Salvador - 2020

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After the ballad "Pontal", his first partnership with Fernanda Takai, Arthur Nogueira presents "Salvador", the second of five new songs he released in the first half of 2020. The track is a tribute to carnival and street music in the capital of Bahia . Produced in Belém, the single features musicians from different generations from Pará, including STRR, Lucas Estrela and Jacinto Kahwage. 

 

"Salvador" was composed by Arthur Nogueira after a season in Bahia, in 2017. "I sang on Dia de Iemanjá, did my voice and guitar show afterwards and took the opportunity to extend it until Carnival", says the man from Pará, who that year performed at Lálá Multispace, in Rio Vermelho, with Caetano Veloso and Jussara Silveira in the audience. The song is homoerotic and refers, according to the author, to all meanings of the term "Salvador" — the city, the adjective and the noun. "It's a place where I like to be, but it also strengthens me and saves me from intolerance. It could be just another memory of carnival love, like many Brazilian songs, but I think this memory asserts itself because it is also inseparable from the political power of that period", says the artist. "In Brazil today, carnival is a beautiful and relentless affirmation of individual freedoms, freedom of expression, democracy in general. And in Salvador, in February, it is as if all these abstract concepts could be seen with the naked eye ", highlights the composer, already recorded by Gal Costa, one of the biggest names in Bahia music, in 2015. 

 

The track "Salvador" was performed in Belém, under the musical production of Mateus Estrela (STRR). The basic arrangement had the collaboration of pianist Jacinto Kahwage and bassist Leo Chaves. "While we were in the studio, I read in some academic works that lambada, a rhythm that was quite successful in Pará in the 1980s, was an influence on the emergence of axé music. That's why I suggested Lucas Estrela, a guitarist who works with these rhythms popular in Pará, as a special guest on the single", explains Nogueira. "In addition to the musical dialogues, it is worth remembering that the Northeast and Pará were also the Brazils that resisted, at the polls, this power project that daily positions itself aggressively and against everything that has already been hard won by rationality modern", highlights the artist.

 

The lyrics of "Salvador" also include a quote from the American poet Walt Whitman. "There is a poem of his called "We Two Boys Together Clinging". "I remembered this poem one day in Bahia and translated the first two verses ("we two boys together clinging / one the other never leaving") this way: "we two boys together grabbing / each other without thinking about the end." With this motto, I continued the lyrics. If Salvador is such a modern city and Whitman is the poet of modern man, it seemed like a good idea to bring him to the summer", says Nogueira, whose work includes melodies for verses by Antonio Cicero, Adonis, Rose Ausländer, among others. poets.

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Press release

2020

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