This interview was originally broadcast over the KALX airwaves on June 2, 2023.
Reality Check: [00:00:00] Thank you for, um, for taking the time today.
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: Thank you for, for the invitation for the interview as well. He really likes the radio as a medium, so he is always at your disposal for whatever you need. So he is happy to, to do this interview.
Reality Check: What does he consider his profession?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: Uh, he says, well, actually for me, there are no professions. There are devotions, and that’s music in his case.
Reality Check: What does music mean to you?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: Music holds the world while we live. It’s the biggest, endless source of joy and happiness.
Reality Check: How would you describe music to someone who could not hear?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: He would do it by hand gestures and movements, uh, but in a natural way without, uh, planning ahead. Just do it intuitively and naturally. And this is something that he used to do when he was a kid back in his, uh, northeast of Brazil, because he knew that children, they have small bodies, but the soul was the same size of an [00:01:00] adult. So, uh, it happened a lot when he was a child.
Reality Check: I read about when you were a child, um, how you played accordion for hours. Um, can you describe, you mentioned just now, like, as a child you would do hand gestures and things. Can you describe a bit of your life when you were, when you were a child, when was, when was the first time you, you played music? Do you remember that?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: Back in the universe where we all come from and where he says he comes from, uh, the instruments and music was there. If they have like this, pretty much the same instruments with the different formats and sometimes more sounds. So when he started playing the instruments in this world, it would be something more natural for it to him, you know? So he was waiting already for that moment to happen. And, uh, he says he is gonna share some secrets that people from the other side don’t want people from this side to know. But that’s what it is. You can actually play music over there and, uh, in this [00:02:00] so-called universe that goes beyond whatever we live in here and right now.
Reality Check: How did he learn the secrets from the other universe? Or is that part of him?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: He came from there, so, okay. When things are really intelligent and no objectives, there no qualities that you can define them, they’re simply intelligent. That’s what they are. Intelligence.
Reality Check: I’ve heard that people call you the Sorcerer. Can you explain why people call you the Sorcerer or how that name came to be?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: So it all started with a Brazilian journalist called Ana Maria Bahiana. She’s actually LA based currently, and I’m not sure how old if she’s still active, but she’s LA based, so she interviewed him in Caruaru, in his, in the state of Pernambuco, Northeastern Brazil.
And, uh, she wrote that, uh, he’s the, the Bruxo or Sorcerer, as you said. Um, he said, um, maybe she meant the magician or the wizard [00:03:00] more than a sorcerer, but when he read the headlines, he immediately felt that it was with a good meaning, with a good, the, she meant it in a very good way. So, uh, it’s been for many years as a nickname, and he got used to it, and he, he sees it, it’s, people are happy to call him that.
Reality Check: I read also that, um, when he was like 13 or 14, he ran away from Northeast Brazil to go play with his brother in the cities. Can you talk about, um, his decision to go with his brother and his relationship with his, with his brother?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: That’s a beautiful question because I, I miss him so much, so I get to talk about it.
Back in the day, in that part of Brazil in the northeast, so let’s say that’s 1940s, early 1940s, it was a tradition of families, the eldest son would take care of the smallest one. So, as a proper responsibility they would be really responsible for the smallest one and do whatever, [00:04:00] take ’em to school or feed them and really take care of them. It was not just one, “Okay, you help mama.” No. You really take care of this little person. Even if I was the smallest kid, I felt the urge to leave that town because I needed to progress in my music and I needed more stuff that weren’t available in my town, my small village. So that’s how I, I felt the, the real urge to move to the big city like Jose.
He told his brother his older brother, that is also an albino like him. So they are a very different looking on that part of Brazil. They played somewhere, they took a bus in the local area and on the way back, Hermeto said, “I’m not boarding the bus back. I’m taking the bus to the big city.” And that is like I you, you can’t, because I’m responsible for you and that’s our parents orders.
“I have to take care of you, can’t go. Like, I’m going, so maybe it’s better if you come because then you are taking care of me. If you don’t, it’s worse.” And then [00:05:00] they went, so they went to the bus station and they arrived there. And, uh, they wouldn’t let him board, like with your parents. You can’t just take a bus like that.
Uh, but then they did this theater thing where Hermeto started crying and there was a dying aunt in Recife, and they needed to go visit her. And they were desperate and the only ones, and the people felt sorry for them and let them board, and that’s how they went there.
