By VICTOR MORAIS*

Commentary on the film directed by Flávia Moraes, currently showing in cinemas

“[…] and deep down / I decipher the panicked cry of the world, / which intertwines with my own cry, / and we both compose a vast choir”
(Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Rosary Clock”)

1.

Generally, when we think of Brazilian music artists-intellectuals, we usually come to the names of Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque – more recently, we could add, from a different perspective, the names of Mano Brown and Emicida. Undeniably, there is a selection of interpretations of the country that they sing. Since the song and the rap are based on the intersection between music and poetry, melody and lyrics, sound and word, it is noticeable that in the cases mentioned the quality of the country's interpretation is already visible in advance in the lyrics of what is sung - often dispensing with its vocal interpretation.

Perhaps the great exception to this scheme that has already been discovered is João Gilberto, in whom the elaboration of Brazilian material necessarily appears through musical means, especially with regard to the relationship between the country's modernization and its popular urban culture maximized by samba. Left out of this scheme, among many others, is the name of Milton Nascimento, in whom the inability to understand and explain his production rigorously is often attributed to his virtuosity – which may not seem “reasonable” at first glance, but is indisputably sonorous and musical.

This is, with few exceptions, the argument most seen in the feature film. Milton Bituca Birth, by Flávia Moraes. Reinforced above all by the indigestible narration by Fernanda Montenegro, who tries to dramatize in her reading a text in which exaltation and sentimentality feed off each other, a myriad of names from the pantheon of national and international arts speak in this vein about the most Minas Gerais-like carioca in the world. The tone is always that of the genius who emerged from who-knows-where – to the point that graphic artists Os Gêmeos, in charge of the set design for his farewell tour, “A última sessão de música”, held in 2022, asked Milton Nascimento if he doesn’t feel like an alien – to which he responds that he does feel a little.

Aside from all that is funny about it, it seems to me that this line of investigation tells us about a difficulty that still exists today in understanding Milton Nascimento's work. A difficulty that the film does not resolve, largely due to the editing that is typical of the image documentary-interview genre, but also due to the celebratory tone, which, although it may seem appropriate at a time of reverence for a brilliant veteran artist, almost cancels out the critical elaboration. This, Milton Bituca Birth manages to do without his help, especially in the choice of some great moments from the testimonies collected around the world for its creation. It is in them that I think the strength of the film lies – which is not necessarily a cinematographic attribute.

Torn between being a road movie that accompanies the aforementioned tour “The Last Music Session” and pays homage to Milton Nascimento, telling stories and thinking about him, three major themes stand out: musical genre, race, and geography. In other words: Milton Nascimento makes jazz? Do you do bossa nova? How is blackness present in Milton Nascimento? What is the relationship between his work and his origins in Minas Gerais, despite his descent from Rio de Janeiro?

Although there is no great discovery in privileging the place of Minas Gerais in Milton Nascimento, just as in parts it is possible to say that the attempt to fit his music into a type of sound is not a novelty, the racial issue, treated with the leisure in which it appears there, is something basically unprecedented in attempts to understand it.

In general, with regard to the musical genre, on an international level, the comments are in an attempt to associate it with jazz, while Brazilians point to links with bossa nova. This is somewhat obvious, since both there and here, these are founding genres of modern popular music in each country. In other words, Milton Nascimento is part of a tradition that is distinct in two countries. And he is part of both. Apart from Caetano Veloso's comment, busy proving the cultural size of Brazil in a retroprophetic and almost pamphlet-like way, everyone points to the sonic singularity of Milton's work. In other words: it is and it is not jazz, is and is not bossa nova.

It is also common to point out that Milton Nascimento sings about Minas Gerais. What is missing is to wrap it all up by saying that Milton Nascimento can only be understood from the point of view of a black man, born in 1942, who goes to Minas and grows up during the early heyday of recorded popular music in the world. His lens, the way from which he sees the world, is not Minas – the world he sees – nor the jazz, nor bossa nova or the musical genres of his childhood – the world he listens to. His lens is that of a black man, in Minas, in that golden age for music – the world that is.

2.

Although the film is attempted to interpret this way by names such as Djonga and Djamila Ribeiro, it is in Mano Brown's reading that the most accurate analysis is found. Commenting on the blackness of Milton Nascimento and his view of the historic cities of Minas Gerais, he cites “Francisco”, from the album “Milton” (1976), first released abroad. Since it is a song without lyrics, he says: “if not even Milton Nascimento spoke there, what am I going to say?” And then he invites us to listen carefully, a fundamental move to overcome Milton's inexplicable genius from most of the film.

