Playing Carlos Paredes
Carlos Paredes (1925-2004) wrote in 1963 a music that would become a portuguese ex-libris par excellence. Far away from the furore espressivo of fado singers, Paredes creates a music that shows the idiosyncrasy of the Portuguese Guitar and how expressive it is beyond the common place of the
narrow streets and low life's fado.
This music not only inaugurated a new era in the urban popular music panorama, but it's also a theme music of a film that turned portuguese cinema inside out. By the time mostly languishing in a sterile landscape.
Os Verdes Anos (1963) by Paulo Rocha show us a Lisbon, already then, a permanent construction site, with the Avenidas Novas (New Avenues) and its bourgoises, with little country girls as maids, that then rushed towards the capital of the empire. And the nephews of the shoemaker uncles that flirted with the maids, consumating in the city that which before was consumated in the country.
But, in this apparently bucolic scenery, darkness peeps, and good fellas are sometimes the worst fellas.
In Paredes music that unquietness is felt, that movement of the soul, or the lack of a soul. And if there's a music that defines the portuguese singularity, it's this. Being portuguese, with all the good and bad that ensue, this music glues to my skin: one scratches but the itch continues.
Carlos Paredes: Os Verdes Anos
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Le Je ne Scay Quoy
- Mafalda Nejmeddine: harpsichord
- Javier Aguirre: viola da gamba
- António Carrilho: recorder
Photo of Gare do Oriente (Lisbon) by Jsome1.
