The Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal, who played – and even boxed – with Miles Davis and was known as “the Sorcerer” for coaxing tunes from everything from a live piglet to water-filled kettles, died on Saturday aged 89.
According to a message shared on his social media pages, Pascoal “passed surrounded by family and fellow musicians”.
Pascoal became an instantly recognisable figure for jazz fans around the world with his mane of white hair and thick beard. Critics lauded his creativity as a composer and his virtuoso playing of the keyboard, guitar and saxophone.
Born on 22 June 1936, in Alagoas state in Brazil’s poor north-east, he was spared work in the fields as an albino child and instead spent hours learning how to play his father’s accordion and listening to birdsong.
His family moved to the port city of Recife when Pascoal was 14, where he developed as a musician before setting off for faraway Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
He recorded with musicians who became some of Brazil’s greatest performers, including the singer Elis Regina. The percussionist Airto Moreira took Pascoal on tour to the US, where he met Davis, already a jazz superstar.
Davis, before inviting him to play on his Live-Evil album in 1970, asked Pascoal to join him in his personal boxing ring and, in the Brazilian’s telling of the encounter, got hit hard in the face.
“That’s when he started calling me the Mad Albino,” Pascoal recounted in an interview.
Davis is also reported to have called the Brazilian “the most impressive musician in the world” and recorded three songs written by Pascoal on Live-Evil.
On his own 1977 album Slaves Mass, Pascoal squeezed a piglet to make it squeal for the opening of a track, and a photo of him cuddling the animal appeared on its back cover. Other bizarre instruments he experimented with included children’s toys and cow horns.
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Pascoal objected to the classification of his work as jazz, and his compositions owe as much to Brazilian musical genres such as the fast-flowing chorinho and samba.
“When people hear my music they find it very hard to pinpoint and to pigeonhole it,” he told Jazzwise magazine in 2022. “When they think I am doing one thing, I am already doing something else … It’s very liquid.”
Pascoal wrote, recorded and led groups of musicians well into his 80s. In a show in London in 2022, he encouraged a group of young performers to push the boundaries of their playing before launching into his own furious solos.
