All the folks, hailing from Brazil, with whom I have had the grace to be friends with are invariably musical even if they are not. I suppose to be Brazilian is to be able to play the guitar, or at the very minimum to walk around singing, not humming like the rest of us, some song or the other.

Pico Iyer, that inveterate traveler, in one of books invokes paradise, and refers to the essential Brazilian nature to be the closest man can get to subsequent to The Great Fall apres Eating of the Big Red Apple. While such off hand sociological observations necessarily ignore the harsh realities of Brazilian society, they neverthless capture an essential aspect of the Brazilian nature.

So in celebration, this post on a musician I discovered quite recently; if you are a movie watcher, a musican whom you might have encountered in Bill Murray's latest nuthouse movie, "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou", with an acoustic guitar in hand, singing David Bowie covers in Portuguese. Yes, kind reader, I am talking about Seu Jorge. You can download three of these songs, including Ziggy Stardust over here.

Bro. Seu is a child of Rio de Janeiro's favelas, and his music reflects the same exuberance, and perhaps pain, of those crucibles of hard living and quick death. In this concert Bro. Seu seems to address these issues head on. Check out the terrific drum section. Finally here is the customary YouTube video:

This post is for all my Brazilian friends, especially Sgt. Joao and Daniel