vinícius de moraes | “a tonga da mironga do kabuletê”| a arte do encontro | 1994
my pop music exploration was interrupted by a two-year mission to são paulo. the interruption was brief, though, for it soon transformed into an expansion. brazil has its pop and its native musical traditions too. i fell in love with “mpb” (música popular brasileira) along with most other things brazilian. mpb is kind of like jazz for brazil – not in its sound, but in the fact that it takes from europe, africa, south america and melds it all into something distinctly brazilian.
i won’t be able to tell you what “a tonga da mironga do kabuletê” means. conceição, the woman who gave this cd to me before i returned home in 1995, didn’t know what it meant. it’s some old african-based slang from the northeast of brazil.
even though i don’t know what that phrase means, this song evokes my quintessential experience of brazil.
[image: jardim monte kemel, 1994]
