Tone Glow 229: Grupo Um
An interview with the legendary Brazilian jazz group about kickstarting the Vanguarda Paulistana movement, playing with Hermeto Pascoal, and their new archival LP, 'Nineteen Seventy Seven' (1977/2026)
Grupo Um
Grupo Um is a legendary Brazilian avant-garde jazz group started in 1975 by brothers Lelo Nazário and Zé Eduardo Nazário. The Nazário brothers’ unique music was a result of Lelo’s interest in musique concrète—an extreme rarity at the time in Brazil—combined with Zé Eduardo’s jazz chops, exemplified by his stint in Hermeto Pascoal’s band. Grupo Um released three albums during their initial run—Marcha Sobre a Cidade (1979), Reflexões Sobre a Crise do Desejo (1981), and A Flor de Plástico Incinerada (1982)—the latter of which was released on the Lira Paulistana record label. However, they also had two recording sessions in 1975 and 1977 that were left unreleased for decades, and those recordings have now been unearthed via two archival releases: Starting Point (2023) and Nineteen Seventy Seven (2026), both issued by Far Out Recordings. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Lelo and Zé Eduardo on January 18th, 2026 to discuss their upbringing, their collective and solo efforts, and the Vanguarda Paulistana movement. Special thanks to Henrique Quadros for interpreting and translating.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Both of you were born in the 1950s in Brazil. What are the earliest memories you have of music in your life, moments when you realized the beauty of music and that it was something to devote your life to?
Zé Eduardo Nazário: I’ll start because I was born first (laughter). I was born in 1952 in São Paulo, Brazil. My father was an important journalist at Diário de São Paulo, one of the most important newspapers at the time. It was founded by Assis Chateaubriand, who was the Brazilian ambassador in London from 1957 to 1960, and he brought television to Brazil in the mid-1950s [Editor’s Note: Chateaubriand founded Tupi TV, which was the first television network in Brazil]. My mother was a music lover and she listened to the radio all the time. When I was 3 years old, I’d be in the kitchen listening to these singers and orchestras… I found it very impressive. I started to listen to some records as well, like classical music.
When I was 9 years old, I started to learn piano with a private teacher, an old woman. I used to go to Mococa, my mother’s hometown, where I had two cousins who were older than me. They had a fabulous discotheque where they played the best of bossa nova, samba-jazz, and American jazz. At about 10 years old, I was listening to Max Roach, Roy Haynes, Buddy Rich, Philly Joe Jones, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins… that’s what made me fall in love with the drum set: the things that those musicians were doing with phrasing, harmony, everything.
I started to ask for a drum set. It took me some time, but when I was 12, I got my first one. As I had been studying piano beforehand, it was extremely easy for me to pick up the drums—I was playing in no time. My cousins were studying in São Paulo and one of them was also a percussionist, so he showed me some things. Edison Machado, one of my idols and one of the inventors of samba-jazz on drums, as well as Dom Um Romão, Hélcio Milito, and Milton Banana… my cousin showed me what those guys were doing and I quickly embraced it. When I was 13, I met some guys who were more or less the same age as me and we formed a trio that we called Xangô Três.
We started playing at parties, in clubs, and we had some jam sessions. We went to a college concert, though we weren’t supposed to be there. A lot of people wanted to play there. This was in 1965, when bossa nova was still the main thing going on, and people were packing houses every single time. I had my drum sticks under my arm and I spoke to the nun responsible for the event—this was a Catholic school, so the nuns took care of everything—and I said, “Sister, we came to play the show!” I opened my box to show her my drum sticks and she said, “Go to this place and you’ll arrive at the venue,” so we went. When we got there, another girl asked me, “Who are you?” I said, “We are Xangô Três.” She looked at the artist list and said, “But you’re not here, who called you?” I said, “My mother told me on the phone that this guy told us to come here to play.” The girl didn’t know what to say (laughter).
Musicians started to come out, and this was a festival with several important groups like Zimbo Trio and Bossa Jazz Trio, and we knew some of these guys from the spaces we played. The venue got full and the show was about to start, but one of the members wasn’t there. The girl looked at us and said, “You start the show.” I couldn’t believe it. We went on stage and played three songs and it was a huge success. People were like (imitates a crowd cheering and clapping) and there was a guy—a famous piano player and composer—who was watching. After the show he came up to us and enthusiastically said, “You have to come on my radio program.” His name was Mário Albanese, the inventor of the jequibau, which is a 5/4 kind of bossa nova. We went to the radio show and did well, and he showed the jequibau to us.
