Dani Gurgel: Paulista Polymath

Dani Gurgel is an acclaimed artist with a restless creative spirit. Born into a musical family in São Paulo, she took up music at age four and kept on going. Her mother, an accomplished pianist and arranger, and father, an amateur saxophonist, met while playing in a big band. She began studying photography in her early teens and has since pursued that realm as well, simultaneously and with equal vigor. Da Pá Virada, her company, is rooted in "music and image, intertwined." Aside from producing her award-winning releases, it has become a leading producer of photography, audio, video and advertising materials for a large and growing clientele, which includes such stalwarts of the Brazilian scene as Joao Bosco, Hamilton de Holanda, Monica Salmaso and Edu Ribeiro, among notable others. On the education side, Gurgel holds a doctorate in communication science, which has helped her tie her worlds of music and image together and launched her on a new path of teaching and scholarship.

AAJ spoke with Gurgel at Trinity University in San Antonio, at the tail end of a 2024 tour to promote her first large ensemble release, co-directed with Debora Gurgel, her mother. More information on that is in AAJ's review of the album, DDG19 Big Band.

Finding Her Voice

When asked about her early training, she spoke of a winding road that led her, after many instrumental twists and turns, to find her voice as a singer.

Dani Gurgel: I traveled from instrument to instrument to instrument. It was hard to find myself, to find the instrument that made me whole. Because when I started playing some 30 years ago—I know this still goes on, but a little bit less, and I know it happened a lot more before my time—but instrumentalists in general would make fun of singers. The ones that don't know anything about music, the ones that can't read music, or can't—anything else.

And at the same time—being a woman in music, in a man's world—all the men were making fun of the women: "Oh, she plays like a man, or she can't do..." All the odds were against, so I started playing instruments. All of the instruments were...I learned them, but never went up to the point of really studying them because I switched to the next one and the next one. I played the recorder, then the piano to learn harmony, then the flute and then the saxophone. The saxophone was the one I stayed with for the longest time. I played in big bands, which was the time I most learned to be part of a whole instead of just being a soloist. My times with big bands were amazing.

I wanted to be in a rock band, so I played electric bass. Then I started playing some acoustic guitar because I wanted to write Brazilian music and wanted to get the feel. I wrote music differently when I was on an acoustic guitar than I did when I was on a piano and all the other instruments. I was always shy to sing, even though I was writing with lyrics, because of all that prejudice. Finally, after 15 years playing in big bands, I said, "I finally know what my instrument is. I want to sing. My instrument is my voice; my instrument is built in." That's when I started to sing and when I recorded my first album. Only then did I record my first album, and I've been recording only as a singer since then.

Beginning a Career as a Recording Artist

AAJ: What was that first album and when did you record it?

DG: It was 2007. It was an EP with original music (Dani Gurgel, Da Pá Virada, 2008), not just by myself but some of my original music and also original music by other very new and young Brazilian composers. It was a time when, in Brazil, there was this general saying, "Brazilian music is dead. We're not making anything new; nothing is happening." So I kind of started this movement, this novos compositores, new composers. I did this first one, but also two more albums in this theme of "who are the new composers" (the second is Nosso, Da Pá Virada, 2008).

There's a lot of people doing amazing new music, and I started picking them and doing one track with each one and it ended with—not ended—but the main event of it was when I recorded an album featuring new composers; they were all part of the track they had written (Agora, Da Pá Virada, 2009). We did a big concert. And when I started getting listened to in Japan, I remember a Brazilian music expert from Japan said, "I'm using your albums as menus." He was taking my albums—of course he started because he enjoyed the music—but then he would look at the very fine print, all the credits. He would take all the names; there were so many names, so many people, composers and interpreters and everyone in each track. He would take all of those names and then Google them and then, "look, let's find this one and let's find this other one and find this other one." He was branching out from my records, and I was so happy.

Learning the Profession

AAJ: Tell us a little bit about your education. Obviously, you were playing and learning music outside of school, but did you study music in school, and if so, to what point?

