Musical projects
&
the Anthropology of Music
The sonic and stylistic musical diversity one finds in Portugal has grown from long standing cultural traditions and also reflects the backgrounds of the many migrants that call the country home. On a world stage Portugal is known for its futebol players, but it really should be known for its musicians. I started playing music with my family growing up, and played clarinet starting in grade school, learning the guitar afterwards, which became my primary instrument. My study of music was grade school basic until I was able to learn from musicians and mestres in Portugal.
Arriving in Lisbon not really knowing anyone, I found that playing music was an extraordinary way to connect to the place. In 2005 I started one of the first open mic nights in Lisbon at the first Lisbon Irish bar. I quickly adapted the concept when it was clear that players in town would rather just have a controlled jam session. The night brought in many of the city's working musicians, and through these connections of music and friendship, I was invited to join other projects and able to learn and further explore the country through music. Traveling throughout Portugal, and other parts of Europe and North America playing with these projects, there really is no better way of discovering a place. You often play shows as part of local traditional social and life-cycle events (Carnival, festas populares, New Year's eve celebrations, agricultural fairs, mercados, beach parties, city clubs, etc.) and you are treated as an invited guest of the communities where the shows are being held. Given the weird liminal space occupied by an unknown troubadour, people are eager to go a little crazy and share their lives with you. A decidedly different experience than rolling into a town as even a well-informed visitor. Shows are often sponsored by local community associations or local municipal governments and they often share their communities with you while hosting the band. What this means in practical terms is that you will almost always meet fascinating people and eat lots of really good food.
Select band name to learn more about each project
Farra Fanfarra
Guitarist with Farra Fanfarra
Farra Fanfarra from Sintra and Lisboa is one the most widely travelled of Portugal's many well known brass bands. The bands draw inspiration from global brass music and players' own individual musical formation and exploration. Many of these musicians have played in community-based music associations, including village filarmónica bands and in Portuguese music schools, and have travelled internationally in cultural exchanges.
Farra Fanfarra experiments creatively with world brass music traditions, animated performances, elaborate choreographies, and palhaçaria (street animations), with a set list developed from national folk brass music traditions in Portugal as well as Afro-beat, Balkan brass, Indian wedding music, jazz, and orchestral arrangements, along with songs from global pop music. Farra Fanfarra has represented Portugal in international shows and competitions—winning the Best International Band prizes at Haizetara in (Pays Basque) 2016 and at the reknowned Guča Trumpet Festival (Serbia) in 2018. Farra Fanfarra has also helped to develop brass music in Portugal by participating in and hosting gatherings of national and international brass bands.
I have been a member of the Portuguese chartered cultural association "Farra Fanfarra Associação Cultural" since 2010, and have been performing with the band since 2008. During this time, the band and the association have been an incredible school of music, performance, and production. I have also worked as a member of the FFAC in the cultural association's many national and international cross associational global humanitarian and social equality projects held in Portugal, Europe, and North America.
My time with Farra Fanfarra has been part of research projects studying musical associativism. To read an article I wrote about Farra Fanfarra and the birth and growth of the phenomenon of Fanfarra style bands in Portugal (in a book about community brass bands), click here:
Vrtlog (Dejan Petrovich)
Santiago Alquimista
J.J.D (Fela Kuti)
Live at Andanças
Kameleon Video
KING MOKADI
Guitarist, Vocalist, songwriter with King Mokadi
King Mokadi, founded by a group of players and friends in the Lisbon music scene who came together around a weekly show at Gilins, playing to a Cais do Sodré audience composed mostly of thieves, nefarious characters, and the bairro's many sex workers and their dates. A collective of musicians from disperse geographic locations including Portugal, North America, Holland, Cabo Verde, Italy, and France, the development of King Mokadi sound has been an experiment in combining diverse origins, approaches and sensibilities. From trad-folk balls to the urban dancehall, King Mokadi plays original compositions and mashups in eclectic styles, including balk beat, afro-groove, salsero, jazz, blues, rock, grindhouse funk and trad-baileapocaliptico dance music. Dance-balls, club sets & weddings are King Mokadi's realm.
