Erasto Vasconcelos
Jornal da Palmeira

Today I want to tell you the story of a younger brother. I am the eldest and have two sisters, so I don't really know what it's like to have an older brother, but from what I've observed I can roughly deduce that there are two extreme cases: when there is a willingness to help and give incentives, and when the weaker one is segregated into a state of psychological inferiority.

In their childhood, a musician father and band leader transmitted the passion for music, and then the first percussion instruments built with inner tubes and Nestlé's Ninho milk cans, also good for assembling the first berimbaus.

Then you grow up and have to choose a path in life, and so one day Naná says to Erasto, if you want to follow your big brother, study! And so Erasto goes for it, starts moving, and in the mid-sixties begins a journey that will take him to Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and finally New York.

In Pernambuco, he plays with almost all the most important musicians, in Rio with the Clube da Esquina (see Milton Nascimento) and João do Valle, in New York he has the fortune to accompany Stan Getz at a couple of concerts, do some sessions with Ornette Coleman, plays in Eye on You by Ronald Shannon Jackson (note the participation of a young Vernon Reid), with Jon Hassell, in Stone Alliance by Marcio Montarroyos alongside Don Alias. Then in 1981, it seems that everything stops.

After three years spent in the States, Erasto has an emotional collapse that will lead him to depression and bring him back to his homeland, specifically to Olinda, forcing him to stay without uttering a word for a couple of years.

What this should be attributed to, nobody knows for sure; longing for tropical life? Maybe fed up with Yankee universities and musical negro intellectualism?

The fact is that after this dark period, Erasto will start moving again, forging a great friendship and collaboration with Fabio Strummer of Banda Eddie, where he seems to find a new dimension for his life. Erasto was not an academic, nor a virtuoso like his brother; he was one who liked the suburbs, loved to laugh and joke, and the "bohemian" life, even without cerveja (having quit alcohol), preferred a joint, and most of all, loved women, proving to be an unwavering charmer on every occasion.

All of this about Erasto can be heard in his songs. Yes, songs, nothing like free jazz or world music, but genuinely Brazilian Pernambucan music with great personality, neighborhood music, provincial songs to sing and dance to.

Of course, as is natural, the two brothers always found comparisons between them pointless, but their paths had various moments of encounter and stylistic divergence. Naná the master, serious and composed; Erasto the songwriter, frivolous and chaotic. Both in recent years working with music in their hometown, Naná with his passion for Hector Villa-Lobos and Erasto for the young musicians of the city, who contributed to the making of this record, reciprocating the important influence of Erasto on the local music scene, which will take the name Olinda Style.

Although published in 2005, the "giornale della palma" is still very fresh and who knows, it might make some of you move your skeleton while you flip through its songs on some Mediterranean beach.