Several weeks later, we came back and I instinctively played a beat with my bass drum and hi-hat which had never been done on record until that time. Drummers only played the hi-hat and the click on the snare like (imitates a type of rhythm) and I instinctively did (imitates a different type of rhythm) where I transformed the 5/4 into 10/4, you know? When we returned to the Mário Albanese show, we showed him that. He had a partner, the maestro Cyro Pereira, who was also a composer. He wrote down my beat, and that became the official jequibau beat that was used for anyone who wanted to learn. And then Mário Albanese started calling me to play with him on major TV shows and at universities. I was his drummer for everything he did because most of the professional drummers at the time—who were 20 years older than me—had trouble playing that 5/4 with the hi-hat on the 2 while being free to play the rest of the kit. So that was how my professional life began.
How old were you?
Zé Eduardo Nazário: 13 years old.
Wow, incredible.
Zé Eduardo Nazário: That was the beginning of everything for me. Now Lelo can tell his history.
Lelo Nazário: For me it was simpler, in the sense that I started learning the piano at 4 years old, and I didn’t really dedicate myself to starting a professional career from a young age. One day, when I was only 5 years old, a friend of ours gave me the record Musique Concrète N° 1 (1959), which featured the works of Michel Philippot, Luc Ferrari, and Pierre Schaeffer. I really enjoyed this mixture of all kinds of sounds, this construction of brand new sounds that could be modified and become other things. So I began my musical study by studying classical music and attempting to achieve sounds through small sound experiments.
When Zé started playing the drums, he already knew what he wanted to be—he really wanted to be a drummer, a musician. But when I started playing the piano, my intentions were solely to study music, and only later on when we started working together did I decide on making music a career. When I started studying, I was mainly interested in contemporary erudite music, which treated music very differently—it used sounds instead of tones as a form of personal expression. Musique concrète started out like that, and then there was Stockhausen, who began doing experiments with electronic instrumentation. I was really drawn to this, to such an extent that when I started my professional life later on, I tried doing this sort of sound work in the experiments we did. Even when we played as a duo at home, we’d do sound experiments, modifying sounds—Zé would modify percussion instruments. We’d play around with the intention of creating completely different sounds.
I imagine most people in your life weren’t familiar with musique concrète or electroacoustic music. I know in Brazil there weren’t people releasing electroacoustic music until later in the 1970s, like Jorge Antunes. Were there other people around you listening to this? How were you studying this music?
Lelo Nazário: When I was given that Pierre Schaeffer record, barely no one talked about this type of music with the exception of professors at universities who had studied in Europe. So when I got a hold of it, I was amazed by the work, and it directed me towards a certain type of research. But really, in Brazil, it was very unknown outside of these small pockets like Jorge Antunes, and in Bahia there was [Walter] Smetak who experimented with building instruments for contemporary music.
Who did you get the record from?
Lelo Nazário: Just a family friend.
That’s so random! (laughter).
Lelo Nazário: Not a musician, either, just an intellectual who was friends with people at home.
When did you first meet the other members of the band? Do you remember your first impressions of them?
Zé Eduardo Nazário: I used to call people over to my home. We had the piano, my drum set, and the bass because of my first trio. Sometimes we had jam sessions at home. Since I was the older brother, I was able to go to the streets. This was because my mother had to take care of my three younger brothers. Lelo was born in 1956 and the other two were born in 1958 and 1960, so there was a similar age gap between each of them. I was going outside to see concerts, and São Paulo had many good musicians in the early 1960s. Before the dictatorship, which started in 1964 but took some time before it got strict in terms of going out—between 1967 and 1970 were the worst years—I was able to take a cab downtown to visit my father at the newspaper office and go to record stores. I started playing with a great Brazilian piano player, Tenório Jr., he’s the guy who recorded the Edison Machado é Samba Novo (1964) record, which was one of the top records of that time. He also has his own solo record. He was murdered in Argentina in 1976 when he was playing with Toquinho and Vinicius de Moraes—it’s a famous case.
So I started calling musicians over to our home, and Lelo was there watching [people like] Mário Albanese and Tenório Jr. play the piano. It’s a different kind of approach—it’s jazz harmony, you know? And it’s all kinds of jazz—samba-jazz, everything. I gave Lelo a harmony book that a friend had given to me. In a few days, Lelo was composing very interesting things for piano. His mathematical mind is something incredible: he was studying physics at university, and he had an argument with the program director because they weren’t teaching him the necessary knowledge for what he wanted to do, like maybe going to NASA as a physicist. So that was the beginning of us playing together. Some of these songs are on Starting Point (1975/2023), which was released by Far Out Recordings. Did you listen to that record?
Yes, I have.
