But she soon fell in with the Brazilian expat music community there, who jammed with other jazz musicians nightly. It was a rich area, I thought it was a bit boring," she recalls. "At first, I wasn't crazy about the city because I was staying at a fancy apartment owned by the owner of the club. In 1977, Moreno was hired for a residency at New York's Cachaça, a very fancy and expensive club offering up Brazilian music for its upscale Upper East Side clientele. "I was blown away when I first her guitar playing on that recording, the voicings on the chords, that song's melody and harmony - so beautiful."
"Joyce is a really unique Brazilian singer-songwriter and she's an insane nylon guitar player," enthuses modern tropicalia-indie musician Tim Bernardes, whose trio O Terno and his own solo work draws on the lineage that Moreno's music embodied, citing her appearance on Milton Nascimento's album Clube da Esquina 2 as an influence. Yet even in the face of such oppression, her star was ascendant, thanks to her self-titled 1968 debut and 1972's Nelson Angelo E Joyce (a classic of the era recorded with her then-husband), showcasing Joyce's dulcet voice and nimble guitar work. Moreno says that censors came after her for having words like "pregnant" and "giving birth" in her songs. But you have to keep in mind: By 1967 at the Song Festival and 1968 on my first album, we were living under a right-wing dictatorship, a military government in a very conservative Catholic country." It was a level of repression that imprisoned - and then exiled - stars like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and suppressed the lyrics of others. "It was considered immoral it was not appropriate for a 19-year-old girl to write and sing things like that," she says. In 1967, her song "Me Disseram" became a finalist in the country's International Song Festival, but its first-person perspective as a woman scandalized journalists and critics.
Chordsmaestro how to#
She picked up the guitar at the age of 14 and taught herself how to play, soon after writing her own songs. By that point in her career, Moreno was already used to adversity. Maybe not in my lifetime, but I knew it would happen at a certain point."įame instead came decades later for her outside of her native Brazil, thanks to the championing by European radio DJs like Gilles Peterson, Patrick Forge and even Davis, whose label has released over six Joyce albums to date. Of course, I knew eventually it would happen. It's a moment of my career, my life, all of us who participated. "When you say 'could have been,' it's because it wasn't," she says with a small smile. Natureza also could have been the album that catapulted Moreno to an international audience. "It would have been amazing for Joyce and her career obviously and would've been appreciated throughout the world by jazz and world music fans." "There was a real change in jazz record sales and appreciation at that particular time, so it would have been a perfect moment for Joyce's music to be heard," he says. For label boss Joe Davis, he believes that had her album been released back then, it would have found Moreno in the company of other jazz artists pushing toward mainstream success, like George Benson and Donald Byrd. It seemed that with Natureza, Moreno's time had finally arrived.īut the Natureza recordings were unheard until now, with a release on the British imprint Far Out Recordings. His charts narrowed the gaps between bossa nova, jazz, easy listening and pop and Moreno was an ideal fit, with her breezy delivery and skillful guitar. Moreno was in line to become - if not as familiar a name as the women above - then at least as established as fellow international Brazilian luminaries like João Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto or Antonio Carlos Jobim, names well known in the U.S., thanks in no small part to Ogerman's arrangements for them.
Chordsmaestro crack#
We're discussing Natureza, an album Moreno recorded in New York City back in 1977 with legendary arranger and conductor Claus Ogerman and a crack ensemble featuring Brazilian session musicians and jazz players ranging from former Herbie Hancock bassist Buster Williams to session man Joe Farrell (whose silken sax and flute work could be heard accompanying the likes of Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin and Laura Nyro at the time). " A vida tem sempre razão," she says over video chat, quoting fellow Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes (himself famous for writing the words to "Girl from Ipanema"), before translating the line: " 'Life is always right.' Whatever happens, life has its reasons, it's always right." At her home in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian singer-songwriter Joyce Moreno waxes philosophical about an album that sat unreleased for upwards of 45 years.
0 kommentar(er)
