Baden Powell

Baden Powell

Birth : 1937-08-06, Varre-Sai, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Death : 2000-09-26

History

Baden Powell de Aquino (6 August 1937 – 26 September 2000), known professionally as Baden Powell, was a Brazilian guitarist. He combined classical techniques with popular harmony and swing. He performed in many styles, including bossa nova, samba, Brazilian jazz, Latin jazz and MPB. He performed on stage during most of his lifetime. Powell composed many pieces for guitar, such as "Abração em Madrid", "Braziliense", "Canto de Ossanha", "Casa Velha", "Consolação", "Horizon", "Imagem", "Lotus", "Samba", "Samba Triste", "Simplesmente", "Tristeza e Solidão", and "Samba da Benção". He released Os Afro-sambas, a watershed album in MPB, with Vinicius de Moraes in 1966. Baden Powell de Aquino was born in Varre-Sai in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His father, a Scouting enthusiast, named him after Robert Baden-Powell. When he was three months old, his family relocated to the Rio suburb of São Cristóvão. His house was a stop for popular musicians during his formative years. He started guitar lessons with Jayme Florence, a famous choro guitarist in the 1940s. He soon proved a young virtuoso, having won many talent competitions before he was a teenager. At age fifteen, he was playing professionally, accompanying singers and bands in various styles. He was fascinated by swing and jazz, but his main influences were in the Brazilian guitar canon. In 1955, Powell played with the Steve Bernard Orquestra at the Boite Plaza, a nightclub within the Plaza Hotel in Rio, where his skill got the attention of the jazz trio playing across the lobby at the Plaza Bar. When Ed Lincoln needed to form a new trio, he asked Powell to join on guitar to become the Hotel Plaza Trio. Powell brought in Luiz Marinho on bass and a fourth member of the "trio": Claudette Soares on vocals. Powell, Lincoln, and their young musician friends took part in after-hours jam sessions, gaining notice in the growing Brazilian jazz scene. Powell achieved wider fame in 1959 by convincing Billy Blanco, an established singer and songwriter, to put lyrics to one of Baden's compositions. The result was called "Samba Triste" and quickly became very successful. It has been covered by many artists, including Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd in their seminal LP Jazz Samba. In 1962, Powell met the poet-diplomat Vinicius de Moraes and began a collaboration that yielded classics of 1960s Brazilian music. Although bossa nova was the prevailing sound at the time, Baden and Vinicius wanted to combine samba with Afro-Brazilian forms such as candomblé, umbanda, and capoeira. In 1966 they released Os Afro-Sambas de Baden e Vinicius. Powell studied advanced harmony with Moacir Santos and released recordings on the Brazilian labels Elenco Records and Forma, as well as in the French label Barclay and the German label MPS/Saba (notably, his 1966 Tristeza on Guitar). He was the house guitarist for Elenco, and of the singer Elis Regina's TV show O Fino da Bossa. In 1968, Powell joined with poet Paulo César Pinheiro and produced another series of Afro-Brazilian-inspired music, released in 1970 as Os Cantores da Lapinha. Powell visited and toured Europe frequently in the 1960s, relocating permanently to France in 1968. ... Source: Article "Baden Powell (guitarist)" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Profile

Baden Powell

Movies

Pixinguinha: Um Homem Carinhoso
Self (archive footage)
The life of legendary Brazilian musician Alfredo da Rocha Vianna Filho, better known as Pixinguinha.
Garoto - Vivo Sonhando
Self
A prodigy of stringed instruments, a pioneer of Bossa Nova, a modernizing master of the guitar: Aníbal Augusto Sardinha, better known as Garoto (1915-1955), is one of the hidden pillars of Brazilian music. Woven by rare archival material, personal diaries and testimonies, this documentary reveals his influence and the artistic conflicts of an avant-garde artist in the golden age of Brazilian radio.
Viva Volta
Self (archive footage)
A documentary on Brazilian trombone player Raul de Souza who, since 1996, has lived in Paris and suffers because he goes unnoticed, unrewarded in his native land. With the sound of his trombone for a background, the film takes him back to Bangu, in Rio de Janeiro, and retraces his trajectory.
Velho Amigo - O Universo Musical De Baden Powell
Self
Documentary on Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell.
TransAtlantique
Music
Le grabuge
Music
Le grabuge is a French-British-American film drama.
Feiras do Nordeste
Music
O Homem da Amazônia
Music
A Vingança dos Doze
Music
The Lion Has Seven Heads
Original Music Composer
A white-robed preacher wanders and sermonizes across African lands; European communists and CIA spies conspire out of mutual self-interest to engineer the appointment of an African bourgeois to a puppet government presidency; and a revolutionary group marches in exile.
O Tempo e o Som
Self
Saravah
Self
Documentary about Brazilian music circa 1969, with extremely rare scenes, such as the only color footage of Pixinguinha, images of João da Baiana, one of the fathers of Samba, Maria Bethânia rehearsing at Barroco nightclub, Baden Powell playing his acoustic guitar, Paulinho da Viola showing his masterpiece "Coisas do Mundo, Minha Nega", that he had just finished, and Márcia, a singer from São Paulo.
Cordiais Saudações
Music
Mar Corrente
The Violinist
Mar Corrente
Original Music Composer
The Girl from Ipanema
Self
Chronicles the life of a 17 year-old girl living in the upper-class Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood of Ipanema. Márcia lives a life of parties and spend her days among bohemians, musicians and intellectuals. While seeming happy in the outside, she's extremely anguished inside. Based on the famous song by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes.
O Santo Módico
Music