Zé Eduardo Nazário: Some of that was composed in a few days. I was like, “Wow! This guy’s a genius! Let’s play together!” (laughter). And so we started playing. I have a lot of percussion instruments, and I had a percussion group with Guilherme Franco. He was a percussionist and, in 1972, he went to the United States where he played and recorded with all the major jazz musicians, like McCoy Tyner, Woody Shaw, Archie Shepp…
Lelo Nazário: He also played with Keith Jarrett in his group.
Zé Eduardo Nazário: Yeah, he was very famous. Airto Moreira was also very famous because he played with Miles during Bitches Brew (1969).
Zé Eduardo Nazário: Hermeto Pascoal was a great percussion player and made many records, and we had a percussion group in São Paulo. It was the first percussion group that had a mixture of written tunes from composers and improvisations, and these had three drums, berimbau, and every Brazilian percussion instrument. So me and Lelo started playing and spent hours playing at my parents’ home. Brazil had become really difficult for a young musician like myself to have a musical career. There came an opportunity to work in the United States; I was invited to Minneapolis, and they got me a work visa in 1973.
I was about to go, but the telephone rang and it was Nenê, a great Brazilian drummer who was playing with Hermeto Pascoal at the time. Hermeto had recorded his first record in Brazil, A Música Livre de Hermeto Pascoal (1973), in 1972, and Nenê said, “Zé, Hermeto needs a drummer and percussionist because Annunciação,” who was his percussionist and drummer, “became sick and went to Salvador, Bahia to stay with his family. Hermeto needs a drummer to perform at a gig in Londrina, Paraná.” I played the gig, and the following week when I went to Hermeto’s home to get my fee, he invited me to be part of his group. So I gave up travelling to the United States because I was going there to play bossa nova, and Hermeto was the one and only musician who could give me a chance to create, because he was a creator, you know? So I started playing with him in 1973.
Lelo Nazário: Who were you going to play with in Minneapolis?
Zé Eduardo Nazário: I was going to play with Manfredo Fest and another guy whose name escapes me right now. Brazilian musicians needed Brazilian drummers, because at that time it was a specialist thing. American drummers still didn’t play samba well—it’s not like today, where American drummers play samba well and Brazilian drummers play jazz well too. With Hermeto, we started to play for several hours a day, every day. I did that for four years. Hermeto would get invited to make arrangements for singers or for commercial jingles, and every time, he would ask me to play for these recordings. It was a fantastic thing that happened in my life.
I started inviting Lelo to come to the Hermeto rehearsals. At 9 o’clock, we were at Hermeto’s house, we’d have some breakfast, and we’d go to the room outside the house to start playing. Sometimes, Hermeto would appear with a soprano saxophone and play with us. That was before the official rehearsals would start with the other musicians in the band. But one day, Nenê had left the group to play with Elis Regina, and Lelo was invited to join the group. We started a trio with bassist Zeca Assumpção. That was the trio that recorded Starting Point. Hermeto would travel abroad sometimes because he’d get invited to play at a festival in Germany, or Airto would call him to record Slaves Mass (1977) in the United States. Because of this, there were days when the trio would get together and play a lot. We started to develop our compositions this way, and that’s how Grupo Um started.
This is a question for both of you. What do you feel you learned from your time playing with Hermeto? What was he able to teach you, and maybe not just directly but also from being in his presence?
Zé Eduardo Nazário: Well, he had some amazing compositions that needed a special kind of drumming. On YouTube, you can listen to several rehearsals—hours of them—that were recorded by this guy. It’s a recent upload. I listen to that and [think], “Wow, man…” they play again, again, and again… it’s a search for perfection. So there was learning in everything—it just came with playing. Before that, I was studying a lot; I spent hours every day at my parents’ house playing with Lelo and alone, and I was picking up new instruments—things I’d find on the street that had a really good sound—and I’d put it on my barraca de percussão [percussion tent], which was a mountain of things that I put around the drums. There were a lot of instruments. Hermeto was fundamental to my career. In my point of view, he was the most important musician to play with at that time in the world.
Lelo Nazário: What I liked most about Hermeto’s compositions was his harmony design. Even though he learned everything about jazz and bossa nova when he came to São Paulo—he played that really well—he developed a way of harmonizing that was completely different from the entire jazz school. He no longer thought about degrees, and of course he knew them from playing jazz and bossa nova, but he thought of each chord independent of degrees. He could construct a piece with a harmony that starts, let’s say, at a C7, then he changes to F#, then it goes to an A, independent of any tonal relationship. And then he creates a melody on top of these large harmonic shifts. Sometimes we played songs that had eight chords in a bar—eight completely different chords. And these weren’t chords that were just one degree above one another, or dominant to tonic… no, he’d simply change everything, he’d make four completely different chords, and he’d construct a melody on top of these very rapid harmonic shifts.