Salto ao sol
Live at Casa de Alentejo
Lisboa
Old Gilin's
Wednesday night show Teaser
Foxtrot
Live at Casa de Alentejo
Lisboa
Rosinha
Guitarist with Rosinha
Rosinha is my favorite of Portugal's Pimba Stars, playing the highly popular music—known for using lyrics that celebrate village and domestic life sung through broad, bawdy and smack on the nose sexual entendres. Rosinha has turned the form upside down however, reclaiming the sexualized lyrics (which are usually sung by men who talk about women in clownish though sexist and lascivious fashion) as a form of sex positive and body positive women's and LGBTQ+ empowerment. One of my musical highlights in Portugal, having the chance to perform with Rosinha as one of the boys in her band. Viva a Rainha da Pimba!
é das gatas que eu gosto
SIC
Juntos à Tarde
Rosinha-é das gatas
Eu Quero Porco no Espito
SIC
Juntos à Tarde
Rosinha-porco no espito
The Campesinos
Guitarist, VOcalist, songwriter with The Campesinos
When I first moved to Lisbon, my musical background was mostly in bluegrass, country and country blues, styles of music rarely heard in Portugal from local bands outside of novelty songs. Founded with ace Portuguese banjo player and European bluegrass proselytizer Andre Dal, The Campesinos was Lisbon's first ever touring bluegrass/country band. It was an adventure playing these sounds on Portugal's folk and club scene—often to largely confused audiences.
Although fans of bluegrass in Portugal are few, they more than make up for it with their fervor for the Americana music. Similar to the spread of Celtic music, bluegrass has spread throughout the world. In Portugal, this has much to do with André Dal. The Campesinos did their part in Portugal. The performance of our version of Mitch Jayne's "Old Home Place" as part of the Sete Maravilhas do Mundo festival was the first by a bluegrass band on Portuguese television.
The festival's performances featured many well-known Portuguese folk and popular dance bands and was a first introduction to many of the musicians and friends who would open up Portugal to me and teach me about music in ways I never could have imagined when I moved here. The Old Home Place, no doubt about it.
Sitting in with Legendary
bluegrass Banjo player
ROger Sprung
The Old Home Place
Vôce na TV, TVI POrtugal
The Campesinos getting second billing to a Mechanical Bull at a Portuguese club's "authentic COuntry Night"
The CodTown Swing Lounge
Guitarist, Vocalist, songwriter with the Codtown Swing Lounge
The Codtown Swing Lounge, a Portuguese experiment in trad-baile swing, polka, whiskey waltzes, and hillbilly jive.
The year before I moved to Lisbon I followed around the 2004 Bob Dylan/Willie Nelson minor league ball park tour, catching most of the shows east of the Mississippi over the course of that long summer.As incredible as it was listening to Bob's band and watching Willie night after night, the band that stays with me every day, the sound that hasn't left my head in 20 years, was their support act, the Hot Club of Cowtown, from Austin Texas. The trio back then included violinist Elana Fremerman (now James), stand up bass player Jake Erwin (who played in a rhythmic percussive style) and guitarist Whit Smith. Whit was an authentic lunatic who only played instruments and amplification that were contemporary with his musical lodestar, Django Rhinehardt, even going so far as to only use tubes in his vintage amp from before 1953, the year of the heavenly apotheosis of the great French-Roma Maestro. I was on the outfield grass at the West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx baseball stadium in Jackson, when Dylan called up Elana to sit in with his band for the first time on the tour. After her set with them was over and she exited, Bob's band sounded like four people had walked off stage.
