41 f Applied Science
The late Chico Science invented Mangue and put Brazil’s funky city of Recife on the world music map. Tom Allsop looks back at those creative days.
991, Recife, northeast Brazil. The late Chico Science – then a 25- year-old performer and composer – met his friends around the table of one the city’s less reputable bars. He told them he had invented some- thing new and he was going to call it ‘Mangue’. In the words of Fábio Trummer, lead singer of the Manguebeat band Eddie, these were “the people who changed the profile of music in Brazil and perhaps the world in the 1990s”.
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A year earlier an American research institute had ranked Recife as the fourth worst city in the world and Chico and his friends had formed a collective to fight against Recife’s cultural conservatism. The collective became the Mangue Scene – now more commonly known as Mangue- beat – and is the reason why Recife is often known as Brazil’s capital of culture.
The friends gathered at that table 20 years ago are now some of Brazil’s most respected artists. DJ Dolores was winner of BBC Radio 3’s Club Global Award in 2004. Fred Zero Quatro is lead singer of Mundo Livre S/A, and also known as Mangue’s Subcomandante. Otto started with Mundo Livre S/A and is currently Manguebeat’s most recognisable member, recording in America and a common fea- ture in Brazil’s gossip columns after the breakdown of his marriage to one of the country’s most famous soap stars. Siba is one of Brazil’s foremost folk musicians and has toured the world with his current band, Siba And The Fuloresta. Renato L became known as Manguebeat’s ‘Minister for Information’ and he is now Recife’s Secretary for Culture.
Mangue (the latter syllable is pro- nounced gee- as in geese) is Portuguese for the mangrove swamps that line Recife’s rivers: home to the crabs that are central to the imagery of the Mangue scene. Chico’s friends warned him that if he used the name to refer exclusively to his band’s thumping Maracatu drummers, screeching electric guitars and hip hop influenced vocals, he risked having to play the same music for the rest of his career. Chico agreed that rather than refer to a type of music, Mangue should encompass everything that he and his friends were doing at the time; he called his band Chico Science and Nação Zumbi.
The Mangue collective’s resistance to being pigeonholed was a direct reaction to Brazil’s cultural conservatism in the ’80s and early ’90s. Renato L is a spruced-up, former punk with tobacco-stained teeth and white shirtsleeves. Speaking at the
Chico Science Memorial, he said: “The national music scene was at a creative low. Artists that were once considered revolu- tionary were producing their most com- mercial work. It was as if economic depres- sion had scared them away from doing anything that might not sell abroad.”
The friends originally came together to share the music that was so hard to find in Recife. DJ Dolores is shaven headed and stands no higher than 5' 5". Looking out over Recife from his living room on the top floor of one of the city’s grand old apart- ment blocks, he described the lengths that the group of friends had to go to listen to the music they liked: “There were records that were almost impossible to get hold of at the time. Recife was so cut off that it was even hard to get hold of national newspapers. If we found out that there was a guy in Boa Viagem [Recife’s up- market beach district] who had an album we wanted, we'd get the bus to his apart- ment and ask him to let us record it.”
Chico came up with the name Mangue when he combined his Psychedelic-Ska band – Loustal – with the percussive group, Lamento Negro who specialised in Mara- catu, a traditional rhythm from Recife’s state of Pernambuco. Maracatu perfor- mances originally celebrated the symbolic coronation of African kings and queens who had been sold into slavery and taken to Brazil. It translates literally as ‘Beautiful War’ and the performances are a combina- tion of spectacular multi-coloured cos- tumes and thundering percussion.
This type of cultural mixing was unheard of in Recife at that time. Fred Zero Quatro’s image has barely changed since the ’90s – somewhere between punk and hip hop – he is rarely seen without his thick-framed glasses and Run DMC style baseball cap. Talking at the Chico Science Memorial, he explained why no-one had had the courage to do what Chico was doing: “The owners of the music venues were only interested in ultra-traditional acts or tributes to foreign bands – Recife at the time was a desert of ideas.”
Manguebeat liberated Recife’s artists from the cultural conservatism of its music venues. H D Mabuse, Mangue’s ‘Minister for Techonology’ is cheerful and rotund with a vertical tuft of thick black hair. Talk- ing in a Recife coffee shop, he said “One day, I saw a group playing traditional Coco music and one of them was wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt, it was fantastic! Mangue gave us the freedom to follow our own creative paths, no longer limited by the call for ‘tradition’ or ‘authenticity’.”
Photos: Fred Jordao
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