So he invented a highly complex harmonic system, something that was very particular to him. That’s something that impressed me a lot when I started playing with him, and it was very nice to learn how it was made. I saw that he deviated completely from the harmonic scheme of traditional jazz and even the American avant-garde jazz that was being played back then. It was a completely unique way of creating harmony.
With the first recordings that you guys made in 1975 that are in the Starting Point album, did you have a specific vision for what you wanted your music to sound like? You were familiar with working with Hermeto, with jazz and musique concrète, did you specifically set out to record music that would be new or groundbreaking in this way?
Zé Eduardo Nazário: We just recorded what we were already playing together. Whenever we had the opportunity to play as a trio, we developed these compositions that we had. So if you look at the record, you’ll see that for the berimbau solo, I was studying a lot of berimbau. And it wasn’t only the folklore aspects of berimbau, but I was going even further by improvising and creating different phrases and rhythms. Zeca spent some time at Berklee in Boston—he studied a course there—and he had a very wonderful technique and sound. And Lelo had his own compositions. This was the thing: when we got together as a trio, we played the music that we had in the moment. That was enough to make a some music, but it wasn’t even 30 minutes total. And that’s what we were capable of doing in a studio near my house. I used to record a lot in this studio called Vice Versa. I was a friend of the owner, the maestro Rogério Duprat, who was responsible for the Tropicália movement with Gilberto Gil. He was his arranger, as well as the arranger for other Tropicália artists.
I met my first wife in ’74 and I moved to Pinheiros in a place that was like a basement, where I could barely sit down on my drums because the roof was touching my head. I was talking to Rogério Duprat, who was building his big studio—there were two in the building, a small one and a bigger one—and he said, “Bring your drum set here. We still have some time before the studio is done so you can study.” And I brought my drums to the studio, and when the studio was ready, we were invited to test the sound. Me, Zeca, and Lelo went to the studio to do just that, so Starting Point was really a test of this studio. Fortunately, Lelo kept the tape and preserved it in good condition, and then digitized it and everything. That’s why we have the Starting Point record, the Hermeto Pascoal & Grupo Vice Versa record, and now Nineteen Seventy Seven—it was because he preserved those tapes and kept the music alive.
Lelo Nazário: We were already in Hermeto’s group, but we had this intention of creating our own, which would later on become Grupo Um, but we were only a trio. It was this cozinha [“kitchen,” a nickname given to this trio of musicians] that played with Hermeto: me, Zé, and Zeca. We decided to play things that I had composed alongside Zé’s material. We rehearsed this a lot and when the opportunity came to record at Vice Versa, we felt we had already rehearsed enough. There was a nice grand piano in the studio and it was properly tuned, so I ended up making a prepared piano piece for the album, which was more common in contemporary classical music but not so common in jazz. I just held on to these tapes for all these years. And as we kept producing other records, they ended up getting left behind. We’d go on to record other music, we’d try to release it, but because of all the problems in the music industry, we’d set them aside and move on to the next project.
So you hadn’t released the material from the first recording session by the time you had the second session in 1977, but what happened to that material? Why couldn’t those songs get released?
Zé Eduardo Nazário: We were playing many good concerts with Hermeto until 1976. Hermeto recorded Slaves Mass and had abandoned the idea of releasing those crazy 1976 Vice Versa sessions, which included a 26-minute song called “Casinha Pequenina” with crazy solos (laughter). Even Hermeto thought, “Well, let’s move on to the Slaves Mass record” because that had good marketing and everything. And then, he recorded with Flora Purim during his time in the United States, and he got some good money from that. He had this dream to live near his parents in Rio de Janeiro, at Bairro Jabour where his father was a shopkeeper. So he bought a house there near his parents and moved. We had two options: we could go with him to Rio de Janeiro, because at that time we had to rehearse every day, or leave the group. It was a very difficult decision for me to leave Hermeto’s group, but that’s what I did. My son Ian was born in September 1976 and my first wife didn’t want to go to Bairro Jabour because there wasn’t much in the way of structure for us to live there. We lived in a small but very good house. I had a basement where we rehearsed, and I was also starting to teach—many people wanted to learn what I was doing, and they wanted to play with me, so I started getting a lot of students.
