There are many anecdotes about Hermeto Pascoal, the Brazilian musician who died on Saturday at the age of 89, that have become the stuff of legend. From punching Miles Davis in the face to playing for five hours straight one night in Rio and being widely known as “the sorcerer” of Brazilian music, with a long white beard to match, these episodes would make an average artist infamous. But beyond the outre stories, Pascoal truly was a mythic figure: a musical genius with few peers, who pushed music beyond boundaries.
This self-taught, skilful musician learned flute, tambourine, piano and many other instruments by mimicking gestures and transposing techniques from one to another. But his first teacher was nature. Born in 1936 in Lagoa da Canoa, a small town in the north east, the young Pascoal took his earliest musical inspirations from the noises of rural Brazil: frogs ribbiting at a placid lake, birds chirping in the small hours, bullock carts rolling in the morning; church bells calling the mass and popular festivities pulsing through the region, such as the winter festas Juninas, soundtracked by the accordion-laced forró.
One of his best-known performances is in the documentary Sinfonia do Alto Ribeira (Bagre Cego). Recorded in 1985, the film shows Pascoal and his band actually playing in Brazil’s PETAR national park, everywhere from inside caves to standing in a river. Waist-deep in the water, Pascoal blows bubbles and fills up bottles, then dives fearlessly with his flute. At the end of the experiment he cracks a joke: “Spending money on synths is just nonsense.”
Hermeto Pascoal: Música da Lagoa (Sinfonia do Alto Ribeira, 1985) – video
His innovative and fierce approach to wind instruments – or anything that might work as one, from kettles to bottles – influenced the most best-known jazz musicians of the US in the 1970s. Miles Davis had Pascoal show him a number of compositions, three of which ended up on the trumpeter’s acclaimed 1971 album Live-Evil. Bob Moses called him “God on Earth”. Chick Corea asked to play alongside him at the 1978 São Paulo jazz festival: it was a highly lauded gig, as was his impromptu appearance with singer Elis Regina at the 1979 Montreux jazz festival: she hopped on stage and offered a scatted accompaniment to his deconstructed version of Asa Branca.
Pascoal found wider recognition when he moved to Los Angeles in 1970 at the invitation of fellow Brazilian drummer and composer Airto Moreira. They had met when Pascoal was playing with samba jazz ensembles in Rio. But the move to the US prompted the recording of his first solo album, Hermeto, which revealed an artist operating way outside of tradition and laid the foundations of his work for decades to come. Recklessly experimental, it spans musique concrète, atonal jazz, concert forms, popular music, frenetic rhythmics and fragmented constructions.
By the end of the 70s, Pascoal was back in his beloved Brazil. He kept deepening his experimentations, mixing flute and electro-acoustic manipulations on tracks such as Cannon (Dedicated to Cannonball Aderley). In his music he was writing asymmetric bars, powerful counterpoints and using improvisation as a key resource in a quest to reassemble Brazilian genres while keeping them anchored in tradition. However, this set him at odds with the major labels; the Brazilian media would refer to him as a “cursed artist”, an outcast unlike the mainstream-courting Gal Costa and Gilberto Gil. It didn’t stop him from inspiring other musicians, like Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque – although Pascoal wasn’t shy about saying the respect wasn’t mutual.
During the 1980s, Pascoal founded what researchers and critics would later call the Jabour School. Based in the west suburbs of Rio, far from the postcard landscapes that nurtured bossa nova, he created a tirelessly dedicated world of his own, playing music for hours and writing at an unstoppable rate. Eventually, he built a collective of musicians who formed his studio crew and played on live albums such as 1980’s Cérebro Magnético and 1987’s Só Não Toca Quem Não Quer.
Hermeto Pascoal performing at the Barbican Centre, London, in 2016. Photograph: Robin Little/Redferns
Ilza na Feijoada, the opening track of his 1984 album Lagoa da Canoa Município de Arapiraca, captures those joyful, productive years – an era also captured in an intimate 1981 documentary Hermeto, Campeão, by Thomaz Farkas. The film features one of Pascoal’s most resplendent arrangements. With his clarinet’s flaring articulations and high-pitched lines, the music jostles like a noisy family get-together over a feijoada (a black bean and meat stew).
Ilza (da Silva) was Pascoal’s wife. They were married for 46 years, until her death in 2000. As loyal to her as he was to his music, Pascoal released his last album, Pra Você, Ilza, in 2024, the final vestige of his incessant creativity. (In 1996, he wrote 366 songs, one for each day of that leap year, for Calendário do Som [Calendar of Sound].) He kept his doors open to the new, playing for young audiences at festivals such as Dekmantel in Amsterdam in 2022, and always welcoming artists who paid a visit to the wizard, travellers in search of an oracle.