DG: I had a very simple music class in school when I was very young, first to fourth grade, and it was just—not even the recorder—some singing and understanding music and more about creating culture. But since I was three years old I studied at a music school, Centro Livre de Aprendizagem Musical (CLAM), a music school founded by Zimbo Trio, directed by Amilton Godoy. I spent maybe 15 years there, going from instrument to instrument. That's the main music school where I studied. After that I just played in the school's big band and did some one-on-one classes with different teachers. But that was my main school, CLAM.

AAJ: Was that on weekends or at night, or how did you schedule it?

DJ: When I first started it was one lesson once a week. But then I started getting into the bands and they had this thing from which we learned so much—it was for the end of the year. We would have a student presentation, and—instead of making student bands—they would have one student and a band of teachers and assistants to support that student. When I was really small, I would be the student with all of those teachers and assistants. But when I was about 13, I was already one of those assistants.

I would go to school in the morning, have lunch and then go to the music school and be there from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m., just playing with the students. It was amazing to learn how to read music really fast. A student would come and they would say, "Oh, I'm playing 'Bala com Bala,'* do you know that song"? And we would say, "Well we know, but what key and what... (makes gesture of handing out) sheet music, sheet music..." And "Dani, you go to the saxophone, Dani you get the flute now," and we were building that. It wasn't free playing like when we play in venues, when we have that freedom of being all professionals, and we kind of change and look at each other. We had a student, so we had to be steady. We had to give them the cues and everything. I learned so much from that.

AAJ: Incredible training. Tell us about your degrees.

DG: I also studied photography for a long time. When I was about 13, playing at the music school, around that time I started studying photography as well. When it came time to go to college I couldn't decide if I was going to be a musician or a photographer. I already had technical training in both and couldn't decide what I was going to do in the university. So, I decided to do none of them (laughs).

I decided to study communication in a way that could help me build both my music and my photography and connect them. I still work as a photographer and a videographer, while I do mostly music. When I'm doing music I think a lot about the images. I studied communication, then I did a master's in communication. And now I'm Dr. Dani Gurgel, Ph.D. in Communications Science (smiles). But my Ph.D. is all about music business and streaming platforms, so it's all connected.

Research

AAJ: Tell us more about that Ph.D. What about your scholarly activities?

DG: My research is very specific in the Brazilian market. I used a very large data set. It's like all of the Brazilian artists in the Brazilian market. I proposed a theoretical model, and what I was able to identify was that different musical genres use platforms in a different way. So—thinking about radio—one of the genres that I study, sertanejo, is a kind of Brazilian country music, very popular. Not like pop music, but very popular. Sertanejo starts on radio. We're all talking about how to do streaming strategies and YouTube and video, but their strategies are starting with radio and all of the artists that I studied, who grew and had a lot of success, in the 5-year period that I studied, were starting in radio.

Other genres were starting on YouTube, others were starting on Spotify playlists. All of my research was about trying to track and trying to understand if there are more similarities than differences among artists in the same musical genre.

AAJ: That sounds fascinating.

DG: I had so much fun! The one genre that I absolutely couldn't find a pattern between/on artists was Brazilian popular music, MPB. Which is crazy, because it's the genre I was most interested in as an artist. I'm doing all of this research, and I really wanted to understand what's going on with MPB, yet it's the one genre where I couldn't find a pattern. All artists that I studied were different. I could find five or six different strategies and personas, one starting on playlists, one starting on YouTube, the other one built her own channel. It was completely crazy. All artists were different.

AAJ: That makes sense. The music has so much difference. As an artist, one might not feel obliged to jump on a prescribed track. You could create your own. So there is that.

DG: Yes (smiles).

AAJ: What about jazz, Brazilian jazz?

DG: I didn't study jazz because I didn't have enough data. For this specific research, on my dissertation, I needed to work with large amounts of data, a lot of artists and a lot of streams and plays. So I had to work with the big ones, and Brazilian jazz—unfortunately—is not that big.

AAJ: Are you doing any teaching related to your Ph.D.?