Lelo and Zeca didn’t want to go to Rio either. We had this trio, and we were invited to perform at a concert that I called “Concerto para Ian,” after my son. That was our first good gig, in March 1977, which was after we left Hermeto’s group. We invited Roberto Sion, Carlinhos Gonçalves, the trumpet player Marcio Montarroyos, some singers, and Luiz Roberto Oliveira, who brought the first synthesizer to Brazil in the early 1970s. We had a lot more material at this point, so we played this big concert at Parque Morumbi in São Paulo, and it was crowded. The people loved our music—it was a surprise that they went crazy for what we were doing. We talked amongst ourselves and said, “Why don’t we record something?” But the studio was very small, it was Studio B at Vice Versa, so we did a quintet formation with Roberto Sion and Carlinhos Gonçalves. That’s the Nineteen Seventy Seven record.
I went to recording companies in Rio de Janeiro, but none of them were interested in releasing that kind of music. It was still a difficult time in Brazil for new things. By then, we were already calling this formation Grupo Um, but we only really became Grupo Um in 1979 when we finally recorded an independent record. It was like opening a window for us and for a lot of other artists in Brazil. We made the first independent instrumental record in Brazil. Before that, only Antonio Adolfo had recorded something, an LP called Feito em Casa (1977), but it had songs. [Editor’s Note: Feito em Casa is largely considered one of the first independent records in Brazil, notable for LPs being hand-stamped and independently distributed. Lula Côrtes & Lailson’s Satwa (1973) is often cited as the first independent Brazilian album]. Our record was conceptualized as an instrumental record, and that’s very important. We weren’t making a record for the market—the music was the most important thing.
Lelo Nazário: When we recorded Nineteen Seventy Seven, I was already working with synthesizers. Luíz Roberto Oliveira brought the first ARPs to Brazil: the ARP 2600 and the ARP 2500. I started working with him and learning how to interface with synthesizers. I ended up creating, at the studio, a piece called “Mobile/Stabile,” which is entirely composed of electronic sounds in a way where musicians could play their parts on top of this electronic base. So it was the first time we recorded an electroacoustic piece with a jazz group, with free jazz elements and contemporary music on top of an electroacoustic base. So we did this in this record for the first time.
What was the thought process behind making that track? Were you just trying to see what could happen if you put these different styles of music together?
Lelo Nazário: Actually, I started composing this song by going to the studio and recording many sounds from these three synthesizers that I had access to: the ARP 2600; the EMS Synthi AKS, which was a small synthesizer but very appropriate for contemporary music and finding new timbres and combining sounds through oscillators; and the Moog, which was also there at the studio. I captured many different sounds from all these synthesizers, and I combined them into eight mono tapes. Then, in order to produce the master tape, I spliced each of the tapes. The sounds are really short, so I’d splice them with a tape editor and compose each of the tracks, and then I would remix them into a stereo master tape. With this, I had a base from which we could play on later. So often we’d stipulate, like, “In this brief segment we’ll only play staccato, in this one we’ll do long phrases.” This would eventually change during rehearsal. So it was a sort of composition that had an electronic base on a magnetic tape, and we played on top of this tape with certain pre-determined parameters. Eventually these parameters changed and became less strict as we worked out each section from the piece. But that’s basically how it was constructed.
Did you perform live concerts with these electroacoustic compositions? What was the response from the people who saw your music? I’m sure this music wasn’t something they were likely familiar with.
Zé Eduardo Nazário: Well… (laughter). We have a very nasty story about this. It was during the 1978 São Paulo Jazz Festival, which was the first São Paulo Jazz Festival, and it happened in combination with the Monterey Jazz Festival. Everyone from Monterey came to São Paulo and it was broadcast on TV Cultura in São Paulo. It was a huge festival that lasted several days with everyone you could possibly imagine, including very famous American jazz musicians. John McLaughlin was there with his group, and there were Brazilian groups as well. I was playing with Egberto Gismonti—we did a very good record called Nó Caipira in 1978. I played with him, I think, on a Wednesday, which was the same day as Ahmad Jamal. It was a great concert, but on the last day of the festival, it was supposed to be Márcio Montarroyos. He had made a record with Steve Grossman, Gene Perla, and Erasto Vasconcelos. His concert was supposed to be performed with this group. They were in Rio de Janeiro, but something happened three weeks before the festival: Márcio had a disagreement with the guys, and I don’t know why. He called me, and I was at my father’s place. I was with my instruments, preparing for the gig with Egberto. He said, “Zé, I want to play at the concert with Grupo Um” because he had played with us in “Concerto para Ian” and in Hermeto’s group as well. I said, “Well, Márcio, we don’t have time to learn your material,” and he said, “No! I want to play Grupo Um’s material. Your compositions,” and so we did. I went to São Paulo and we spoke to the director of TV Cultura.
