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Jaime Santos, born musician from Rio Grande do Sul (gaúcho)
in Porto Alegre on August 28, 1963, son of Adriano Subtil dos Santos and Maria Eloy dos Santos. Elder brother of nine brothers. Born in Navegantes neighborhood in Porto Alegre at the age of five he moved to
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Canoas, a neighboring city of POA in Rio Grande do Sul, where he lived with his parents until he was fifteen. As a teenager, he studied at the La Salle school in Niterói / Canoas after finishing his first degree (elementary school) he was transferred to Colégio La Salle in the Centro de Canoas where he won a free scholarship where he studied until the second year of accounting. Upon arriving at the school he was faced with a variety of activities that that school offered, coming from a humble family he was faced with the strength of a private and wealthy school in the city. At the same time in the neighborhood of Niterói, where he lived, he fell in love with the music of Ewerton (Passarinho as he was known), a friend who played the guitar next to the club where he met with several friends and was bitten by the sound and “humming” bug of the music. His brother in the meantime bought a Gianinni guitar and that's where it all started. His hand went mad from the repetition of musical notes until the first song came out, it was when he composed his first song, “Vida Severina” Based on the play by João Cabral de Mello Neto to participate in an internal festival at Colégio La Salle de Canoas, and took second place with the song where it quivered like a stick of green quince. As soon as it all started. From that moment on, Jaime Santos saw that it was what he wanted for his life. However, music was not an easy profession and had to survive, with this it worked with several things to be able to maintain itself, and it was taking the music in parallel. Upon reaching the age of majority, he had no doubts, he started to study music, self-taught and with private teachers. At the age of nineteen, he moved to Porto Alegre again, where he lived for ten years. Still in this place, he met fellow composer Sullivan Maridakis, who later came to invite him to be the caretaker of the building where he lived. Jaime then moved to the 17th floor of the Rambla building on Rua Dos Andradas (better known as Rua Da Praia, in the center of Porto Alegre where he composed several songs in honor of his homeland and its beauty. During this period, a lot happened in bars , festivals, projects and made shows of his own creation. Until 1994 in an internship in accounting at Banco do Brasil, his colleague Waldemar Pires invited him to Florianopolis on vacation, he had no doubts if he went to that inspiring and wonderful place the first And at that moment he decided that he would live on music. Since moving to Florianópolis in 1994, where he resided for twelve years, music became a profession, because up until then in Porto Alegre, Jaime took music in parallel with In the time he lived in Florianópolis, he met Itamar Rios, his partner in several songs, and now lives in Londrina for nine years, in the north of Paraná.
Jaime Santos Brazilian musician and composer. He interprets his songs and music by Milton Nascimento, Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Djavan, Caetano Veloso and many others in the style of MPB.
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Jaime Santos, his art is the song, one of the gems that
Brazil knew how to develop so well and is so proud of us. The song is the music and it is the words. It is not just music, which in itself is an art of immense value. And it's not just the verses, as we find them delicious in the poets' lyric.
It can even be said that there is a specific musical activity for the song, just as there is also a very particular way of writing its words. However, we do not have a suitable word in our language to designate those who make songs.
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We say composer, but that term originally refers to those who “compose or write music”. In English, a songwriter is called a songwriter, as in French he is said to be a chansonnier, both of which are derived from “song” (ie, song and chanson, respectively). Song Portuguese, as well as Italian canzoniere and Spanish song, refer to a collection of songs (this is how we say, for example, “Dorival Caymmi's songbook”), and not to those who make them. But in Italian and Spanish there is the word cantautore and cantautor, respectively, a term that refers to those who sing their own songs and which, in Portuguese, we do not know.
It will look like a trifle. Perhaps. But it does not cease to intrigue us there should be a suitable name for an art of such relevance to the Brazilian culture. It is an art of the highest complexity. After all, as if makes a song? It is necessary to find the new melody, to cover it with the appropriate and insinuating harmony, seek, in addition, the words whose sonority and sense fit precisely to the melody. That's when it's not music before that adapts to the words, because the composer can also work on previous text, yours or others.
It is in this sense that Jaime Santos is an artist of the song, a genuine Brazilian “composer”. And “cantautor” (let us accept the necessary foreignness) of excellent quality. In Jaime we have the authentic Brazilian popular song. He does not use specific poem forms, such as the sonnet, nor does he work with certain metrics, such as the decyllable verse. Nothing like that. His poetics are entirely free, dictated only by the melody of the music with which he adjusts and harmonizes. And the themes all come from his own daily life. “Jaime Santos”, writes correctly * Guinga on the back cover of the CD Pomegranate, “retrata a realidade da sua vida com toda a honestidade, e é isto que um compositor deve fazer”.
