Somewhere in the world, perhaps there's a music that's more buoyant
and optimistic than Daniela Mercury's.
But you'd have to travel far to find it, judging by the ebullient
show the singer-songwriter played Sunday night at the Vic Theatre to
launch the Museum of Contemporary Art's new exhibition "Tropicalia:
A Revolution in Brazilian Culture."
Surrounded by a corps of exuberant folkloric dancers, backed by a
coterie of top-flight instrumentalists, bathed in a flood of
ever-changing lights, Mercury didn't just take the Vic stage -- she
reinvented it. Within moments of singing her first throaty notes,
she and her troupe transformed a drafty old Chicago theater into
something recalling a balmy Brazilian beach. The dancers moved
nimbly, as if stepping on hot sand; the singers chanted radiantly,
as if exhorting the heavens; and Mercury spun and swayed with every
phrase she sang, reveling in the sensuality of movement and the
luxuriance of her gauzy alto.
"Instead of rhythm and blues, I make rhythm and happy," the singer
told the Tribune when she performed in Chicago for the first time
three years ago.
By now, Mercury has moved well beyond happy and proceeded headlong
toward delirious, her tempos swift, her vocal lines short and
breathy, her intricate gyrations constituting an art form in
themselves. With a shrug of a shoulder or a kick of a heel or a
one-two swing of her hips, she becomes an instrument of rhythm,
accenting beats her percussionists are articulating behind her.
Many observers have heard in Mercury's music a mixture of samba,
reggae, funk and what-not, and that assessment is correct, as far as
it goes (which is not very). In fact, Mercury has conceived a deeply
personal yet wholly accessible approach to the indigenous music of
Brazil, Africa and the Americas. For all its apparent froth, this
music overflows with cross-cultural references, from the ritual
dance patterns of ancient Africa to the jubilant song forms of Bahia
(the Brazilian state where Mercury grew up), from the classic samba
of earlier Brazilian songwriters to the jazz-based vocal styles of
everyone from Billie Holiday to Ella Fitzgerald.
Because all of these influences--and others--have been tucked into a
music that consistently remains light, transparent and fast-moving,
its intellectual heft has been elegantly disguised. Relax, and you
can glide along with the intricately layered beats that Mercury and
her dancers, vocalists and instrumentalists play. Listen closely,
and you're getting a crash course on multiple musical cultures and
epochs.
Though it's true the dance-band aesthetic often rendered Mercury's
English and Portuguese lyrics difficult to decode, that's probably
what the singer had in mind. Rather than fronting the band and
letting her voice ring out, she seems to prefer that her vocals slip
into the ensemble texture.
Yet when she sang forth in "And I Love Her," she produced some of
the most elegantly improvised vocal lines one might hope to hear
from a mainstream pop artist.
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