History and language
Brazilianpiano
What it is, where it comes from, and what I do with it.
Brazilian piano is what happened when that music entered the instrument.
The piano is not a Brazilian instrument. It was born in Italy, in the early eighteenth century, and came to Brazil in the hands of the elites: the theaters, the music houses, the salons.
The music it found here had another story. It was born from the meeting of Indigenous, African and Portuguese peoples and so many others who came later; from different ways of singing, playing, dancing and keeping time.
That music was not born on the piano. But when it met the instrument, something began to happen.
How the piano became Brazilian
I tell this story the way it reached me: through the dances, the radio and the records I heard long before I knew the names.
The piano spent the nineteenth century in the salons, playing waltzes and the music of Europe. The music of the street came in through another door: the pianeiros, pianists of the sheet-music shops and silent-movie theaters, played polka, lundu and maxixe to sell music and liven up screenings. That is where the instrument began to change its accent. It is a story I recognize: I also started out playing for the dance, not for the concert hall.
At the turn of the century, Chiquinha Gonzaga and Ernesto Nazareth turned choro, maxixe and Brazilian tango into music written for the piano: the salon instrument began to play what was danced in Rio de Janeiro. Villa-Lobos and Radamés Gnattali took that music to the concert piano and to the radio, and samba, frevo and baião, the baião my father played at home, came in along the same path, each with its own way of keeping time.
In the 1950s, before bossa nova had a name, Johnny Alf and João Donato were already playing jazz harmony over samba. With bossa nova, Tom Jobim put the piano at the center of the song. With the samba-jazz of the Beco das Garrafas nightclubs, Luiz Eça, Tenório Jr., César Camargo Mariano and Amilton Godoy made the trio of piano, bass and drums the classic lineup of Brazilian popular piano, the lineup I most enjoy improvising in. Egberto Gismonti opened the instrument to all of Brazil, from choro to the Indigenous music of the Xingu; Hermeto Pascoal erased the border between the classical, the popular and the experimental; Tânia Maria took that piano full of swing, played and sung at the same time, to the stages of the world.
By then the piano was no longer reproducing a European repertoire. A Brazilian way of playing the instrument had been born: the left hand doing what the guitar, the surdo and the zabumba do, the right hand singing the way people sing here. Each of these musicians played the piano as if it had been born in Brazil. They are far from the only ones: they are the ones who shaped me most directly. That way of playing is what I call Brazilian piano, and it is where I come from.
Where I come from
I grew up in Cruz do Espírito Santo, in the countryside of Paraíba, playing at the dances of the region. Before I knew any of those names, I knew baião, xote, forró, the rhythm my father played on percussion. When I came to the piano, I came with that baggage.
What I try to do is continue the same idea with the music that is mine. It starts with the Northeast, where I come from: a left hand that plays baião the way a zabumba does, a phrase that comes from the accordion's bellows rather than from the piano tradition, the swing of forró treated with the same care one gives a jazz harmony. But the Northeast is the starting point, not the limit. I love digging into the music of every corner of Brazil and bringing what I find to the piano.
The most direct example is the album Baião de Dois, with Guegué Medeiros: piano and zabumba, just the two. A European instrument and a Brazilian instrument, with histories that have almost nothing in common, playing the Northeastern songbook together. It was the first time that encounter happened on record. Interior, recorded live on solo piano, takes the same idea to its limit: with no other instrument around, the piano alone has to be the rhythm, the harmony and the singer.
“…an imaginative improviser whose sound bridges classical, jazz, and the vibrant traditions of Brazil’s northeast.”
Brazilian Nites · USA
Watch and listen
Carrying it forward
This story is not closed. Each generation picked up Brazilian piano at one point and handed it over at another, and that is how I understand my work: to receive what came from Villa-Lobos to Laércio, pass it through the Northeast where I grew up, and hand it on. That is what I do on records, on stage and at Escola Salomão Soares, where I teach this language, from rhythm to harmony, to anyone who wants to play the piano the way Brazil plays it.
- Want to study this?Escola Salomão Soares
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“Salomão Soares creates here a new Brazilian piano.”
Léa Freire · composer and arranger
“Salomão Soares brings more depth and elegance to Brazilian piano.”
Katsuaki Hanada · e-magazine LATINA · Japan