* Testimony by Guinga (guitarist and composer of Brazilian music, on the back cover of the CD Pomegranate by Jaime Santos.
But where does this come from? That is, how do you learn to make songs? Certainly it's not at school. In fact, Jaime, a boy from the periphery, only entered school belatedly. It happened that a neighbor named Sila one day introduced him to what, for Jaime, then nine years old, he represented his “cat jump” (expression popular and tasty with which we can perhaps translate what academics name a Epiphany).Indeed, Sila showed him vinyl from the generation immediately heir to Bossa Nova: Chico Buarque de Holanda and the tropicalistas, among other artists of that always very prestigious gold generation of our MPB. Now, it is understood that it was not easy for a poor kid to have access to vinyl records. That's how Jaime got ready working for Sila's father, which always allowed him to hear those precious discs.
A few years later, one of his brothers came home with a guitar, a “Stick came”, as Jaime likes to say jokingly. With the support of your friend Everton, Passarinho, Jaime not only understood how that instrument, as well as learned his first two chords. Few though, these already served him to compose his first song, with which he reached the second place in a talent festival at La Salle school, in Canoas.
In fact, music was in Jaime forever: in his mother's voice who liked to sing radio hits (it would have been with him that he learned to sing) and the pride of the indigenous father, who put him as a boy on the table to sing some samba or bolero for your guests.
However, talent just won't be worth much if it doesn't there is also persistence and discipline. In fact, in this Brazil so few opportunities, how many talents do not fall halfway, potentialities that are never realized!
It turns out that with Jaime it was different. The boy who grew up listening to the mother sing, that the father raised on the table to sing to his friends, the boy who, having only learned a few chords, wrote alone a song to represent the school class, classifying it in an artistic competition, the young man who, some clothes in the suitcase and the guitar in the bag, boldly decided “Set foot in the profession”, the man who crossed the Atlantic, taking the song Brazilian with you to the world, Jaime Santos never gave up. And never gave up because I knew, I always knew, since I heard those vinyls with Sila, the one that came in this world.
The CD Pomegranate.your opera cousin, is thus the result of years of learning. It is, therefore, the moment definitive and decisive when the apprentice proves to be a master for all who have ears to hear. They say you have to travel to tell stories. Because Jaime traveled around Brazil, and in Pomegranate presents us with a good part of the sounds and themes that cross the country: from coast to the interior, from northeastern intent to urban south, passing through the southeast, transversality is undoubtedly the hallmark of this work. Pomegranate recognizes, inventes, sublimates and presents in sounds and words the Brazil we love.
With elaborate harmonies and contagious melodies, the songs follow the track of the best strain of our magnificent MPB, while the lyrics (from the Jaime or his partners) delight us and surprise us every moment with the sonority and the meaning that words take in the unique context of the song.
Much can be said about this flow inspired by sound words, but some representative verses will be sufficient for us at the moment: “The street movement / It is already visible / And the silence outside wants to die ”(The color of day); “Good and tasty fruit / Who looking at me wants” (Pomegranate); “If loving is part from me / The sea is the beginning and the end ”(Cais do porto); “The heart beats, for / Then listen to bull talk / The Cala-Boca bull complains about the boss / The man it was never stronger than the ox (Conversation of oxen); “Aligned our headlights / I expect a signal from you / The ships, our ports / The storm is over (Headlights); “We weave light and shadow / paths to get lost” (Oil on screen).
These verses (and there are others of equal value), already in themselves of great artistic expressiveness, gain a sublime sense when sung - and it is precisely this, we have already said, the art of song.
We could go on talking about Jaime and his work for hours, but, as wrote Caetano Veloso, “the song has to end”. We cannot, however, finish it not to mention one of the poetic passages that we think is of great prominence on the CD Pomegranate. Pomegranate:
She waits for me, her unrest
I don't have time
Seasoning the yearning
When I arrive in the middle
(Who are you)
It is understood that the restless, restless wait by someone who, for reasons not specified, has no time to return, this anxious waiting is tempered (understand: it is modeled, adjusted or, if desired, “Tuned” as if it were an instrument) by the lyrical self, who, after all, it arrives in the middle, that is, when, although they expected it, they did not know that it arrived just that moment.
We were waiting for you, Jaime, and very restless. Without the right time to come and having therefore tempered our yearning, you finally arrive with CD Pomegranate Pomegranate and you hit us right in the middle. Right in!
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Conrado Abreu Chagas
Literature teacher and musician
Master in Language Studies
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