\n<\/p>\n
The Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal, who played \u2013 and even boxed \u2013 with Miles Davis and was known as \u201cthe Sorcerer\u201d for coaxing tunes from everything from a live piglet to water-filled kettles, died on Saturday aged 89.<\/p>\n
According to a message shared on his social media pages, Pascoal \u201cpassed surrounded by family and fellow musicians\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Born on 22 June 1936, in Alagoas state in Brazil\u2019s poor north-east, he was spared work in the fields as an albino child and instead spent hours learning how to play his father\u2019s accordion and listening to birdsong.<\/p>\n
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 S\u00e3o Paulo.<\/p>\n
He recorded with musicians who became some of Brazil\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s telling of the encounter, got hit hard in the face.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s when he started calling me the Mad Albino,\u201d Pascoal recounted in an interview.<\/p>\n
Davis is also reported to have called the Brazilian \u201cthe most impressive musician in the world\u201d and recorded three songs written by Pascoal on Live-Evil.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s toys and cow horns.<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen people hear my music they find it very hard to pinpoint and to pigeonhole it,\u201d he told Jazzwise magazine in 2022. \u201cWhen they think I am doing one thing, I am already doing something else \u2026 It\u2019s very liquid.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal, who played \u2013 and even boxed \u2013 with Miles Davis and was known as \u201cthe Sorcerer\u201d 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 \u201cpassed surrounded by family and fellow<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21367,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[5289,8086,2527,13108,2375,2011,686,13109,13110],"class_list":{"0":"post-21366","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-aged","9":"tag-brazilian","10":"tag-dies","11":"tag-hermeto","12":"tag-jazz","13":"tag-legend","14":"tag-music","15":"tag-pascoal","16":"tag-sorcerer"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}