“Francisco” is one of only two new songs released on this album – the other is “Raça”. Unlike the latter, it is instrumental, with acoustic guitar, piano touches and vocal improvisations. Not wanting to comment in detail on its composition and execution elements, I will limit myself to pointing out that there is a considerable similarity between this song and those that make up the album “Milagre dos peixes” (1973), most of which had their lyrics censored. Some of these were used in the film soundtrack. The gods and the dead (1970), by Ruy Guerra, and I believe that this is where “Francisco” gains strength.

The gods and the dead is set in the cocoa-growing state of Bahia in the 1930s, and pits the old local economic elites against a hero, played by Othon Bastos and referred to in the credits as “The Man,” whose desire is to retaliate destructively against a world based on exploitation and rule. In the last scene, after The Man dies, on the banks of a stream, the song “Bodas” by Milton Nascimento and Ruy Guerra is sung. Its lyrics recall scenes of violence and unbridled fury that organize the world of cocoa exploitation. That violence, even if it was just that day, has ended (“The gunboat is gone…”), but something remains. Someone remains. And sings of the world that remains after so much horror.

Getting straight to the point: “Francisco” is a post-traumatic song, understanding post not as a denial of the during, but as an attempt to elaborate this during with a view to overcoming it. What is elaborated there is the violence of the colonial, slave-owning world of Minas Gerais during its golden age, in the 18th century. Milton looks at that and sees violence everywhere; he sees his position in that world. And, taking this pain – which in his case is ancestral – for himself, he elaborates that world of horror into first-class free art, through improvisation, for a foreign audience. Precisely to say, as he says in several songs, that any other horizon has to take this scar into account.

3.

Hence the accuracy of Mano Brown's diagnosis, because while other testimonies place Milton in the category of an inexplicable divinity (like Djamila), when he alludes to “Francisco” what appears is a profoundly negative interpretation of the state of things, which does not mean nihilism. Precisely for this reason it is “post-traumatic”. A paradigm that has been announced in Milton Nascimento's production since “Travessia”, the song with lyrics by Fernando Brant that launched him to the country at the 1967 FIC.

Taking as its motto the word that closes “Grande Sertão: Veredas” by Guimarães Rosa, the song is structured entirely around martyrdom, endless suffering, which is redeemed by the possibility of becoming (“I have a lot to live for”).

“Travessia” is one of the songs sung throughout the documentary and there are also scenes in which Milton Nascimento is sitting on the bed, reading passages from Great Sertão: Veredas. That is to say: there is a force, a desire to move forward, to seek transformation, but which does not deny the violence suffered in the great journey of existence – which is precisely where its transcendent dimension comes from, which is evident in the film’s testimonies. Which is interesting, because despite being the dominant tone of Milton Nascimento’s production, it cannot function without the negativity it dispenses with – which, except for Mano Brown’s testimony, tries to be the tone of explanation in the film.

In search of celebrating the great artist, it loses the Minas of Carlos Drummond de Andrade – not even mentioned, even though the poem “Canção Amiga” was set to music by Milton in “Clube da esquina 2” (1978) -, in which there is exactly this negativity, and the redeeming Minas is imposed, at times grateful to past violence for the heroic possibility of the journey, which shapes all of Guimarães Rosa's work.

This is a choice made by those behind the film, in line with Milton Nascimento's claims of supernaturalism, but it does not hold up if his work is taken seriously and his roots in the world of Minas Gerais are seen, between coffee on the table and emotional blackmail. Everyday violence, by the way, appears in passing when Milton Nascimento comments on the suffering he and his adoptive mother, Lília, went through in the city of Três Pontas, where he grew up, due to the fact that he is black.

This is actually a situation that allows us to formulate the Milton-situation and the Milton-lens well. Born in Rio, black, marginalized, he loses his mother to tuberculosis at the age of two and is adopted by the daughter of his mother's employer. Brazil is boiling over there. On the other hand, thanks to this he obtains considerable musical training – his adoptive mother studied with Villa-Lobos. He is a black man in a world of white people; a foreigner who is part of it at the same time as he cannot do what “his own” can due to racial difference.

A difference that “Morro Velho” will show right at the beginning of its production, and which precisely because it is central will never be able to remove from Milton's horizon a capacity for observation that is at once distant and sentimental, which is affected by what it narrates, but whose capacity for critical formulation is only possible through racially demarcated distance.

Going a little beyond the limits of the film, it is possible to say that this is where the extremely ambiguous relationship that exists in Milton Nascimento's work with regard to the modernization of the 1964th century in Minas Gerais comes from, and which can be seen in songs such as “Ponta de Areia” and “Saudades dos Aviões da Panair (Conversando no Bar)”, both with lyrics by Fernando Brant. There, a nostalgia is created for the times of technical invention – the train and the airplane, respectively –, which promoted social integration with Minas Gerais as the radiating and receiving center, but which were left behind with the turnaround in the Brazilian modernization process signified by XNUMX (I follow Vinícius Gueraldo's analysis in his dissertation).

