions of the parts of the record we could do without Nick. I was confident enough on the drumset to follow their lead on the Samba stuff. We had all the material we needed. Adriano, Flávia and Mateus all arrived in Chicago, and I met them there. We spent the next month or so on the road across the Eastern half of the USA from Milwaukee to Lawrence to Buffalo and to New York City.

Like all things, our tour came to an end. The band flew home from New York, and I drove the van back alone. We were already in talks about a a follow up record and taking the band to Europe. I was in the process of buying new recording equipment, I had renewed my passport and had all but bought a plane ticket to Brazil in February of 2020. However, like most things happening in the world at that time, our plans were upended by the pandemic. Adriano's career as a microbiologist became his priority, Mateus went back to medical school, and Nick moved to a remote part of Minas Gerais. I remained in Saint Louis continuing to work on my own music, and gradually incorporating the viola more and more into my recordings. In September of 2021 I moved to Chicago, and began working as a sound engineer and music producer (in addition to performing as a singer-songwriter and sometimes drumset player). I found my way to Roger's Park where I became surrounded by talented musicians specializing in many kinds of cultural and traditional music in addition to jazz musicians, folk musicians and experimental rock musicians among others.

I began to see a new beginning emerging out of a new perspective that was forming. It took a few more years and quite a few more significant moments of personal growth, but like clouds parting, I realized one day that I had already laid the groundwork I needed to return to my work in Brazil. I reached out to my old friends there, who thought the idea of me returning with a Fulbright to continue the project of creating cross-cultural music productions was wonderful. So I set myself to work, and through that process, the clouds have cleared more and more. People who I never imagined would even want to talk to me have offered me help. The viola itself has become a deep source of wonder, inpiration and reverence for me. I find myself searching for information about it, cultivating substance and knowledge and practicing it with intention in a way that I never had any interest in doing when learning to play the 6-string guitar. It feels like I have crossed into a new way of being. Receiving the news that the Fulbright proposal was successful was an incredibly joyful moment. It felt as though the past 20 years of work and personal development as a musician and music producer finally made sense.

The journey has reached the place that I can stop telling my own story. My own story no longer needs to be told because there is a bigger story to tell. A Viola No Espelho means "The Guitar in the Mirror." People often ask me what I mean by that. Caetano Veloso once famously remarked (and I'm paraphrasing. here) that between the USA and Brazil exists an impossible temptation to analogize between historical and cultural elements. The two countries grew up in the same colonial era, were part of the same trans-atlantic slave trade, and have both emerged to be geographically enormous, culturally diverse, economic leaders and cultural exporters. The experience of going to Brazil felt like stepping through a mirror into another part of myself. When I picked up the viola for the first time, I didn't feel like I was picking up a cultural object from outside my own world. I felt like in that moment I transcended North and South, and became just "An American." A Viola No Espelho aims to give this same revalatory experience to others by telling their stories through the same lens of borderless commonality and mutual learning.