We were told that we could play four compositions, and we had 15 minutes for each one, so this was a one-hour program. There was an evening concert and then a later night concert. At the evening concert, “Mobile/Stabile” was the last composition, and at that concert we played all four compositions and nobody said anything to us. Right before the night concert was about to start, an organizer came to me and asked, “Is it possible to leave the last composition out?” I told him no, that we arranged four compositions that were 15 minutes each and that everything was timed perfectly. When the song started, they shut down the tape recorder and we were asked to leave the stage. There was a fight backstage, it was terrible. They had a jury of four people who didn’t understand anything about jazz, you know? Maybe they knew some mainstream jazz, but our “Mobile/Stabile” was “degenerate art” to them, like something from World War II. They just wanted these perfect paintings of flowers. They censored us and it became a topic of discussion in newspapers—a lot of articles were written. To me it was terrible because I was very prepared to play this new music and maybe, finally, get an opportunity to make a record. This experience really strengthened our belief that we should make an independent record.
Lelo Nazário: It was exactly as Zé said. When they cut the sound on stage, we were forced to stop. On one hand this was really bad because we lost this opportunity to broadcast our music on television. The evening concert was not gonna be shown on TV, but the night concert was being broadcast to the entire country. Of course, this is why they insisted on us not playing “Mobile/Stabile.” But on the other hand, this caused a big revolt among other musicians who were attending the festival, as well as with other artists who clearly saw that censorship was happening. It gave us a certain spotlight, and it even led to us playing concerts later on because audiences were curious to hear something that had been censored. In the concerts that we did later on, like at Lira Paulistana, there was a larger audience because of this notoriety.
Did you feel like there was a sense of community among musicians making more experimental work? There was the Vanguarda Paulistana movement that was born out of the Lira Paulistana label and venue, with artists like Itamar Assumpção, Arrigo Barnabé, Eliete Negreiros. I’m curious if you felt more accepted later on.
Zé Eduardo Nazário: In September 1979, we recorded Marcha Sobre a Cidade (1979). In the beginning of 1980, I lived on Rua Teodoro Sampaio, which was where Lira Paulistana was located. I was walking on the street and I saw some guy painting the wall and I asked, “What’s this place going to be?” “It will be a small theater.” This was the owner who said that and was painting the wall. I said, “I’m Zé Eduardo Nazário. I recently toured with Egberto Gismonti and John McLaughlin, and both groups played throughout Brazil and Argentina. I have a new group now and we need to release an independent record that we produced.” “Oh, nice.” We spoke and scheduled a series of shows at the theater. It was the first thing that happened in the theater. Grupo Um played there in February 1980. We did some marketing with newspapers and a famous critic came to see us and he loved it. He wrote a whole page in the paper about us.
Nothing was happening in São Paulo at that time because it was Carnaval, which in São Paulo is a dead thing, you know? There were no big parties like in Rio de Janeiro. All of this attracted a lot of musicians and other groups to the theater, and they started programming their shows there too. Some of those musicians you talked about started out thanks to that first successful gig we had, which was for the release of Marcha Sobre a Cidade. And then a lot of instrumental musicians, who were not really like Grupo Um—they were more like samba-jazz artists—started to book shows at the theater as well. It was what started the movement. Many singers as well, like Arrigo Barnabé, Ná Ozzetti, Suzana Salles, Vânia Bastos, and Itamar Assumpção started looking to the Lira Paulistana theater, but Grupo Um was the first group to call attention to the space.
Lelo Nazário: Lira opened at a time when there was an increased interest for new music—music that had a different language than what was already happening. What I liked about the Lira organizers was that they had this mentality of hosting anything that was a breath of fresh air, that showcased a fresh way of thinking. They really believed in this new musical mentality that was emerging in São Paulo, and they created a space where all this creativity could be manifested.
How did performing live inform the music that you created later on? Do you feel like it was important to play live in order to have the studio sessions that led to the three albums that were officially released?
Zé Eduardo Nazário: We were accustomed to playing live, as I’d done it since I was 13 years old. I was playing live on television and radio, and I played shows with several musicians. I’ve told you the names of only some of them, but I played with a lot of musicians—the telephone never stopped ringing (laughter). What was important was to release something that was musically new, and Marcha Sobre a Cidade was different.
Lelo Nazário: Playing live is important in the sense that you play it “hotter.” You have live audience feedback and you notice that this feedback gives you energy to take risks and make more forward-thinking type of music. Grupo Um started playing live at Lira and this gave the group this force; music grows when you play it live. When we went over to the studio, we ended up playing more “outwardly” than if we had only done rehearsals.
