Tone Glow 173: Caxtrinho
An interview with the Brazilian singer-songwriter about the influence of Candomblé on his music, his connection with the Vanguarda Paulista artists of the 1980s, and living as a Black man in Brazil
Caxtrinho
Caxtrinho is a Brazilian singer-songwriter who released his debut studio album, Queda Livre (2024), on QTV Selo. One of Tone Glow’s Favorite Albums of 2024, it is a ferocious album that is in the lineage of Brazil’s experimental Vanguarda Paulista movement of the 1980s. Caxtrinho began working on these songs in 2020 and through live performances, his band found ways to develop each track, many of which sound different today. This willingness to improvise and continually morph these tracks is reflected in their unwieldy yet tight compositions. Despite being recorded in different studios and across a wide span of time, Renato Godoy—who mixed and mastered the record, as well as played on it—helped ensure it sounded cohesive.
With explicit mentions of race and class, Queda Livre is an album about living as a Black man in Brazil, often through a humorous lens—“Branca de Trança,” for example, is about a white woman with braids. Also crucial to Caxtrinho’s musical identity is the influence of the Candomblé religion, where pontos are sung to spirits called orixás—these songs are humorous, too. Caxtrinho has also released two live albums, one of which is under the Caxtrinho moniker and another one in the Orkestra Inventiva Som de Putãoe, which is more jazzy.
Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Caxtrinho on October 12th, 2024 to discuss how metal bands shaped how he plays guitar, the artists who have inspired him most, and the absurdity of life in Brazil. Mariana Mansur, Caxtrinho’s manager, also joined the conversation as an interpreter and to shed more insight into Brazil.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I wanted to start off by talking about where you were born. What sort of memories do you have of that place?
Caxtrinho: I’m from the ’90s. I am from one of the last generations that was really born in Belford Roxo, and I lived there until recently. Belford Roxo is a new municipality; it’s around thirty-three years old as a city, so it’s very connected to my generation because we were growing up in a city that was starting around the time we were born. It’s also a city where there’s music in the streets, in the bars, anywhere you’re walking—there’s music everywhere. It’s not only me, either; there’s a generation of musicians who were born in this area and are around my age—they’re composers and make their own songs. And this music is very inspired by the city itself; the music and the sounds are inside the lives of people who live there.
Mariana Mansur: Just so you understand, Belford Roxo is in what we call “big Rio de Janeiro.” Not Rio de Janeiro itself, but it’s around here. There’s a lot of these very full cities. Lots of them were made from removals—people that were removed from the city to places around it, and because it’s Rio, it’s a mix of city and countryside. You can go to Belford Roxo, and places around Belford Roxo, and there’s a lot of waterfalls and stuff like this. But it’s also a very chaotic city. I think it’s very important to understand geographically how it works to live there, because it’s around two hours from the city center. If you’ve got to take a bus, or other transportation, a lot of time in your life is spent in transit, to come to work or to live.
Do you have any early memories that inspired you to pursue music?
Caxtrinho: My family is very musical. My uncles, from my mother’s side, had a samba band that had a little success around Duque de Caxias—another city nearby Belford Roxo that is also around Rio—and they won prizes composing sambas. This is one memory.
Mariana Mansur: And his grandfather, the father of his mom, is still alive. He lives in France and he’s also a composer.
Caxtrinho: But I’m not a nepo baby! (laughter). There were always a lot of percussion instruments around the house to play. The family reunions, gathering together, was always a lot of music, a lot of samba, the whole family playing and singing.
Mariana Mansur: This is something that I think is very common in Brazilian families, to have a get-together, and someone who has the acoustic guitar plays the guitar, or someone who knows how to play anything will play—or even someone who doesn’t know how to play will play! (laughter). It’s something that is very Brazilian, to have live music and family parties. This is something that also influenced him very much, to have a lot of music going on all the time.
When did you first start composing your own songs?
Caxtrinho: I started when I was 17 or 18 years old—a little late. The guitar was something I saw at school; friends of mine were playing and I started wanting to understand how it worked. Then I started talking to my uncles, who also played a little bit. Before having a guitar, I used to play and make sounds with anything. It was not something I really planned to do but it happened, and now I play my own guitar.
I liked heavy metal when I was a teenager, so my compositions didn’t start like the ones I have nowadays. I started off playing rock and metal. I love Napalm Death, Beyond Creation, NOFX. Metal gave me an understanding of how to use the guitar as percussion, of playing like (Caxtrinho demonstrates, “duh-duh-duh-duh-duh”). It needs to be very fast and very accurate, and you’re doing things repeatedly—this is something I learned from metal. At the same time as I was starting to play guitar—and I played bass, also, in a band—I was learning how to play atabaque at my terreiro, in Candomblé, where I was initiated. [Editor’s Note: a terreiro is the temple that Candomblé practitioners attend].