DG: I taught for about five years at a university in São Paulo. I taught in the photography courses and also was the coordinator, the head of the post-graduate course in art direction for movies. For a while, I also taught communications majors, mostly for graduate studies. But I just left the university because I was on a very fulltime schedule as a musician. I'm touring a lot, so I'm going to part-time teaching and back to touring a lot.

Projects and Touring

AAJ: What have you been doing in Texas?

DG: I'm in Austin for South by Southwest (SXSW), stretching from a longer trip. I had a showcase at the Elephant Room. I've been in the US since the beginning of February 2024. I came with the whole quartet, with—besides myself—Debora Gurgel on piano, Thiago Rabello ("Big") on drums, who is also the producer of our records and sound engineer, and Sidiel Vieira on bass. We have this quartet we call DDG4, and we've also recorded a big band album that we've renamed DDG19. DDG4 was the quartet and DDG19 is the 19-piece big band.

AAJ: 19 pieces. What are the additional pieces?

DG: We added traditional big band horns: 5 saxophones, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones and two flutes.

AAJ: Thank you very much for the flutes (laughs). What about percussion?

DG: No extra percussion, just the drums. We decided to use the traditional big band formation to be able to do exactly what we just did. We traveled as a quartet but with all of our sheet music. We collaborated with two different big bands on this trip. We went to Berklee College of Music and taught for a week; we did a residency. We taught Brazilian music. We rehearsed with their big band of students, and we played our music with them. Then we went to California and did the same thing at the California Jazz Conservatory. We played with the Electric Squeezebox Orchestra in California. We did both quartet shows and big band shows, in both cities.

AAJ: That's a wonderful thing to be able to do. It's great for the students because it is a similar instrumentation—it includes the big band instrumentation—but for the rhythm section players in particular, it is a whole new ball of wax. On this big band release, did you and your mother write together?

DG: Most of them are written by both of us; we wrote the original compositions together. But then the arrangements for the big band are 100% by Debora.

AAJ: She is obviously both a pianist and an arranger. How does she identify herself in terms of what she does professionally?

DG: I think she would say half and half. She does a lot of commissioned work to write for orchestras and big bands in São Paulo. When she is not touring, she is writing. She is always writing at home. And she doesn't just write her own stuff, she has a lot of commissioned arrangements for orchestras and "we're doing this song for this artist and we need an arrangement," stuff like that.

AAJ: And so how is it to travel with your mother (laughs)?

DG: It's fun because we get along so well. We've been playing together for so long. I travel with my mother, also my husband. Big Rabello, our drummer and producer, is also my husband and on this tour even my daughter came. It's almost like a family trip.

AAJ: Choro Das Tres just came through San Antonio, another outstanding family band. They are traveling with their mother now; they used to tour with their father. So, is that what everybody in Brazil does (laughs)?

DG: I don't think so (laughs).

AAJ: Another thing I noticed about your big band is that it has women in it. That is still unusual. But understandable, now that you explain your path.

DG: Yeah.

AAJ: How many women are in your big band?

DG: Besides Debora and I, I think four. No, five. It's important to me to say that we're not putting women in the band just for putting women in the band. To do that kind of goes against everything. We have women in the band because those women are amazing instrumentalists. And they just are women as well. We built a band not just thinking, "oh, we have to have women," but we built a band of people that we love how they sound, and we also love to play with. Because music is not just about sounding good. Music is about the way we relate. When we finish the rehearsal and we go get something to eat and we're friends, and we tour together and we're all having fun, it comes back. It adds to the music. We built that band based on that. And I was happy to have women with us also, both in Boston and in California.

AAJ: Interesting. Renee Rosnes has talked about that a little bit with Artemis, because she and everyone else in that group... Are you familiar with them, Artemis? No? They are described sometimes as a supergroup because they are each celebrated, separately, for their solo careers. But they have been doing a lot of touring together, and she has talked about how different it is to tour with women. There are certain things that you can discuss. Girl talk, you know (laughs). These are all very high-power women musicians. But it is just a level of comfort that can be very refreshing if you have spent your whole life in situations that are—where women are missing.

*Check the YouTube, below, for the Gurgels' take on "Bala com Bala" (Bosco & Blanc).

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