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Hermeto Pascoal

Hermeto Pascoal is a prolific musician and composer who transcends category. Hermeto often uses unconventional instruments such as teapots, children's toys, found objects, and—sometimes, without harming them—live animals. He uses nature as a basis for his compositions, as in his Música da Lagoa, where the musicians burble water and play flutes while immersed in a lagoon. He is an energetic and virtuosic soloist who can play proficiently on almost any instrument: keyboards, button accordion, saxophone, guitar, flute, voice, various brass instruments, and various folkloric instruments. A Brazilian television broadcast from 1999 showed him soloing at one point by singing into a cup with his mouth partially submerged in water.

Hermeto's career began in 1964 with appearances on several Brazilian recordings with relatively small groups. These now-classic albums and the musicians involved (Edu Lobo, Airto Moreira, Elis Regina, César Camargo Mariano and others) established widely influential new directions in post-bossa Brazilian Jazz.

He initially came to the international public's attention through an appearance on Miles Davis' 1971 album Live/Evil, which featured Pascoal on several studio pieces (which he also composed). Davis has said that Pascoal was "the most impressive musician in the world". Later collaborations involved fellow Brazilian musicians Airto Moreira and Flora Purim. From the late 1970s on he has mostly led his own groups, playing at many prestigious venues, such as the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1979.

Hermeto is a prolific composer, famous for his project Calendario do Som, in which he composed a song every day for a year so that everyone would have a song for his or her birthday.

Jazz In Brazil: the legendary composers and musicians

by Larry Slater
March 14, 2025

Though Bossa Nova, and the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim, are Brazil's most recognized musical export, Brazil hosts a vast number of musical styles with musicians garnering international followings. One of the most unique, and influential is the composer and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal, who defies categorization. Moacir Santos is revered today as a giant of Brazilian music, but he struggled for recognition throughout his life. The singer and songwriter Milton Nascimento is a globally recognized icon, whose unique ...

Album Review

Hermeto Pascoal & Grupo: Pra você, Ilza

Read "Pra você, Ilza" reviewed by Katchie Cartwright

by Katchie Cartwright
June 24, 2024

During her final year on the planet, Hermeto Pascoal filled a notebook with chorinhos and other musical offerings to Ilza da Silva Pascoal, his wife of 46 years (1954-2000). Twenty-four years after her death, the Brazilian sorcerer of universal music presents 13 songs from his Ilza notebook in the form of the recording Pra Você, Ilza. In the album notes, he writes of her in the present tense: “Our love, our spirit, our soul remains together. Everything keeps unfolding."

In Pictures

Hermeto Pascoal At UC Theatre

by Walter Atkins
June 23, 2023

Jazz is Dead (Jazz Está Morto) presented Brazilian multi instrumentalist and composer Hermeto Pascoal (Miles Davis, Airto Moreira, Flora Purim, Donald Byrd) at Berkeley's beautifully renovated UC Theatre on University Avenue. On this six city tour, his loyal followers were in full force for an evening of eclectic music. San Francisco-based Jazz Mafia enthusiastically warmed up the overflowing crowd. Considered a living legend in his home country, Pascoal treated the standing room only audience to his unique blend ...

Album Review

Dan Costa: Beams

by Craig Arthur
February 19, 2023

UK-born pianist Dan Costa plays and composes in the impressionistic tradition of Bill Evans, acoustic Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea or Marcin Wasilewski. It is a style that lends itself well to the alchemy of turning light into music, music into light. And his subject matter of choice on Beams, like that of an impressionist painter, is indeed light. He describes the album as “a celebration of light in some key physical and metaphysical forms." Light is like water, ...

Album Review

Hermeto Pascoal: Planetario Da Gavea

Read "Planetario Da Gavea" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
July 10, 2022

Planetario Da Gavea is an enormous, sprawling document from a February 1981 outdoor performance series by Brazilian jazz wizard Hermeto Pascoal recorded under the stars in the Gávea neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, within the dome of the city's outdoor planetário (planetarium). Ten pieces, most never recorded before and several never performed again, stretch across two hours of gloriously inspired, indulgent sound featuring the composer, instrumentalist, and sorcerer who Miles Davis once famously called “one of the most ...

From the Inside Out

Demons and Wizards, June Bugs and Jakarta

by Chris M. Slawecki
June 29, 2022

Hermeto Pascoal Planetario Da Gavea Far Out Recordings 2022 Planetario Da Gavea is an enormous, sprawling document from a February 1981 outdoor performance series by Brazilian jazz wizard Hermeto Pascoal recorded under the stars in the Gávea neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, within the dome of the city's outdoor planetário (planetarium). Ten pieces, most never recorded before and several never performed again, stretch across two hours of gloriously ...

Radio & Podcasts

Hermeto Pascoal, Somi, Leo Genovese, Melissa Aldana & More New Releases

by Ludovico Granvassu
April 23, 2022

Somi's tribute to Miriam Makeba and a previously unreleased wild live recording by Hermeto Pascoal bookend an episode replete with beautiful new albums, with a special focus on Latin America, Caribbean and European artists.Happy listening!PlaylistBen Allison “Mondo Jazz Theme (feat. Ted Nash & Pyeng Threadgill)" 0:00 Somi “House of the Rising Sun" Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba (Salon Africana) 0:16 Host talks 4:00 Omar Sosa, Seckou Keita “Kharit" Suba (bendigedig) 5:00 Host talks 9:52 Yilian ...