So I started to relate rhythmically to how the music worked in terreiro, how I could use this together with stuff like samba. I could see that it was related, the way I could play both things. And I started with both styles at the same time so I could bring things from terreiro, like playing the atabaque, inside the compositions. The compositions became more like they are now; I started to grow an original way of doing things. I think it took four years to make my first good song.
What was your first good song?
Caxtrinho: “Papagaio”
What was missing in the previous songs you made? Why was this the first good one?
Caxtrinho: I developed some kind of rule. I was listening to other people from my own generation, and also asking people I liked to listen to my music. For example, when I first met Vovô Bebê, one of the producers on the record, he told me that my music was very light, not very…
Mariana Mansur: I don’t know how to translate this expression from Portuguese, but it’s “when you put sugar in the water.”
Caxtrinho: The music was very sweet, you know? And this was something that I used to compose, because I got interested in doing something different then. “Papagaio” is the first good song because it’s the song I worked at the most. Every part of the song, I put some effort into it. Also, that was the first song I heard and thought, “Okay, now I’m not copying anyone.” It was the first song that made me realize that I’m different from anyone I like.
Who were the artists that you thought you were copying previously?
Djavan, Duke Ellington, Jorge Aragão, Luiz Melodia, Jorge Ben. A lot of other music. For “Papagaio,” Djavan was the main reference. Djavan has this funk, pop, soul music that the song reflects, but I wanted to sound different somehow.
I’m wondering how you approach arranging music. On Queda Livre (2024), a lot of tracks have different musicians involved; how do you think about arranging the tracks, especially when you have all of these different influences and different changes within a single song?
Caxtrinho: I started the record around 2020. 2022 was when we started recording it, and 2024 was when we finished. Every musician on the record, in each song, composed their own lines. I composed my lines—the lyrics and melodies. Most of the songs are mine; I think there’s only one song that’s from Kau, and the other songs are me and somebody else. Another thing that’s important to understand is that we started recording the record in a very slow way. We had different places to record—at Vovô Bebê’s studio, at Eduardo Manso’s studio—and a lot of things were pre-recorded until 2023. Then there was a big mixing process.
Before we were recording, and at the same time, we were doing some presentations in Rio. There was this band: it was Manso, Vovô Bebê, Phill Fernandes—the drummer who plays on the record, but now we have a different drummer because Phill is with Oruã—and João Lourenço, the bass player. So most of the arrangements, and the things we thought up for the music, started while we were playing. The dynamics, and the way things work on the songs, most of them started while we were playing live, and we took them to record.
So you played these songs live, and that’s how they formed?
Caxtrinho: We played them a lot of times in different forms, and that’s how they developed. There were a lot of little concerts here in Rio.
Can you give an example of a song on the album where it started one way, and after playing it live multiple times it changed?
Caxtrinho: Almost all of the songs have this influence because the record was almost finished by 2022. At the same time, knowing Manso and Vovô Bebê, I know they don’t wanna do the same thing each time we play live. We’re always interested in doing something different, inventing new things in the music, not always repeating ourselves. Almost all of the songs are like this—they have been changing all this time, and they are, even now, different from the album. But I’m going to be doing more of the arrangements on the second record (laughter).
When you’re playing live, do you talk with the other band members about how you want to do things differently, or is it all improvisation? I’m curious about how that’s structured.
Caxtrinho: We rehearse a lot. Because we rehearse a lot, a lot of parts for the live concert are preconceived, but it’s free. It’s not like we talk to each other about what we’re going to do exactly.
Mariana Mansur: I haven’t seen Caxtrinho concerts that were the same, you know? All the time, he’s saying different things, in the music itself, in the way he sings, the way he talks to the audience. It depends on the way the audience responds to him, I think. But there are always some comedic things in the middle. I don’t know if he gets nervous, but I think he likes to throw a little comedy in, always something funnier than the song itself. He’s always playing with the audience somehow when he’s doing live concerts. The music’s structure is there, but something always happens that you won’t expect.
This element of humor, this comedy, how important is this for your music?
Caxtrinho: Living in Rio de Janeiro, you get used to absurd things happening all the time. You get used to the absurdity, and you start to see things as funny even when they’re not supposed to be. I can give a thousand examples. We had a governor that used to carry machine guns, you know? This kind of absurdity happens in Rio de Janeiro, and you gotta laugh at it somehow. If you don’t laugh at the absurdity, you’re going to go crazy.
