If you grew up in the rural area of Rio Grande de Cima back then, you probably knew the two boys as Tonho and Cacau. Whether they were playing football or marbles, swimming in the river or in one of the nearby waterfalls, they were inseparable. One afternoon, Tonho and Cacau were playing on a dirt hill when photographer Carlos da Silva Assunção Filho (better known as Cafi) drove past in a Volkswagen Bug. He braked, shouted to the boys and as the dust settled, snapped their picture. “It was like lightning,” recalls Cafi. “It’s a strong image. The face of Brazil. And it was at the time when several artists were in exile.”
Cafi didn’t catch either boys’ name that day, but when he later showed the photo to Brazilian musicians Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges, the two knew they had their record cover for their 1972 double album, Clube Da Esquina. And for many years after the fact, people thought the photo was in fact Nascimento and Borges as young boys. For the next 40 years, the boys on the album cover were a mystery throughout Brazil, one requiring a manhunt of sorts to try and track the boys down. “Someone in the car shouted at me and I smiled,” Tonho recalled some 40 years later, as a reporter and photographer had finally tracked him and his childhood friend down, even recreating the iconic photo. “I was eating a piece of bread that someone had given me, because I was starving. And I was barefoot. But I never knew I was on the cover of a record. My mother will be thrilled. We never had a photo of me as a boy.”
While deep in the morass of a brutally repressive military regime, 1972 was a watershed moment for Brazilian pop music, or as it’s often called, MPB: Novos Baianos’ Acabou Chorare, Paulinho da Viola’s A Dança Da Solidão, the duo album from Nelson Angelo E Joyce, not to mention self-titled albums from Tim Maia, Jards Macalé, Tom Zé, and Elis Regina. And after years in exile, Tropicália heroes Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso returned home with career highlights in Expresso 2222 and Transa, respectively. Yet looming over them all is Clube Da Esquina, one of the most ambitious records in Brazilian music history, a double album that not only belongs in the same discussion with others in the Western canon—be it Blonde on Blonde or Exile on Main Street—but one that is even more uplifting and mystifying.
The music of Milton Nascimento ranges from the earthy to the angelic, both mysterious and plainspoken, haunting and sublime. Eumir Deodato, who provided string arrangements for Clube Da Esquina and subsequently worked with Roberta Flack, Frank Sinatra, and Kool & the Gang, heard in Nascimento parallels to classical music, but admitted: “To date I have not managed to discover the rhythmic impulse he gives to his songs. It is something new, mysterious, intriguing and challenging. Few people have a deep understanding of what Milton Nascimento’s music is.”
Such extremes befit a man whose voice is one of the most profound in 20th-century music, one that entices and inspires his fellow countrymen as well as Paul Simon, Earth, Wind & Fire, Herbie Hancock, and Animal Collective. It’s a voice resonant and well-deep yet able to soar upwards to an ethereal falsetto, one capable of shaking vibrato as well as sustaining pure tones, and wordless shrieks closer to tropical bird calls than the human voice. Or, as Elis Regina once put it: “If God sang, he would do it with Milton’s voice.”
Born in Rio in 1942, Nascimento’s mom died when he was still an infant and his adopted family relocated to Brazil’s Minas Gerais region when he was three. His adopted mother sang in a choir under iconic 20th-century composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and in the streets, Nascimento could hear church music, romantic toadas and folia de reis during Christmas season. Lingering from a 17th-century gold rush that brought in a flux of African slave labor to the Portuguese colony, the racial diversity of Minas Gerais yielded a rich spectrum of music (as well as racial tensions). As one of only a few black children in the small town of Três Pontas, Nascimento felt such intolerance daily. Yet he wholly absorbed the musical culture of his adoptive state of Minas Gerais and let it reverberate in his own songs throughout his long career.
Obsessed with music though he was, Nascimento relocated to the capital city of Belo Horizonte in 1963 to take an accounting job. But he paid his bills by gigging in clubs at night, where he forged a close friendship with the Borges brothers, Márcio and his kid brother, Lô. With Marcio, he caught Francois Truffaut’s nouvelle vague classic Jules et Jim, watching it again and again until the last showing. Nascimento was inspired to start writing his own songs with his friend that same night. “All my songs are like a movie—they’re all very cinematographic,” he said. And it was through Lô that Nascimento first heard the Beatles, realizing just how classical music and pop could be fused together.
Nascimento’s rise through the ranks of MPB was meteoric. A performance at the inaugural MPB festival in 1965 garnered notice and by ’69, he found himself booked at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in North New Jersey, recording with producer Creed Taylor and helming a band that included fellow Brazilian jazz stars Eumir Deodato and Airto Moreira as well as Herbie Hancock.
But it was when he was back home in Belo Horizonte, making small talk and jamming with his friends on a stretch of sidewalk at the corner of Rua Divinópolis and Rua Paraisópolis in the neighborhood of Santa Tereza that their “corner club” was born. Neither a club nor a movement at the time (a popular music venue now stands at the intersection), their “corner club” twined together various loves: bossa nova, the Beatles, psychedelic rock, Western classical, indigenous South American music, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and more. In 1971, Nascimento and friends rented a house in Praia de Piratininga to the east of Rio to pull their songs together and Clube Da Esquina was released the next year.
