Lô Borges, a legend of Brazilian widespread music and one of many founders of the Clube da Esquina musical collective, died on Sunday, November 2. Borges’ household confirmed the information in a press release posted to his official social media pages. In keeping with Folha de S.Paulo, the musician had been hospitalized for a drug-related an infection, and Borges’ household wrote, in Portuguese, that he “fought bravely for 17 days.” Borges was 73 years previous.
The sixth of 11 kids, Salomão Borges Filho was born in 1952, in Belo Horizonte, the capital and largest metropolis within the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. As youngsters, Borges and his older brother Márcio grew to become related to a bunch of musicians who gathered on the nook of Rua Divinópolis and Rua Paraisópolis within the neighborhood of Santa Tereza to smoke, hang around, make music. Their “nook membership,” because it got here to be identified, blended MPB—música widespread brasileira, one of many dominant kinds of Brazilian music in the course of the Nineteen Sixties—with jazz, psychedelic rock, and the Beatles’ baroque pop.
Amongst these musicians was Milton Nascimento, who was about 10 years older than Borges and had moved from the city of Três Pontas to Belo Horizonte in 1963. A rising worldwide star following his efficiency on the inaugural MPB competition in 1965, Nascimento co-wrote two songs on his 1970 album Milton, “Para Lennon e McCartney” and “Clube da Esquina,” alongside the Borges brothers. Lô was planning to affix the Brazilian military at 18, however Nascimento invited him to Rio de Janeiro to work on one other mission.
Regardless of arriving deep within the midst of Brazil’s oppressive junta dictatorship, that album, 1972’s Clube da Esquina, grew to become one of the vital influential and acclaimed information within the nation’s musical historical past. Borges claimed writing credit on eight out of 21 tracks, together with “O Trem Azul,” album opener “Tudo que Você Podia Ser,” and “Paisagem da Janela,” a track whose recording was initially blocked by federal censors. “After I would communicate of these morbid issues/After I would communicate of these sordid males,” he sings, in Portuguese, within the refrain, “After I would communicate of this storm/You didn’t pay attention/You don’t wish to imagine/However that’s so regular.”
The identical 12 months as Clube da Esquina’s launch, Borges, nonetheless solely 19, shared his self-titled solo debut, colloquially often known as Disco do Tênis (“sneaker album”). He reportedly grew to become overwhelmed by his label’s demand for brand new materials, nevertheless, and went quiet for a lot of the Seventies. He ultimately resurfaced on the tail finish of the last decade on a number of songs from Nascimento’s Clube da Esquina 2 in 1978 and his personal sophomore solo effort, A By way of-Láctea, in 1979. He put out 4 extra albums all through the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, and had a late-career hit in 2003 with “Dois Rios,” a track he co-wrote for the Brazilian ska-punk band Skank.