Mariana Mansur: People are very focused on how social his music is, how he fights racism. If you don’t understand racism in Brazil, people say that you gotta listen to Caxtrinho. I was telling him that it’s funny because, for me, I listen to the songs and it’s very funny how he observes things. He’s a Black man living in Brazil, so it’s funny to think about a white girl in braids going to samba. And this happens! In Rio de Janeiro, this happens all the time. It’s not uncommon, and that’s why it’s funny. In that verse [of “Branca de Trança”], it’s like… we always see somebody like this! That’s how it works! And we’re not only being judgmental—it’s just funny. You have to laugh at things people wouldn’t laugh at.
I wanted to talk about that song, “Branca de Trança.” I think the image of the white woman in braids is so funny, and I love how the horns come in and add to the humor. You can imagine it as a soundtrack for some comedy movie. How did you approach that song lyrically, and are you often thinking about how the music can support the lyrics?
Caxtrinho: The music was composed by me and Xuxuvevo, my wife. We were doing a series of concerts live in Rio, in a place called Calma in Botafogo. It’s a very small place, and we did four or five concerts there for a whole month. This music happened there. While we were doing these concerts, it was supposed to be a jazz night, but it happened to have a lot of different people coming to see the concerts and also to play. There were a lot of friends coming together to watch me every week on Tuesdays. I was at home with Xuxu, and I told her I wanted to compose a song called “Branca de Trança.” I was thinking about the way the music sounds, listening to a lot of Itamar Assumpção, Vanguarda Paulista. The music happened between concerts.
Mariana Mansur: I think I remember him playing “Branca de Trança” for the first time in a concert. He was like, “We’re going to play a new song” and it was new for everybody—even the other guys in the band. It was very funny to watch. He doesn’t remember how the lyrics started for real; it was something they composed together.
Caxtrinho: I was playing in a Botafogo, which is a neighborhood in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro that is mostly white Brazilians. There’s a lot of white people, a lot of foreigners. It’s not near Belford Roxo—it’s very far—so it’s very dislocated from my reality of playing in bars in Belford Roxo or even in the city center. Even the people who come to the concerts are different.
At first, the record was supposed to have around 8 songs. But then “Merecedores”-—that’s the music from Kau—and “Branca de Trança” were the two songs that happened after the record was almost ready. The band liked the song so much that after they played it two times, they decided it should be on the record.
When I listen to the album, I always think of all the different Vanguarda Paulista artists from the ’80s. What inspiration did you take from these artists, be it their music or the way they approached the music industry?
Caxtrinho: It’s funny that everyone says it’s an influence, but the truth is that I didn’t know Itamar until 2021. And the first time I listened to Itamar was because someone compared me to him! There is something that’s very curious about him—he was erased from the music industry somehow and, after he died, we had more access to his music. It was not easy to find. In 2021 it was very easy, but for a while it was not something that was in the life of Brazilian people. You know, Djavan is in the life of every Black family in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, I know many guys called Djavan. But Itamar isn’t—or wasn’t. Now, the Black families are probably gonna have Itamar (laughter).
Luiz Melodia influenced a lot of the Vanguarda Paulista as a composer. Also, Itamar and Melodia had these comparison all the time—being from the margins of the industry, one Black man from Rio, the other Black man from Londrina, in Paraná. It’s a very different kind of Brazil. Melodia is the most influential artist for me, and I think that’s why I get compared to Vanguarda Paulista, because of his works from the ’70s and ’80s. There’s also Marku Ribas—a Brazilian singer who was also on the margins.
Since these influences you mention are all Black Brazilians, I’m curious how you view yourself in this lineage.
Caxtrinho: Being a Black man in Brazil is a very specific thing that’s influential to the way you live and experience things. Being a Black body is something that I’m starting to think about more, but it’s impossible not to attach it to my day-to-day life, my way of thinking, my way of making music. Even though these composers and influences are came from different generations or lived in different cities, being a Black man in Brazil meant that they could all go refer to the same sort of life experiences. Even though I didn’t personally know these composers or their music, having these experiences is always going to be influential.
I do want to ask about the song “Brankkkos.” I love the lyrics because you’re mentioning all these different things: “shitposting,” “Xbox,” “dental school,” “media-friendly,” “matching on Tinder.” This, along with the title, just paint an evocative picture. How did the song come about?