I’m curious to know what each of you brings to Grupo Um individually aside from the instruments themselves. Is there something more indirect, like a philosophy, that each of you has that shapes the music? In 1982, both of you recorded your own solo albums: Zé had Poema da Gota Serena (1983), which Lelo plays on, but then Lelo also had Lágrima / Sursolide Suite (1982). These two albums are really different.
Zé Eduardo Nazário: I learned Indian music with Lakshminarayana Shankar when I traveled with Egberto and John McLaughlin’s band. When we were staying in our hotels, I’d go into Lakshmirnarayana’s room and he’d teach me about South Asian music. I learned all those rhythms, which I then composed. I wrote everything down for “Prá Sentir e Contar” for my album Poema da Gota Serena. The basis of everything, like Lelo did with the computer, was to write every notation of “Prá Sentir e Contar.” And we did playbacks, because that’s the way to do it with a duo. Lelo plays a lot of keyboards and I had a lot of percussion, but not many channels because we couldn’t use many. But it yielded results, and we had the energy to play a lot back then. We went to Europe, we did a tour in Europe, we were playing at Lira Paulistana and other places, so the energy was overflowing. There wasn’t much preparation for it, we did it in one take, and we recorded those records in two days each. All of them, Marcha Sobre a Cidade (1979), Reflexões Sobre a Crise do Desejo (1981), A Flor de Plástico Incinerada (1982) and my Poema da Gota Serena (1983) in two days. I invited Cacau, a tenor sax player, to do half of the album with me. We just went to the studio and played. With that kind of music, the first take is the best take, and it’s because we don’t have the energy to do any more takes! (laughter).
Lelo Nazário: Regarding Grupo Um, I think it’s interesting that Zé brought with him all this Brazilian music and mixed it with jazz, creating a unique way of playing. My work is more related to electronic music. There were Fender Rhodes keyboards, and I was playing a mix of classical and jazz music with Brazilian elements. Also, Grupo Um had Zeca Assumpção, who plays bass in a really unique way. And it’s not just with how it sounds, but how he plays it—nobody plays bass like Zeca. And whenever we called in the wind section to play, like Roberto Sion, there’s a whole different sound thanks to Sion’s education being more related to traditional jazz. He brought this jazz tradition to the group. When we made Marcha Sobre a Cidade, Mauro Senise had this different mentality because he had an entirely different saxophone education. The musicians all brought their own contributions, and from this, we created something interesting.
Regarding the solo albums, when Zé recorded his, he brought in this Indian music, which wasn’t present in Grupo Um or anything we’d done previously. When I played on his album, I used some uncommon synthesizers. I had previously worked more with synthesis-type synthesizers, but at this studio we had the Oberheim OB-Xa, which is a more commercial type of synth. It’s not built for you to be meddling with the timbres—it came with preset timbres. So I ended up using many of these synthesizers, and that’s why Zé’s album has a particularly different sound.
Lelo, can you talk a bit about Lágrima / Sursolide Suite? I’m curious what you were trying to do with the Sursolide Suite composition in particular.
Lelo Nazário: I was trying to do something that had both written and free-improvised parts. I invited Zeca Assumpção and Rodolfo Stroeter to play together as a trio of two basses and one piano. I played the piece when I was celebrating 40 years of my career; we remade it live. And that’s the interesting thing about the composition: it has written segments and open segments, on and off, until there’s a larger open segment and then a written one at the end. It’s filled with this contemporary musical language, and I tried to do something more erudite with that piece.
I really love Grupo Um’s final album, A Flor de Plástico Incinerada. What was your thought process when making that? It’s the most experimental one, in my opinion, and I’m curious why you guys made this record and then decided to end the group.
Zé Eduardo Nazário: That record was a Lira Paulistana production, so we weren’t independent anymore. We did two records, A Flor de Plástico Incinerada and my solo record, in four days—there were two for A Flor de Plástico Incinerada and two for Poema da Gota Serena. I think the music is completely different, which shows how vast our creativity was at the time. To me, what really changed was that people started looking for lessons. Not only drummers and percussionists, but musicians of every kind wanted to learn this language, the kind of thing that I was doing, the Indian classical music, everything. I was giving too many classes in 1983 when we came back from Europe. I had too many people studying with me at home, so I didn’t have the free time that I had earlier.
Lelo had his projects, and Rodolfo Stroeter had the Pau Brasil project. I played in Pau Brasil as well around ’88 or ’89, but we didn’t play many concerts because Rodolfo was involved in a lot of other stuff, too. It was very difficult to find musicians who were available to play with Lelo and I because very few musicians in the country could play the kind of music we were doing. If a musician who did play with us couldn’t play anymore or had other projects, we couldn’t find a substitute. Percussionists are used to playing other types of music, the kind that is pre-written, has ostinato rhythms, these things written in books with square beats (laughter). There are exceptions, of course. There are great musicians in Cuba and the United States like Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Julio Barreto, and Horacio Hernandez.
