Paulinho da Viola

Having a musician, Cesar Faria, as his father, Paulinho da Viola was raised in an environment where playing and listening to music was as natural as breathing. During his childhood in Botafogo, a traditional neighborhood of the southern area of Rio de Janeiro where he was born on November 12th, 1942, Paulinho was constantly in touch with music through his father, a guitarist, member of the “Época de Ouro” (Gold Times) ensemble. In the family rehearsals of the ensemble, Paulinho used to meet Jacob do Bandolim and Pixinguinha, among many other musicians that would gather to compose choro and eventually sing old and new waltzes and sambas.
Throughout the seventies, Paulinho had a recording average of one LP a year; he won several awards and performed in several cities in Brazil and around the world. In the eighties, he recorded four more albums and kept on being one of the main samba singers in the country. In the nineties, he started a new phase, in which the press and the critics see him as a more sophisticated and mature musician. Still with his popular appeal, Paulinho recorded one of his most important works, “Bebadosamba”, and put together a homonymous show.
Paulinho's work today is seen as a link among several popular traditions as the “samba”, the carnival and the “choro”, besides his scores for guitar and vanguard pieces. One of the greatest representatives of the samba and a heir of the legacy left by musicians such as Cartola, Candeia and Nelson Cavaquinho, Paulinho shows that he is always reinvigorating his work and creating new songs and scores without abandoning his principles and aesthetic values.