Brazilian singer and composer Marcos Valle began making music in the early 60s, and since the 90s he’s been settled into a comfortable groove, apparently disinterested in developing his art or rocking the boat. He sticks to the same kind of slick, jazzy bossa nova that other musicians were already playing the late 70s; he makes the occasional album, most often for British label Far Out; and he tours, usually in Europe. The records he’s releasing now—the most recent is 2010’s Estatica—are pleasant enough, and he’s a talented musician who still writes strong melodies. But if Valle weren’t playing international jazz festivals and swanky clubs, he could easily make a living on Brazil’s nostalgia circuit.
Light in the Attic includes present-day contributions from Valle in its new liner notes for his self-titled 1970 album, which on their face make it hard to understand the creative flowering he was undergoing. “I am not a very strong listener. There are some people that bring records and listen and listen to a lot of things to get some influences,” he says. “Or maybe not influences, but they are [consciously] aware of a lot of things that are happening. I’m not this kind of person. But, when I like something I really like to listen to it again.” Yet in an interview published by Wax Poetics in 2007, he acknowledges that he felt the influence of the tropicalistas during their late-60s heyday: “When those artists came along and mixed Brazilian music with guitars and pop, it felt new and good. I think it gave me the confidence to do what I had been thinking about for a while, to liberate myself in certain ways.”
Valle recruited outside help again for Vento Sul in 1972—psych-prog band O Terço helped push him as far afield as he ever went. The vocal harmonies on “Vôo Cego” recall Crosby, Stills & Nash, while electric guitarist Claudio Guimaraes contributes probing psychedelic leads. (He’s not a member of O Terço, but he did write the song.) “Democustico” was originally meant to be an instrumental, with a dancing groove, wandering flute, and insistent harpsichord, but Valle added a trippy recitation where he sticks the prefix “demo-” onto all sorts of words (whether the combination means anything in Portuguese or not). “Mi Hermoza” begins as a drifty, flamenco-tinged meditation with gorgeous falsetto singing, then breaks into a ferocious, crunching hard-rock riff that vanishes just as suddenly as it appeared.