Lelo Nazário: Just adding to what Zé said, we really did have our own personal projects. Zé had a lot of classes to teach, and he was perhaps the most famous drum teacher in São Paulo; many musicians studied with him. I started working as a studio musician, and I was hired to compose tracks and worked on that for many years. As Zé said, it might seem silly, but it’s difficult to find musicians who can play the type of music that we played on A Flor de Plástico Incinerada, which is very much an avant-garde record. We are not in the United States or in Europe—we are in Brazil where, unfortunately, there are very few musicians who are dedicated to this type of music. So it was complicated. These splits happen like that, with each one going their own way. But curiously enough, all of us got together again in Pau Brasil. There was one formation that was me on the piano, Zé on the drums, Rodolfo on the bass, and Teco Cardoso on the wind section.
Zé Eduardo Nazário: And Marlui Miranda, too. Pau Brasil’s Babel (1995) was essentially Grupo Um and Marlui Miranda (laughter). You know, I listened to jazz all the time during the pandemic—I had nothing to do because everything was closed. I stopped going to São Paulo to teach. The pandemic changed my life. For breakfast, I would wake up very early in order to exercise and do yoga. I started every day by listening, for two or three hours, to the ’50s records that I love so much. When I went to New York for the first time in 1978 to play with Pau Brasil at the IAJE, the International Association for Jazz Education, they organized a huge gig with everything happening and with every musician there. And what I noticed is this sense of community—everyone played on everyone else’s records, and everyone knew each other. We didn’t have that feeling of community in Brazil that I felt in New York; it was every man for himself, and it was nasty. It’s a pity, you know?
The Nineteen Seventy Seven sessions are finally going to be released at the end of the month. What has it been like to reflect on these old recordings and this early part of your career?
Zé Eduardo Nazário: Well, I’ll never be able to play what I played then (laughter). I’m 73 now, so I’m very happy that this recording came to light. I always had faith that some day, someone would release these recordings. We’re really grateful for the work that Joe Davies at Far Out Recordings did with Starting Point and with Nineteen Seventy Seven, and I hope he’ll be interested in the other records as well. But yeah, I remember the energy I had, and while I try to keep playing today, I’ll never play the way I did then. That’s life (laughter). But I’m happy to give something to these new generations, to those who are interested in learning about this kind of music. And maybe they’ll create their own language from that.
Lelo Nazário: For me, the most interesting thing is seeing how music that’s made with intention and care will last. Grupo Um celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025. We performed many concerts, and there are books written about each of our records and about our entire history. It’s really nice seeing, after 50 years, that this music is being released and remains alive and fresh.
Is there anything that we didn’t talk about today that you think is important to mention?
Lelo Nazário: The celebrations will continue throughout 2026. We already have plans for Grupo Um concerts at Theatro Municipal here in São Paulo, so even though the 50-year anniversary was in 2025, we will extend it to these next concerts that are being planned here in São Paulo.
I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Zé Eduardo Nazário: Well, I’m 73. I’m here (laughter). It’s the best thing I could say. I’m seeing a lot of bad things happening in all parts of the world today, for different reasons, but I think this desire for money is the main thing. I’m a naturalist—I love nature, and I always loved nature. I eat good food, I practice yoga and Pilates, and I love my dogs. I had seven Rottweilers, and now I only have the last one, the seventh. I saw a film yesterday called Togo (2019), and it’s about these dogs at the North Pole, and Togo was the leader of the sled dog team. I cried the whole time because I love dogs. I think I had a very good life, and I hope young people can reach, with good health, the age of 73 and beyond too.
Lelo Nazário: I love my dedication. I basically see my whole life as one of dedication to whatever I decided to focus on, and for me this was music—this search for doing something new. I don’t know if I managed to do it, but at least I tried. And I’m really happy with everything I did. I’ll keep going, too. I intend on releasing a new album in 2026. It’s basically done—we just need to mix it. So the dedication continues. I think it’s worthwhile to set an objective for yourself and to go after it, to achieve your dreams.
Grupo Um’s Starting Point (1975/2023) and Nineteen Seventy Seven (1977/2026) can be purchased at Bandcamp. Lelo Nazario’s Bandcamp page has his solo music but also Grupo Um’s original run of albums, including Marcha Sobre a Cidade (1979), Reflexões Sobre a Crise do Desejo (1981), and A Flor de Plástico Incinerada (1982). The group’s live album, Ao vivo Jazz na Fábrica: Uma lenda ao vivo (2016), is available on streaming services.
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