I caught shows all over the south, traveling the back roads of America, towns and people and situations that only make sense now as a hazy dream. Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Nashville, New Orleans, and Memphis. The music and sounds of places that kept me from being lonely late at night. You know, I would leave my life tomorrow if I could just go back to Duchess Stadium in Fishkill, NY on the Hudson River, and do it all over from that point forward. Sitting in the grass, the Hotclub of Cowtown playing "After You've Gone ," surrounded by everything that could have been, and was, and always would be, hearing that trio thump the country swing soul of America in time with my heart. In Dylan's band played one of my all time favorite guitarists/musicians, the versatile and kind hearted Larry Campbell. The next year, after he left Bob's band, I saw Larry Campbell play a country duo show in a small club in New Jersey. He was promoting his finger-style acoustic album Rooftops (2005), which I pictured him writing and working out as I followed behind him across America. The next night, I travelled on yet another road behind him, up to Saugerties, NY where he was part of the house band at Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble, when that crazy music night had just begun. A potluck dinner with the musicians before they played song after song into the night, the world's greatest country blues jam band. Why are we always too dumb and blind to ever realize when that elusive nameless thing we chase for much of our lives is sitting in our lap?
The Codtown Swing Lounge, I guess, was some kind of lamb, if bedeviled, and ultimately ill fated effort to scrabble some of all of that back.
Dr Pancho Guitar/Vocals
Jorge Anacleto Guitar/high lonesome
Miguel Gelpi COntrabass
Ivan Ferreira drums
SOciedade Filarmónica
1º de Dezembro da EncarnaCão
tenor Saxophone
1911 (founded in 1840)
2023
The community-based bands in Portugal’s prolific brass and wind tradition are among the world's most prominent. Tracing to the 19th century, they include the military ensemble-inspired village filarmónicas as well as the importation of musical civil societies (sociedades filarmónicas) likely from England, that have been an instrumental part of community life for centuries. There are an estimated 700 filarmónica bands/societies in Portugal with at least an additional 150 in post-colonial and immigrant contexts.
Spread throughout urban and rural spaces, filarmónicas are essential sources of local musical instruction and have an important and extensive social and cultural role in their local communities. Performances of the filarmónica bands have been a central part of socio-religious events, festas populares, and municipal events, and are an essential part of community life. Their activities, which are not exclusive to music, make the bands and the civic associations that support them social and cultural hubs in rural and urban communities. Not only do they play concerts and have street performances, but they also sponsor dinners, fundraisers, and music schools in their society halls. They often share a close relationship with other important community institutions including churches, juntas de freguesia (the smallest elected local administrative unit), the armed forces, and public community centers. In some rural Portuguese aldeias, the filarmónica society is itself the primary public community center. The filarmónicas and other music associations encompass a cross section of ages (from grade school children to octogenarians) and social classes, and are individuals who have respected social roles within the communities in which the bands perform, reputations bolstered through their activities in the musical societies. Founded in 1840, the Sociedade Filarmónica 1º de Dezembro da Encarnação is one of the oldest founded Portuguese filarmónica societies still performing in the country. Like other filarmónicas, the band has a central role in community cultural and social life, and has been an important source of music instruction for local youths.
I have done research with filarmónica bands in the US, the Azores, and continental Portugal, but previously my work with the bands was limited to anthropology. This changed, however, when I joined the music school of the Sociedade Filarmónica of Encarnação, where I have been studying "formação musical" and tenor saxophone. When I was a little kid, my first proper musical instrument was a clarinet, which I played in the North Falmouth Elementary school band and through Jr. High School. But having played guitar most of my life, my understanding of music was mostly intuitive and I had never had any extensive formal training. Joining the filarmónica's music school and rehearsals of the band have been transformative experiences. Using the classic Portuguese filarmónica tradition of the Solflejo method, the school has taught me to sight read, how to identify and unravel the incredible logic and mathematics of sound and rythym, and started me on a journey learning the tenor saxophone. I have greatly enjoyed my experience with the filarmónica, but more importantly, my participation in the school, the band, and the society has made me grow to feel that I am much more a part of this amazing community.
I am continuously impressed and awed by the high quality of musicians that the filarmónica bands teach and cultivate in Portugal. A country that many know because of soccer, gastronomy, and beaches, etc. really should be known for the incredible brass and wind musicians it produces.
Sociedade Filarmónica 1º Dezembro da Encarnação
SFE Escola da Musica
Ensaio
