ALINE DE LIMA

Interview "Onda Curta", Montréal CA, fév/08

New album "AÇAÍ" is coming out on the 8th April 2008

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Açaí– it’s essential to pronounce it aça-i with the stress on the final “i” – is the name of an Amazonian palm tree, Euterpe oleracea, which Portuguese colonisers baptised “açal”. This detached “i” at the end of the word is a pure product of creole, Brazilian, indigenous culture. And that’s why it’s so important. This is the young artist Aline de Lima’s second album and she is already a professional: the only thing she leaves to chance are her emotions. The title of the album, Açaí, is a sworn statement, a profession of faith: “I, Aline, fruit of Maranhao (in Brazil’s Northern state, at the edge of the Amazon basin) will always remain Aline, rooted in the red and ochre earth of this fiery country, even when I sing in French or in Swedish, even when my voice is carried over the internet, the telephone or on tour...”.

Globalisation would be wasting its time sending its goblins to chase Aline de Lima. Her original songs draw their inspiration from her native state of Maranhao in Brazil where she was born in 1978 and they have kept all the freshness and taste of freshly picked fruit straight from the tree that only childhood can preserve. “Obra prima do tempo/ Seu beijo maduro eu colhi” (“I have picked your ripe kiss, a masterpiece of time”) writes Aline de Lima as a preface to this twelve-track journey into the depths of our emotions.

To draw up the plans for this organic architecture with its walls of vegetation, sun-kissed European wheat and carpets of South American ferns, Aline de Lima approached a famous Japanese producer, Jun Miyake, to co-produce this album. Miyake is a trumpet player, composer and arranger who has featured in productions by Philippe Découfflé, Bob Wilson and Pina Bausch; he is also a fan of Brazilian music, wrote an unclassifiable album in 2002 called Innocent Bossa in the Mirror, and has also worked closely with the brilliant guitarist Arto Lindsay who renewed BPM (Brazilian Popular Music) together with Caetano Veloso and Marisa Monte.

The whole group of them got together in New York and formed something resembling a school of avant-garde subtlety that included the guitarist Marc Ribot and Vinicius Cantuaria, who produced Arrebol, Aline de Lima’s first album.

So our beautiful lady of Maranhao has been integrated into this highly musical tribe. Integrated, not swallowed up. Because Aline has a mind of her own. A frail side to her, a certain stubbornness, a strong will and one passion: songs. Writing them, setting them to music, singing cover versions of those that influenced her during her own childhood, such as the chorus of Mulher Rendera, a song composed by Zé do Norte in tribute to Lampião, the highwayman and defender of the poor: “Olê muié rendera/ Olê muié renda/ Tu me ensina a fazê renda/ Que eu te ensino a namorá” - Look, lady lace-seller, look lady making lace You teach me how to make lace and I’ll show you how to fall in love. Joan Baez, the muse of the American protest movement, covered this song from northeastern Brazil (on Joan Baez 5, 1964). Aline de Lima quotes her sources and puts sweet words of love, in French, into the mouth of an embroideress on the seashore (Renda Minha/Mulher Rendera). Another of her quotations is from Horizontes, a poem by the Lisboan writer Fernando de Pessoa about the sea, love, melancholy... which Aline includes in a song, Adeus Solidao (“Farewell Solitude”) where nostalgia lies only just below the surface, one of the hallmarks of this urban loner.

At the Tex Avril Studio in Paris, Jun Miyake laid down guitars, piano, vibraphone and kora (Quem Sou) as well, because Brazil and Aline have this subtle scent of Africa about them. There is Marin-Pêcheur (Fisherman) which Aline wrote in French – she has been living in Paris since 2000 after spending two years in Sweden (she speaks perfect Swedish as she demonstrates on Som Om Ingenting Har Hänt, with lyrics by Johan Schütz). “What should I do?/My siren heart has dived/Into the illusion/That it can bring you back to the salty water of my passion”. This much is clear: this young woman really knows how to write lyrics and she also knows how to set them to music.

Aline de Lima’s father was a bank clerk and a fan of samba and her mother was a teacher who loved Maria Bethania and Chico Buarque. Aline could sing all the nursery rhymes for children of her age. Then she started to draw excitedly, absorbing the thousand different types of music, the thousand rhythms, the indigenous words mixed with standard Portuguese that together form cocktails only Brazil knows how to make.

Of course, this world has its mentors: in her case, it is Gilberto Gil, singer and culture minister in Lula’s government, whose Ladeira da Preguiça (Slope of Laziness) Aline de Lima covers. Because that’s the deal: work more to feel more at ease, look idle and work on your classics day after day after day. That is how another native of the Brazilian North-East, Joao Gilberto, came up with the sound of bossa nova and its complex balance... And that is also how Aline de Lima finishes her second album on which her voice has lost none of its freshness and has made new territories - green, Amazonian and human - its own.