I do a lot of writing and editing at work, and I find that if I listen to music with lyrics (at least ones I can understand) I end up spending more time singing along in my head than getting down to business. For office music then, that pretty much rules out anything in English or French. Fortunately though, I don’t speak a word of Portuguese.
Música de Bolso is a Brazilian initiative that shares good music by regular joes who get together for impromptu jam sessions in elevators, on amusement park rides and in other unlikely places. The video up top is their first “volume,” posted in June 2007 and featuring a guitarist, an adorable Amélie Poulin-esque singer, several percussionists playing various toys and a dedicated rubber-duckie player, all rocking a toy store in beautiful Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
Since then 52 more videos have gone up, many of which are awesome in a jamming-in-your-living-room sort of way. Some of the clips are better than others, and if you’re one of those folks who likes their music polished, produced and hermetically sealed you may not enjoy this (I won’t judge you) but for what it’s worth, I like it a lot.
Here are a few others that got my toes a tappin’.
From the site’s “About” page, kindly translated by a Portuguese-speaking friend:
“Pocket music (Música de Bolso) is an audiovisual project that makes music to see and videos to hear, for whoever wants to produce a live show where it probably wouldn’t happen — or where it would happen, but where there wouldn’t be a camera to film it.”
2 responses so far ↓
1 Asher Vijay // Aug 11, 2008 at 9:39 pm
For the record, liking polish isn’t the same as liking garbage! I think there’s more than one type of polish. A swarm of flies lacks polish, but a cut of wood always has polish even if it doesn’t have any varnish on it. Radio-music tends to have a lot of varnish. Good music often has a beautiful inner structure, like trees.
This music philosophy moment is brought to you by your friendly neighbourhood music theorist.
2 mark // Aug 12, 2008 at 10:21 am
Didn’t say it was. : ) But some folks will like second-rate recordings of spontaneous, heartfelt music more than others. I think there’s value in a toy store jam session — maybe it’s because some of my best memories involve impromptu jam sessions in odd places… Plus they play a rubber duckie.
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