Lenine

Born and raised in Recife (capital of Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil), Lenine specially enjoyed listening to rock all through his teens, until he discovered the album "Clube da Esquina", by Milton Nascimento, and saw Gilberto Gil performing. As he turned 18, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, to compete in a music festival. In 1982, Lenine released his first LP, "Baque Solto", with partner Lula Queiroga. The second record, "Olho de Peixe", only came out ten years later, though, this time with percussionist Marcos Suzano. The album fomented his importance among Brazilian musicians who would promote the genre in the 90s by merging it with pop music. Lenine’s first solo record, "O Dia em que Faremos Contato", came out in 1997, featuring a pop structure for his mix of electronica, northeastern rhythms and samba. Two years later, he released "Na Pressão". Lenine has been touring non-stop and has had songs recorded by acclaimed artists in Brazil.

And here is an article about Lenine published in the NYT this week:

Lenine at Joe's Pub: A Playful and Pointed Brazilian in New York

By BEN RATLIFF

Nearly everyone in popular music makes records and performs live, but at bottom they tend to pull one way or the other. The true record-makers turn out buffed, armored products; when they go onstage, you see a blocked and choreographed show. Hard-core performers are naturalists who make disappointing albums, but onstage become nearly transparent: their physical bodies become subordinate to the music inside their heads.

Brazil has produced a few musician-singers who can be both things at once. Since the mid-1960's Gilberto Gil has been one. And Lenine (pronounced Leh-NEE-nee), a singer and songwriter whose work descends partly from Mr. Gil's, is another. American audiences might place his music midway between that of Ani DiFranco and that of Rage Against the Machine: pointed songs, semipolitical, playful with language and aggressive with rhythm. But the music also carries the marks of Recife, his home city, in the Brazilian northeast.

In his songs there are glimpses of embolada, the fast, rap-like tradition from that area, and maracatu, one of the region's West African-derived rhythms. On Tuesday Lenine played at Joe's Pub, and it was a rare visit. Well known in Brazil since the mid-1990's, he has only now released an album in North America, and so only now has reason to show up as a solo artist on our stages. (The album is called "Lenine" a best-of disc from Six Degrees Records, culled from his three Brazilian studio albums since 1997.) He came backed by a three-piece band drilled in the cropped, swinging, interlocking rhythms of the songs, the reggae-like grooves and the ambient sprays of electric guitar.

Sometimes the band played over electronic rhythm tracks, or over sound samples Lenine has used on his studio albums: a rusty door-hinge on "A Rede" a bit of old recorded music in "Jack Soul Brasileiro." It was an impressive show, and still too canned by half.

If anyone could have slain an audience with just guitar and voice -- and maybe one other musician, playing hand percussion -- it is Lenine. Like Mr. Gil, he performs at full strength and full articulation: strumming an electrified acoustic guitar in choppy rhythms, which stressed upbeats, he sang phrases so hard his face reddened, then backed away slowly at the end of a phrase, his voice fading. He never slurred words, unless in service to the rhythm. He is the professional with integrity, the kind of guy who will prevail in the long haul. Though he sang about alienation, science-fiction movies and the voices in his head, he didn't carry the abstracted air of a North American who might be singing about the same things.

That's because when Lenine sang about alienation, he rooted those perceptions in Brazilian cultural realities. Like a handful of the other great modern Brazilian songwriters, Lenine subscribes to the ideal of syncretic realism, that pop songs can deal with high-tech industry and mud huts, the futuristic and the ancient, in the same stanza. He acted as a full participant in his songs, not a freaked-out bystander. Not all the songs were as good as "A Rede," "Jack Soul Brasileiro" or "Que Baque e Esse?"

Lenine's records contain many similar-sounding rhythmic songs without quite enough action in the melody. And as good as his band was -- particularly Junior Tolstoi on guitar, who manipulated it into attacking chords or washes of sound -- it never breathed as much as you wanted it to. So the band sounded trapped inside the rhetoric of recorded sound, while Lenine himself projected naturally, someone born to communicate one to one.