Caxtrinho: That’s my favorite song on the record. I did the melody first and then I sent it to a friend who said, “No, no this is too crazy, not gonna happen, forget this line.” The guy I sent the music to was a white guy, and whenever I try to do something that’s more percussive or use Black references in my music, people go, “This is too crazy! Let’s do it right! Let’s put it it the right place, this compass is not working!”
The premise of the song is that phenotypic traits are used against Black people—Afro hair, big lips—but at one point, people eventually started saying these were good things. So I thought of how this [caricature] would work if I was talking about white people from our time. What kinds of things only happen to white people? Matching on Tinder, having meat to eat. When I composed the song, it was right after the pandemic and everything was so expensive in Brazil, so people weren’t eating meat—it got crazy. This was an idea that was used politically, something that was well-known. I was playing with the idea of being a white person in Brazil. It has the funny parts—band T-shirts, things like this—very specific, and I was thinking about our contemporary times. Having Negro Leo on the track made it even better. This song was the music that had the most influence from Negro Leo—it sounds like a song he could’ve written.
That’s such a good story. I do want to ask about “Merecedores” too because it’s talking about class. I’m curious about that song’s story.
Caxtrinho: That song is by the composer Kau. I’m not behind the music, but Kau had a discussion with a right-wing Brazilian person—we call them “Bolsominions,” the minions of Bolsonaro—and the guy was saying that people don’t get things because they don’t make an effort for them. Things like, “You can’t do this music, because you don’t make an effort!" Having this discussion made Kau go home and do the song, for the ones who deserve it. I listened to this song, and I liked the tempo very much—it’s almost a pop song, and you feel you’ve heard it before, but then the tempo goes backwards. We started playing it live at one of those Calma concerts in Botafogo and liked it very quickly. We recorded it for the album like a rehearsal, almost live. The music had these backwards elements, and then Manso, the producer, decided that he was going to play the samples he used throughout the album but backwards. So the whole song has samples from the whole record but played in reverse.
Amazing.
Caxtrinho: For all of the songs on the record, it’s the band and me singing, and participation varies sporadically, but the music has big atmospheres. Things are often added after we think of the song itself. This song was one of the songs where I liked how it was sounding, and thought it could be taken further by adding more people. This happened because the band wanted to do things freely from the start; we were not thinking of writing scores. We did a concert with Tori, one of the singers on “Merecedores,” and it was very nice; I wanted her to be on the record. And Bruno Schiavo, who’s one of the singers too.
The music involves lots of people and lots of things happened. Ana Frango Elétrico was supposed to sing too, but she listened and was like, “There’s a lot of singing already, so I’m going to do vocal things on the piano!” All the musicians could decide individually what to do with their lines. It’s very nice how she plays at the end of the song. It’s crazy because it’s not a Caxtrinho song itself—it’s the only song that’s not—but it’s one of the songs that’s most like my way of singing and doing things.
I love that the song comes after “Samba Errado,” which is one of the most straightforward on the album. If you’re interested in having all these elaborate arrangements in your songs, what’s it like to strip everything down?
Caxtrinho: The music is very old, I did it in 2021.
Mariana Mansur: That is not very old, Caxtrinho! (laughter). It’s old for a 25-year-old!
Caxtrinho: I have a lot of new songs! (laughter). This song was one I started in 2021, and in the lyrics, I was very revolted and angry with life. I saw that Romulo Fróes, my partner in composing the song, was posting lyrics and verses on his Instagram Story. I was interested in Romulo’s work, and I talked to Bernardo Oliveira—also a QTV member—and he told me, “If you want to compose with Romulo, here’s his WhatsApp. Talk to him, send this song to him.” We started talking and we made five songs together in a row. “Samba Errado” has this simpler way of being because of the relationship to Romulo’s approach of writing a song. It’s not because of me, but because of the relationship I developed with his songwriting. João Bosco is an influence—I was listening to a lot of João Bosco at the time.
I’m curious how your Candomblé heritage feeds into the music that you make, or how you think about music. How do you see a link there?
Caxtrinho: Candomblé, this cultural heritage, is something that’s very important in Brazil, but for a long time the African-based religions were treated with prejudice and denial. You have a lot of Catholic and Neo-Pentecostalism influence in Brazil. To be someone from Macumba was not something easy to do or say. My mother was a person who had this heritage, but she didn’t [explore] it like someone in the terreiro. She only began after a long time. I didn’t have that experience as a child, but it was something that was always inside me and it grew once I was 19 and really started going to the terreiro. In the terreiro, I was initiated as something called an ogã.
