Music is Powerful.

Suite Delas - A world premiere

Hey everyone,

Since there are many new subscribers to this publication, I would like to introduce myself. I am Jovino Santos Neto, born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and currently residing in Seattle. I am a pianist, composer, arranger, biologist and educator, in that order.

Since my youth I have been attracted to the intersection between Music and Nature. From an artistic perspective, nothing represents creativity and diversity like the planet we were all born in. My academic training as a biologist at McGill University came from the love of being outdoors and observing forests, animals and humans interacting with Nature. My interest in playing music started in my teens, and 48 years ago I became a professional musician by invitation of one of the most amazingly creative artists in the world, Hermeto Pascoal, a self-taught albino master. Through my 15-year apprenticeship with Hermeto’s Group in Brazil and around the world, I learned about his unique and universal approach to music, combining several languages, from free jazz to Brazilian grooves to orchestral and chamber settings. This work taught me the value of artistic discipline and full dedication to the art of music. It also taught me that Music and Nature share a common vibration, and that to know one is to learn the other.

The worlds of Art, Spirituality and Science have informed my creativity and my approach to music composition, arrangement, performance and education. This approach has grown with me as I moved from Rio de Janeiro to Seattle in 1993 with my family and has grown deep roots since, which can be heard in the way I create and share my musical work today.

I am fortunate to be able to travel widely, always expanding my musical horizons, while sharing my music with humans of diverse nationalities, ages and backgrounds.

I am fortunate to be fluent in most global musical languages of our time, from working with orchestras and chamber ensembles to jazz and world music environments, utilizing both fully notated and fully improvised musical contexts.

As an artist who continues to grow and learn every day, I am convinced that this holistic view of Music and Nature can be taught and shared, leading towards a new paradigm of musical structures, crossing over the heavily segmented genres that we encounter today. Here I post a lot of music and thoughts about Music and Nature. Most of my posts are free to read and share, and a few choice bits are reserved for paid subscribers, like the second half of this post.

For musicians, Music is not just “entertainment” or an escape from the current reality of our world. Did you notice that all the billionaire and authoritarian humans we constantly see everywhere are never shown expressing any kind of human joy? The brute trampling of human rights and outright ethnic cleansing that we witness today represent a mechanistic view of the world that can only employ greed and violence as tools to obtain more power. In the view of Dr. Iain McGilchrist in his brilliant book The Master and His Emissary, that kind of behavior is what happens when the Emissary (located primarily in the left brain hemisphere) takes over the functions of the Master (the right hemisphere, responsible for joy, empathy, holistic concepts and connectedness ). That dichotomy that happens inside human brains and also between human tribes is expressed as a distinction between “us” and “them” and it is expressed in violent political and military acts against “them”. Music is one of the most potent forms of crossing the canyons and gorges between the different sides of humans, just as it does between the different sides of the human brain. When people get together and enjoy music that contains beats, grooves and syncopation, the simple mechanical and flat outlook of right and left, top and bottom becomes transformed into a much more subtle reality. Music has this invisible power. It holds the World together, as Hermeto says. There are so many deep and original colors of music all around the world. When we face this variety and diversity in music, we also face all human beings and their cultures, culinary, languages and of course music. Over thousands of years, the powerful telluric grooves from Africa have had the longest time to evolve, because that’s where our arboreal primate ancestors made the literal jump from the trees to live as bipeds. Those telluric (of the Earth as a planet) beats are tools for connecting with the the ground that from that point on became our new home. They are the Old Growth forests of Music. The evolution of humans is in itself a kind of migration, from the trees to the ground.

I have written before about a pandemic project commissioned by the late Ted Viviani in 2021. Ted was a tango aficionado from the Bay Area and he believed in the power of music to create change. Ted asked me to compose music for the Eroica Trio, one of the most brilliant piano trios in activity, blending their expressivity and tone with Venezuelan flautist Viviana Guzmán in a suite that showcased the diversity and power of the music of Brazil.The studio recording was produced by Grammy-Award winning Silas Brown. I decided to write 5 movements of 5 minutes each, and called their collection Suite Delas (untranslatable to English, because “delas” refer to the feminine plural). Interesting to note that the English language does not have a possessive pronoun for multiple female humans. The closest would be “, Their Suite”, lacking the gender distinction.

Each of the five movements represents a different music color from Brazil: choro, valsa, xote, baião and

You can hear the entire Suite here:

Last week in Toronto two movements of the Suite performed live at Hugh's Room (a beautiful sounding room, used to be a church since 1894) with the Gryphon Trio, the premier Canadian piano trio with Roman Borys on cello, Annallee Patipatanakoon on violin and Jamie Parker on piano. I played flute on the first movement, Choro Escondido and melodica on the second, Baião Sapeca.

Here's a video of the premiere. Hope you enjoy it: