Hermeto Pascoal, the eccentric, prodigiously prolific Brazilian composer and self-taught multi-instrumentalist who rose from a childhood of rural privation to become a favorite of jazz musicians and audiences around the world with a taste for the unpredictable and adventurous, has died. He was 89. .
His family announced his death on his official social media page on Saturday night. The statement did not provide a cause of death or say when or where he had died.
Known in Brazil as “The Sorcerer” and “The Mad Genius,” Mr. Pascoal affected a wild man’s appearance: He had long, unkempt hair, a thick beard and a childlike demeanor. But he was passionately serious about playing and composing music.
He wrote more than 2,000 instrumental pieces, many with quirky time signatures or harmonies, and orchestrated or arranged hundreds more songs for others, including jazz luminaries like Miles Davis, who once described Mr. Pascoal as “one of the most important musicians on the planet.”
Mr. Pascoal’s primary instruments were the piano and the flute. He also played tenor and soprano saxophones, guitar, drums, accordion, euphonium and a variety of other keyboard, reed, brass and percussion instruments — and often supplemented them, to the delight of audiences, with everyday objects whose capacity to create music only he seemed able to imagine.
Bath toys, teapots, tuned bottles of water, bicycle pumps, chairs, dolls, anvils and even his own beard were among the items he employed. While recording the album “Slaves Mass” for Warner Bros. Records in 1976, he brought a pair of live pigs into the studio and “played” them as if they were bagpipes, incorporating their squeals into the mix.
Hermeto Pascoal Oliveira da Costa was born on June 22, 1936, in Olho d’Água das Flores, a rural settlement in the impoverished northeastern Brazilian state of Alagoas. As an albino, unable to work in the fields under a harsh tropical sun with other members of his peasant family, he was allowed to remain at home, where at age 7 he taught himself to play his father’s small button accordion and also began playing a fife he had fashioned from a dried gourd.
He began his professional career at 10 by playing rural dances and weddings. Word of his prowess had spread by the time he was 14, and he was invited to join the house band of a radio station in Recife that specialized in hillbilly music. Shortly thereafter he formed a novelty act with Sivuca, another albino accordionist (with whom he would often be confused), and the two played forró and other popular styles of music all over northeastern Brazil.
By the end of the 1950s, Mr. Pascoal had migrated 1,500 miles southward to Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital, where he joined another radio station orchestra, discovered jazz and began to perform in nightclubs. In his spare time, he learned to play piano, flute and saxophone, and, after an interlude in São Paulo, he joined the percussionist Airto Moreira in 1964 in the Rio-based Quarteto Novo.
That group backed Brazilian stars of the day such as Edu Lobo and Geraldo Vandré and also worked with the emerging singer Elis Regina. Mr. Pascoal played both piano and horns in the quartet. He rapidly built a reputation as an adaptable, resourceful composer and an arranger who could write rapidly, and blend jazz and northeastern folk styles.
At the urging of Mr. Moreira, who had joined Miles Davis’s ensemble, Mr. Pascoal came to the United States in late 1969. He soon recorded his first album as a leader, in a big-band session released in 1971 that featured top-flight New York jazz musicians like the bassist Ron Carter, the trumpeter Thad Jones, the flutist Hubert Laws and the saxophonist Joe Farrell. He also began a brief but fruitful association with Davis, who included three Pascoal compositions on his “Live-Evil” album, released in 1971: “Igrejinha” (“Little Church”), “Nem Um Talvez” (“Not Even a Maybe”) and “Selim.”
As word spread of Mr. Pascoal’s fondness for complex harmonies, dense orchestrations and zigzagging melody lines, as well as his versatility and unusual appearance, he became an object of fascination among musicians, a phenomenon that continued until the end of his life. His songs, of which there seemed to be an endless stream, were recorded by Cannonball Adderley, Gil Evans, John McLaughlin, Charlie Haden and others. Later in Mr. Pascoal’s career, the Kronos Quartet commissioned him to write a piece for them, “Marcando Tempo” (“Marking Time”), which became a regular part of their repertoire.
By the mid-1970s, Mr. Pascoal had a firmly established reputation in the jazz world as both a talented musician and an amiable oddball. Davis affectionately referred to him as “that crazy albino,” and in Downbeat magazine the critic Howard Mandel compared him to two other notable eccentrics, writing that he was “as pan-global a leader as Sun Ra and as sure-footed an individualist as Rahsaan Roland Kirk.”
Though Mr. Pascoal continued to tour in the United States and Europe, he went back to Brazil to live and, thanks to his international reputation, for the first time was able to form a permanent band of his own. Commercial engagements at home were few, but his rehearsals became famous for their rigor, and Mr. Pascoal and his band made numerous records, in an idiom that was primarily jazz but also included elements of bossa nova and Brazilian folk music.
As a more prosperous Brazil became a popular touring stop for foreign musicians, those visitors — among them Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie and Chick Corea — would invite Mr. Pascoal to join them onstage when they performed in Rio or São Paulo. At the same time, a younger generation of musicians in the United States and Europe sought out Mr. Pascoal’s early recordings and talked him up in music publications.
In 1997, Mr. Pascoal embarked on a whimsical project: writing one song a day for an entire year, beginning on his birthday, so that everyone could have a personalized birthday song. The songs were never officially released on CD, but his notated “Calendar of Sound” was eventually published in book form and has become a collector’s item among musicians.
Mr. Pascoal’s wife of 46 years, the former Ilza da Silva, died in 2000. At a performance in October 2002 in Londrina, Brazil, he met Aline Paula Nilson, a singer and dancer known professionally as Aline Morena, who became his companion and prompted him to leave Rio and move to Curitiba, her hometown in southern Brazil.
“The instrument I like most is whatever instrument I happen to be playing at the moment,” Mr. Pascoal said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004. And, he added, “Since everything is an instrument, from the burble of water to a symphony orchestra, there is never a moment I am without music.”
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