Tributo à um Amigo

Listening with your ear to the real thing.

By Duda Kovarsky Rotta

Illustration by Derin Ogutcu

Please listen while reading: “Tributo a um Amigo,” Baden Powell, 1970. 

I always read the lyrics before finishing a song. Maybe it’s because, for those of us who write, songs are mystical poems, words put on pedestals by the music. Maybe this is why—except when I was playing them myself—I used to have a hard time connecting to purely instrumental pieces. Until Baden Powell. 

My adolescence was marked by learning, playing, and slowly becoming obsessed with Brazilian music: bossa nova, samba, chorinho—anything I could get my hands on. My grandmother gave me her own guitar, a beautiful instrument she got at 18 years old, and I worked my way through Brazil's national catalog. Amidst the busyness of college, my guitar went largely unplayed. I hadn't realized how much I missed my country’s music until I started talking to a professor about it almost every day. 

For good reason, we stand in awe of our professors. Like many freshmen, I hardly expected to form a bond with any of these highly-decorated, busy intellectuals—and yet, from an impulsive response to an end-of-semester “goodbye class!” email, came a friendship. As an amateur musician himself, I thought my professor might appreciate a song recommendation as a farewell. 

My message to him was short. I thanked him for the semester and, as a side note, recommended Baden Powell, a legend from my home country who is hardly known in this one. “Tributo a um Amigo”— which you ought to be listening to right now— features Baden Powell alone with his guitar in a loosely related compilation of songs unreleased elsewhere. There is no information as to when these were recorded or where they come from. Perhaps it was this mystique that drew me in:  Though the album features few words, it can perhaps be thought of as a “mystical poem.” I hardly thought he would reply. 

To my surprise, as I waited for my plane to São Paulo, I got a text. “Dear Duda: Thank you for your soulful note, which has moved my heart. Which B. Powell should I start with?” We began our friendship meekly. The inversion of roles was at times odd: I was pointing this professor in the direction of one artist or another, and he listened to me as if I knew what I was talking about. In fact, through his sheer enthusiasm, he led me to believe that maybe I did know what I was talking about. Not because I am an audiophile, but because this is how he approaches pedagogy: One’s lived experience always matters as much as ideas pulled from nowhere. I shared this music with him because it was, and is, deeply sentimental to me, and he was able to appreciate that it mattered to me. He told me bossa nova was a craze during his teenage years (like mine, oddly. I chuckled). 

When he once asked me about the lyrics I happily translated them. Although his scholarship focused on music (so he naturally knew a lot about the Brazilian movement), he made me feel that I could still help him approach the music in another way. “This time around,” he wrote to me, “I’ve had my ear to the ground for the real thing.” My desire to write about Powell reminded him of a student he had long ago who wrote his dissertation on a Brazilian movie; he was so happy that I too was finding an interest in writing about music and my own experience with it. I knew why Baden mattered so much to me—his music being a reminder of home—but why did it move my professor too? What was there which rose above location or language? 

Letting go on my original grip on the words—on my desire to see songs as “mystical poems”—I began to hear differently. I heard the strange Bossa chords, borrowing from jazz and fusing with samba. I listened to the soft melodies, pulled from the guitar ever so slowly, which are so unequivocally Baden. I focused, more than I ever had before, on the music, the music, the music, listening to the music. I learned to focus on the wordless, the ineffable. I learned to “have my ear to the ground for the real thing.”