There is an interesting element here to think about Milton and which appears in the film when instrumentalists are interviewed, which resides in the combination of elements of modern music of his time (such as the jazz and bossa nova), with a modern style that was becoming obsolete amidst the many ruins of Minas Gerais. A scheme, by the way, that those versed in Roberto Schwarz’s interpretation of Tropicalism may seem familiar: a combination that indicates “the coexistence of manifestations linked to different phases of the same system” (as he states in “Cultura e política, 1964 – 1969”). The difference is that in Tropicalism the horizon is not one of overcoming, but of temporal freezing, which condemns as “our destiny” the now archaic condition of the colonial heritage.

4.

As seen, in Milton Nascimento there is the horizon of overcoming, but this precedes a critical elaboration of the national regressive forces, about which he speaks between observation and lamentation. It is here that something of the civil heroism that can be seen in songs from his work from the 1970s (especially those with lyrics by Fernando Brant) is fantastically combined with the modern sound form of fraying the limits of genres such as jazz and bossa nova, without however configuring a protest or pamphlet work – which may make one think when seen in comparison with the work of Edu Lobo, whose participation in the documentary was requested by Milton Nascimento, but did not materialize.

Thus, Milton Nascimento goes to the universal sound, merging and overcoming musical genres, via literal, geographical location, bringing with it the need for engagement of the Brazilian, Latin American artist, at the time – the close relationship established with Mercedes Sosa between the 1970s and 1980s in search of a Latin American heart is, in fact, a lack of the documentary.

In this regard, it is interesting to hear in the film what his fellow artists from Clube da Esquina have to say, the musical movement led by Milton in the midst of the “shortness of breath” of the first half of the 70s in Brazil. There it is also possible to see another fundamental genre influence sublimated by the Beatles, from which the rock can now be experimental without being alienated from the real problems of a world teeming with tensions in the 60s.

The rock filter, however, has been bringing elements from all the other influences. When Toninho Horta – whose main instrument is the guitar – says that Milton always let them play in the recordings of his work the way they wanted, without imposing rules of execution, how can we not see a presence of improvisation there? jazzy, which will also draw on part of bossa nova?

Or even when Lô Borges claims that Belo Horizonte was a city where music was made on every corner, and that the famous intersection between Divinópolis and Paraisópolis streets in the Santa Tereza neighborhood, where he played, was just one among many, how can we not see there a presence of community practices of life and social exchange in discontinuity throughout the world?

These practices, in fact, valued otherness, learning from others, and drawing on the libertarian and emancipatory experience of new forms of life and struggle identified as “counterculture,” which explains the collective dimension of many of Milton Nascimento’s works – “Clube da Esquina” was conceived with everyone together, collectively making arrangements, compositions and everything else. (I owe many of the analyses in the last paragraphs to Sheyla Diniz’s studies on the subject).

Having said all that, will anyone find the last scene of the documentary strange, when Milton Nascimento, sitting on the bed, is listening to – and dancing in his own way, thinking, vibrating, really enjoying – the first recording made by Ângela Maria of “Babalú”, the famous bolero by Margarita Lecuona, on the exquisite 1958 album with pianist Waldir Calmon?

It is worth remembering that one of the songs on “Clube da esquina” (the album with Lô Borges from 1972) is precisely the bolero “Two crosses", by Carmelo Larrea Carricarte, which appears there in this new sound by Milton that unites so much from a geographical and racial root. To conclude: the bolero, at the time of the album, was perhaps the most outdated of musical genres, condemned to decadence.

In any case, there are no limits to Milton Nascimento's capacity to aggregate; to aggregate in order to think together, even if what one thinks about hurts the still open wound. And above all because one does this to dream of some other becoming, always possible, with the awareness of the elaboration and the origins in mind.

That is why Pat Metheny is right when he says at a certain point in the film that “the most important thing to understand Milton Nascimento is to listen to Milton Nascimento”. This is because there is a focus on experience, something that is so forbidden in the current world of performances. Experience that, whether hot, in the middle of the whirlwind, or after the devastating storm, can transform what is there. Only then will “Nothing be the same again”.

*Vitor Morais is a history major at the University of São Paulo (USP).

Reference

Milton Bituca Birth
Brazil, documentary, 2025, 115 minutes.
Directed by: Flavia Moraes.
Screenplay: Flavia Moraes and Marcelo Ferla.

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