A landmark of Brazilian pop, the success of the album confirmed Nascimento as a star of MPB but also launched the careers of Clube bassist Beto Guedes, guitarists Toninho Horta, Nelson Angelo and the younger Borges. And while Nascimento was by far the most prominent member of the club, his name isn’t on the cover and he shared credit with the then-20-year-old Lô Borges, who sings lead on six of the songs. Nor is Nascimento’s face easily seen; you have to hunt through the 150 photos in the gatefold to find a small photo of him. As MPB scholar Charles Perrone wrote: “Because of his extraordinary individual musical talents…the collective aspect of Nascimento’s repertory are often overlooked. Clube Da Esquina emphasizes the notion of encounter and the importance of gathering.”
The magic of Clube Da Esquina is that while one can discern all of Nascimento and friends’ influences, their alchemy elevates it all to vibrate at a higher frequency. Casual and inspired, studied and spontaneous, the album is Pet Sounds, Innervisions and The White Album all rolled into one and it remains beloved even for those who know just a few Brazilian albums. And even for those who don’t speak or understand a lick of Portuguese, the vocal harmonies, hooks, and orchestrations slip the confines of language and strike at the heart.
So while you may not glean the lyrics of “Cais,” with its imagery of the sea, pier, and Nascimento’s plea for happiness, when the haunting ballad drops away at the 1:35 mark after singing about “launching myself,” a minor chord and his wordless harmonizing nevertheless conveys the bittersweet thrill of leaving the shore and drifting towards the unknown. You don’t need to translate the lyrics on “O Trem Azul” to feel the line about “the sun on your head,” so warm, languid, and tangible is its chorus. Same goes for the sensuous and ecstatic “Cravo E Canela,” which blends together sensations of caco honey and gypsy rain.
The album is full of such shifts, moments that act like a refreshing breeze across the skin on a sweltering day, a shaft of sun piercing the clouds, a kind gesture on a crowded bus, reflecting how in our own daily lives the smallest of movements can trigger a reverberation within. In the lyrics, in the subtle switching of a meter, a key shift or a pivot in instrumentation, each song sets you down in a space far different from where you began. That sense of movement is intentional, as trains, roads, and modes of transportation often figure into Nascimento’s writing, and he himself considered his music “a kind of oxcart, something that unrolls and develops.” There’s the burred guitar build-up at the end of the otherwise hushed “Dos Cruces,” the clamor of church bells that punctuate and illuminate “San Vicente,” the mournful cello and strings in the middle section of “Um Girassol Da Cor De Seu Cabelo” that launches into a redemptive chorus about “a sunflower the color of your hair.”
On the spare piano ballad “Um Gosto de Sol,” Nascimento moves through a half-forgotten dream, a stranger smiling in a foreign city, a river that falls to sleep, the sweet flesh of a pear, all of it tactile yet also ineffable. And then the minor key motif from “Cais” return, this time as a string quartet rather than piano and voice. It’s a surreal moment on the album, one worthy of Luis Buñuel, that image of the boat drifting from the pier now juxtaposed with a pear in a fruit bowl, the most poignant string section this side of “Eleanor Rigby” now reveals an underlying melancholy and sense of estrangement to the surface.
Yet one of the album’s brightest, breeziest tunes led to Brazil’s federal censors originally blocking the recording of the song, an instance of a disconnect between the music and words. “Paisagem Da Janela” [Landscape From the Window] is clopping, country-tinged soft rock with a chiming guitar line, but Lô Borges’s refrain belies such lightness: “When I would speak of those morbid things/When I would speak of those sordid men/When I would speak of this storm/You didn’t listen/You don’t want to believe/But that’s so normal.” It speaks of a past that could also be a commentary on that moment under the rule of the junta. It’s also one of the album’s catchiest choruses, a natural for a sing-along.
A military dictatorship trying to suppress such a song reveals that beyond the perfect pop songcraft and immaculate arrangements, Clube Da Esquina also signified the subtlest and most profound of revolutionary acts. “The military dictatorship imposed an element of urgency,” journalist Paulo Thiago de Mello wrote about the repressive political climate that surrounded Esquina. “And this is something that those who did not live those days may have difficulty understanding. The suffocation provoked by the dictatorship made life urgent.” Under such tyranny, the idyllic possibilities of youth are crushed. Be it Stalinist Soviet Union, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or under the brutal military dictatorships that sprang up throughout the Southern Hemisphere in the ’60s and ’70s, social bonds are not just strained and severed, but also called into question. It’s no coincidence then that Nascimento references the Mexican Revolution hero Emiliano Zapata in the first minute of the album.
“Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life…by isolating men,” wrote Hannah Arendt in her 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. “But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation…It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all.” In hanging and playing together, Milton Nascimento and his friends provided a beacon in the midst of their country’s “vazio cultural” (or cultural void).
Clube Da Esquina, the album itself and the subsequent movement, emphasized casual social encounters and the importance of getting together and playing, and as a result, it elevated not just Nascimento, but the entire collective. That spirit of collaboration continued for Nascimento well after, be it with saxophonist Wayne Shorter on the 1974 album Native Dancer that reintroduced him to a North American audience or his subsequent collaborations with everyone from Duran Duran to Pat Metheny to Quincy Jones.
Such a sense of camaraderie and community can be heard in the brief, joyous minute and a half of “Saídas E Bandeiras Nº 2,” with Nascimento’s falsetto and the guitars arcing to their uppermost registers and towards a not yet possible but still imaginable future: “To walk down avenues facing up to what’s over our heads/To join all forces, to overcome that tide/What was stone becomes a man/And man is more solid than the tide.” In playing on the corner together, Nascimento and his friends—and even Tonho and Cacau sitting on a patch of dirt—all of them became the face of Brazil.