First he stopped in Alagoas, uh, in João Pessoa, in Maceió, in Maceió, in the city of Maceió, in Alagoas. And then he, he did some gigs at the radio, and then he went to Recife where he started working at the radio Jornal do Comércio, which is exist until today.
Reality Check: What is the role of radio to, to musicians back then and to and to today? Because I feel like today in the Bay Area, so many stations are bought up and [00:06:00] they just play the same music again and again. So, can you, can you describe your first, do you remember your first conversation with, um Odette Dias, I’m, I’m messing up the name, but like, do you remember like when you first met them or when you first went to the station?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: Oh, yeah. Radios that are very commercial nowadays. They say they need it. That they need to sell or whatever, commercial music to maintain themselves, which he thinks is not true because people like good music doesn’t really matter if it’s commercial. That’s in a way. And, uh, he said that over the years his music was not very much on the radio, but every time he was, it helped him a lot so, uh, he can feel the actual radio stations that take care of or pay attention to his music, just like what you’re doing right now. At the same time, radio is the breathing of the tv, so if ra- the moment radio’s over, he thinks in his opinion that TV will be [00:07:00] over as well.
Reality Check: When you got to the, to the cities, did you, like you worked at the radio or did you play on the radio?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: So he was a actual employee of the, the radio. Uh, so his parents were so worried on how it would, they would survive. They couldn’t send things. They were money, you know, back in the day, no computers, nothing would talk again, the rural area of Brazil in the 1940s. So. Uh, that was his first job. He was very thankful to the radio because they welcomed him and he mentioned that every day when they would start broadcasting, they would go, uh, ”Jornal do Comércio, from Pernambuco to the world.” And then they would start playing. So, he was not, uh, a musician, uh, gig promoting his music. He was just doing background or all the music they needed.
Reality Check: How has your, your relationship to music or how has the sounds changed from when you were in your like teenage [00:08:00] years to today? When, when you think about making music, when you make music, how has the language in which you speak through music changed?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: Back then and now? The difference is basically numbers. Uh, whatever, 2023 or 1940s is a matter of numbers. Things were very much evolved back then as they are now. Uh, yes, of course there’s more progress or things that you make, new techniques, but overall it is the same. So, he says that music basically goes out there whenever he composes or he writes music and it turns around the globe and the galaxy, and it’s been turning around over the years. So it’s in the end, basically the same. That’s why I have to make good music, proper music, music that is made with the feeling and intuition, uh, the music that comes out naturally. Uh, and that music stays forever. But there are a lot of music being done, uh, a lot of music schools teaching people how to do music [00:09:00] in the wrong way. Uh, so he considers that, not really music, but basically these are papers with musical notations in them, but not really music, you know, they probably have a sound, but uh, it’s not what he considered to be the actual music. Yes.
Reality Check: Can he describe what universal music is? And how to, how does one learn to speak the language of universal music?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: Each one of us has a mission on Earth, and, uh, you as a musician had to respect that mission. So you’ve gotta be intuitive, as you said before, let the music flow and not adjust to whatever people want you to adjust. Now, you do have to learn the technique. You do in a way to express what comes to your mind intuitively. So of course you have to be able to express an instrument at a piano or whatever the saxophone. But the way you study or the way you, you bring it out from you is gotta [00:10:00] be intuitive. That’s how you do music universal. Sure. Sure.
Reality Check: How do you build the confidence or how do you create every day, like with the, the work you’ve done of making a new song every day in 1996, 1997?
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: You can’t plan. You just have to get it, let it flow. Not really explainable.
Reality Check: What does the music or the sounds of the San Francisco Bay Area mean to you? How have you been influenced by artists or by, um, by the place over the course of your life?
Hermeto Pascoal: California.
Interpreter for Hermeto Pascoal: He has got fond memories when he was touring California with Edu Lobo, that’s in the late sixties. And, uh, they do remember a lot of the landscape and he remembers vividly the, the road from the big city to the sea. I doesn’t recall exactly, but he remembers driving to the sea with beautiful landscapes and he said, still today, he feels that the essence is there, even though it’s not as green as it was. And they took down a lot of [00:11:00] nature. He feels the essence is there. And by at the same time, Sérgio Mendes was also around. So he went to his place, they recorded together, and uh, they had great memories from the time.
