You're a musician whose work seeks to address diverse musical influences. You research?
JPS: I like music. Actually I always awaked up surprised. The things that happen to me, changes, influences of gender, or shape, had much to do with the people who I always played and with the songs that we heard back then. Hence, I had this eclecticism. It happened naturally. Arose mainly because of the people and knowing that was the kind of music they liked to do. I remember that in the case of Belle Chase Hotel I had the idea of soul and I just didn't happen. My work has also changed when I started writing for theater and in Portuguese. Where this universe makes more sense and of course I do not feel like saying it through punk rock, or rock and roll, or rhythm and blues, what was closer to me was bossa nova. Brazilian music in general, this half of the twentieth century is very good. From Jobim to their compelling poets. It has an incredible wealth. The genres are there and they all have wonderful performers and compositions. The rest is coincidence. It's about what you will do, or I never keep in the same genre, because expertise is not my forte. I'm superficial so to speak.
How was accepted a bossa nova album sung by a Portuguese in Brazil? There is a strong penetration of Brazilian music in our country, but the same cannot be said in reverse.
JPS: The 1970 album came out in 2007 and since then until today, I have always played in Brazil twice a year. I'm not the so-called popular musician, because my music has to do with my idiosyncrasies and my limitations. Never was very festive. It was always ironic and self-introspective and therefore if this country does not much liked over there. The bossa nova and the compositions of 60 and 70 years are things that Brazilians do not care much there. Appreciate a more pulsating music, very popular, full of pace and with little care composition. Since the favela funk to the tacky, forro and country music, music genres that are moving very people in the cities of Brazil. Where I had been more welcomed is in Sao Paulo, where there is greater cultural diversity and are more organized. The criteria for openings are quite large relative to other sites. Rio is very narrow, is much attached to its reputation, unless someone is incredibly famous and then everything moves around it, if you not very famous but nothing happen.
So it's a situation that does not just apply to your case specifically, but of Portuguese music in general?
JPS: There are a lot of contingency. Many things can be done. I've never been a guy with a great promotional structure. By choice?
JPS: For choice and I wish that someone wanted to work with me, with a high level of demand, output and to do that I could played in various locations. I do not know at this point of my career I've wondering if my music is not universal to the point that not many people like it. I have to see things that way. Otherwise I'll have to complain endlessly of the people I worked with, that is, my trips have happened by chance, because it started with a journalist who liked my work and managed to take me there, for me to play through SEMEC a very old Brazilian institution, is a kind of Gulbenkian Foundation and Mercy House, I think the last Portuguese musician to have gone there, has been precisely Amalia. These contacts are curious. Result of circumstances, the squabble. It is a kind of musical phenomenon and then almost anything can happen. When to be know you need to disseminate and make it happen in terms of production. It's always like a dog chasing his tail. To create an audience people need to know you. It's hard. I cannot complain and I have never played for Portuguese communities. There are always people who are interested to produce miracles to promote my going there and never had to do with the fact I was well known, or be widespread or have a proper structure.
Going back a bit, you said you are not a musician of summer, more so in autumn, why?
JPS: My music is more introspective, self-ironic, is not expressive and flamboyant as the summer. It is a poetic expression. I am a melancholy musician that's all.
Why did you decide to write an opera?
JPS: I was unemployed at the time.
Meantime the masters were of what had been already recorded were lost. Why it was never reset?
JPS: Because my partner in this project was, as I in another mood. In fact, the music record label took the work I do not know how long after and lost the Masters and from there, by the way, people evolve and the work done five years later, had to be reinvented, because we would not do the same thing, not would make more sense for me and Sergio Costa. So fuck it, in the right way.
