Last week, while chatting with my friend Frederic in the Black Swan Pub, the new English-style bar in the center of Lagoa, I suddenly stopped speaking in mid-sentence and craned my neck all the way around. Frederic didn’t understand at first, but a moment later he too was leaning forward and listening intently. What had so caught my attention was the jazz guitar of Ralph Warren. Not since I lived in Miami, where great jazz seeps out of fancy venues and crummy dives alike, have I heard anything even nearly as good as what Ralph was playing on his oversized, silver Archtop.
In Florianopolis I have heard excellent jazz in the form of bossa nova, of course, but not the sort of angular, straight-ahead jazz played by American and European jazz musicians. Warren’s playing takes that unhesitating confidence and marries to a trippy Miles Davis-like jazz adventure. His partners in crime in the Ralph Warren Trio include two superb, local bass players, Arnou de Melo and Rafael Caligari, as well as the marvelous Mauro Borghezan on drums, who together throw a vibrant dose of Brazilian rhythm into the mix.
The Trio played its way through jazz standards that including compositions by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and others. They played several of Warren’s original compositions as well. In song after song, the trio quickly veered away from safe musical waters and sped out toward the open sea of musical improvisation and pure invention. Even as the music threatened to spin entirely out of control, the cohesion and faith of the musicians in each other held everything magically together. Warren threw in a generous dusting of the Blues, which he sang with a big, convincing voice, but even the blues tunes featured absorbing improvisation during the solos. The trio took the audience on a wild musical journey that stayed with me for days afterwards and I marked my calendar to return to the Black Swan the next Monday night.
When the set was over I couldn’t help but go up to Ralph and introduce myself. We arranged to meet the next week and Ralph told me about the circuitous route that had led him to our beautiful island. Born in Chicago, he moved to Santa Barbara as a child. He has the relaxed manner and speech of a Californian who grew up near the beach. He immediately asked me if I was a surfer, telling me that he loved the sport, and I thought again of his playing style, twisting this way and that, like an expert surfer riding the edge of a musical wave. Warren wandered up and down the West Coast, living for a time in Portland, Oregon and playing jazz and blues in clubs there.
He traveled to Europe where, in Denmark, he was treated to a guitar lesson by Joe Pass in the famous musician’s hotel room. A long-time admirer of Brazilian jazz, the guitar of João Gilberto, and the compositions of Tom Jobim, Warren arrived in Fortaleza in 2003 and performed there for a time. Eager to play in the birth place of bossa nova itself, Warren later spent some time in Rio but found there were few venues for jazz and even fewer opportunities to play. Afterwards, he tried the musical scene in Belo Horizonte, where there were more gigs, but he missed the ocean and longed to go surfing. By chance he heard about Florianopolis and decided to check it out. He said that “as I reached the top of the Morro da Lagoa for the first time and saw the view out over the sea, I just fell in love with the place.” Warren quickly fell into step with the musical life of the city and formed his Trio.
I asked Ralph about jazz improvisation and he smiled and admitted that it was indeed “a high-risk business.” With each new song the band must “build a new fire.” Each time “you don’t know what the other players are going to do, you just have to take your fear and throw it in the waste basket.” Each song, “just begins right now, you have to allow it to happen, let it flow through you.” When it all comes together “you just feel thankful.” Beyond this mindless, Zen approach, however, Ralph has a thorough formal training in jazz and told me that he could play songs one after the other for days without repeating.
Ralph plays at Blues Velvet on Thursdays. On Friday and Saturday nights he appears at the Big Bamboo in Lagoa–Avenida Afonso Delambert Neto, 556–for a bossa nova-laden round of jazz, which features the smooth playing of Cassio Moura on guitar. The Trio also plays at The Black Swan Pub, which Warren hopes to make his chief musical venue and the place where he can launch his new compositions. You can catch The Ralph Warren Trio there every Monday night starting at 8.
So you’ve moved to Brazil in part because you want your kids to experience the richness of another culture and master a second or third language. But now you worry as your childrens’ reading and writing abilities in English begin to lag behind. It can keep you up nights…. all that worrying. What if after all your investment in helping your child integrate into Brazilian culture and speak Portuguese, what if your child fails to learn to read or write in English? What if–despite all your financial and cultural resources, despite your illuminated global perspective–what if yourchild is illiterate in his or her mother tongue?