I was in the military in Brazil—the military service is obligatory. You can get rid of the obligation, but that’s not the reality for most Black people in Brazil. A lot of people in music come from the military, and there’s a lot of influence from the military on Black music in Brazil because it was a way you could make a living. At the same time, you can’t perform the Macumba in the military—it’s not something that’s accepted. So it happened for me a little late, but you can’t deny it as a heritage.
The relationship between Candomblé and my music happens not only in the way I play, but also in the compositions themselves. Once I started to know more pontos—the kind of music played in the terreiros—there was a lot of music for each orixá (“spirit”). (Caxtrinho starts singing “Ponto para Caboclo”). Caboclos, for instance. A caboclo is a mix of Indian and Brazilian—it’s another kind of entity, not something that came from Africa, but something that’s from Brazil. The forest people. The richness of the melodies, the way the melody sees itself and how it works on the songs, influenced the way I compose.
Mariana, the text you sent me in the chat, is that the name of the song [“Ponto para Caboclo”]?
Mariana Mansur: Yes. I’m not sure if you’ll be able to find it. A lot of these songs aren’t recorded, you know? You’ve got to be in the terreiro and listen to it to know the song. There’s a lot of recordings of these Afro-descended Brazilian chants, but there are a lot! In every part of Brazil there is a different kind of song for something different.
What is the relationship between these pontos and your music? What would be different for how you write songs if you didn’t have this heritage?
Caxtrinho: It’s in the percussive aspect of my guitar—I can’t see it as only a harmonic instrument. It’s also in the way that I write songs. Many of these pontos are about everyday life. They have some humor, also. The way Luiz Melodia, Djavan, and all these artists connect is through this influence of the Black experience across different generations. The Candomblé heritage has been in the music for a long time, and it’s something that was always there for us—not only through making glorious music for the orixás, but also in our day-to-day life. There are pontos for malandros. A malandro is like a joker—the life of this person is not what white people would consider an honest life. But the malandro is somebody who is always in the imagination of samba for a Black person in Brazil.
Mariana Mansur: He is thinking of a song, “Maria Padilha.” Pombajira is a woman that comes to Earth, and she is very provocative, she gets men crazy, and she is somebody that is adored. If you’re having relationship problems, like your husband doesn’t want you anymore, you go to the Maria Padilha and she’s gonna help you.
Caxtrinho: She’s the Cabaret Queen. But she’s not a hoe (laughter). She does spiritual works. There’s spiritual works that this entity does, and she helps people—not only with love, but with health, family, and other things like this.
Mariana Mansur: It’s funny, this word that we use—“works” or “trabalhos.” You do a work for the entity, the orixá, and you get back something that’s positive. These kinds of entities are from the streets—malandros, Pombajira. Also, we have another kind of Candomblé, which is Umbanda. When Candomblé wasn’t allowed, Black people had Umbanda, something that they invented. It’s very crazy. Everywhere in Brazil, there are different kinds of entities that are related to the people who live there. So it’s kind of complicated—you have these entities from the streets in Brazil that are gonna help you in the afterlife and your life here. They have this humorous way of dealing with things, and the music is kind of humorous, too.
Is there anything you wanted to talk about that we didn’t talk about today?
Caxtrinho: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this work. It’s been very intense—the way the music connected to people from around the world. We have been very happy with this reception. Hopefully we all can meet in real life someday!
I end all my interviews with the same question. Can you share one thing that you love about yourself?
Caxtrinho: I love the fact that I constructed a character, and that this character doesn’t lie to himself.
Mariana Mansur: He’s saying that he constructed a character—Caxtrinho—and that he doesn’t lie to himself. It’s a difficult thing to translate! (laughter).
Caxtrinho: I’m sorry! (laughter).
Are you saying the character doesn’t lie to your real self?
Caxtrinho: I lie to myself, but my character doesn’t lie to himself.
Mariana Mansur: It’s not a character, exactly, but he calls it a character. We also write his name with an “x,” and so we have to obligate people from São Paulo to say his name right—“CASH-treen-yo” not “CASS-treen-yo.” We gotta be very specific about being from Rio de Janeiro. Somehow, despite his character, he’s a real person from Rio de Janeiro, even in the way of writing his name.
Caxtrinho’s Queda Livre is out now via the QTV Selo Bandcamp page. Caxtrinho has also released two live albums, one of which is under the Caxtrinho moniker and another one in the Orkestra Inventiva Som de Putãoe.
Thank you for reading the 173rd issue of Tone Glow. There’s just so much music out there with little information online—how beautiful.
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