“I got started with music inside my mother’s womb, listening to the beats from my Jêje nation: sató, hamunha, ijexá, and agueré — and when I was born into the outside world it all became even stronger because I saw the beats, watching the ogãs playing.”
It’s not that Luizinho do Jêje took the satós, hamunhas, ijexás, and aguerés straight from his mother’s womb to Aguidavi do Jêje. First, he listened to his brother’s LPs, attended the June sambas (so-called samba duro), debuted in Olodum, worked with Jauperí and Elpídio Bastos, and recorded with Araketu.
But he did in fact get started in his mother’s womb. She in turn had been shaped by the sounds that had shaped the wombs of the grandmothers, the great-grandmothers … (“great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, father, Xangô, Aganju…”)
Luizinho’s music is rooted in a history that came long before him. He was raised in Engenho Velho da Federação inside the Terreiro do Jêje (Salvador, Bahia), and his first composition is called, quite symptomatically, “My Nation is Jêje”.
The Jêjes, Fon-speaking Dahomeyans, are the remote ancestral origin of the community that gave rise to Aguidavi do Jêje, the atabaque orchestra founded by Luizinho in Zoogodô Bogum Malê Rundó, in Salvador.
Notably, Aguidavi includes not only Jêjes: there are also members of the Angola and Keto nations. That which could be called “syncretism” in academically correct terms, Luizinho prefers to describe as the need to “join the three nations for us to fully develop our knowledge”.
What is written here and part of what has been written about Luizinho do Jêje and Aguidavi may give the impression that the work is about ethnic folklore research or documentary recording. Here’s where it gets fascinating. And here’s where the notes fall into place.
Aguidavi do Jêje is not an album of traditional songs: everything in it is authorial. Luizinho do Jêje is as contemporary as any other 21st-century composer. We think the mysterious air enveloping his speech in his rare interviews is explained much more by the “not-knowing” that characterizes profound creators than by interdictions imposed by religious precepts — although they do obviously say a lot.
Caxixi, berimbau, pandeiro, agogô, rum, pi, lé, atabaqueria (a highly modern battery atabaque), and large drums made by himself, besides an ostinato-percussive guitar — such is the instrumental formation of Aguidavi do Jêje, whose pressure sustains responsive songs that are onomatopoeic and that we might describe as somewhat surrealistic (if we were more snobbish).
Luizinho is a teacher: starting in 2000, he taught classes to a bunch of kids who are now grown and belong to Aguidavi (including Kainã do Jêje, his son and one of Brazil’s leading percussionists today). Around that time, Luizinho was searching for new strokes in the guitar, more percussive than harmonic. It would not be out of place for his guitar to claim the status of something inaugural in the instrument’s history in Brazil. But that is not up to us, and he would not mind.
Meanwhile, nothing prevents Luizinho’s guitar from being the newest Brazilian percussion instrument. A totemic pine tree around which everything is organized for the celebration of a festival in which “the mystery remains” — as noted so well by Nei Lopes on the album’s back cover.
Aguidavi do Jêje, the album, was nominated in 2024 for the Grammy Latino in the category “Best Music Album with Portuguese Language Roots”. And Aguidavi do Jêje, the group, was the instrumental base for the Global Alliance Festival during the meeting of G20 countries in Rio de Janeiro, where they accompanied such artists as Daniela Mercury, Mateus Aleluia, Ilessi, Seu Jorge, and Diogo Nogueira.
That same year, Luizinho do Jêje, with Marcelo Galter and Sylvio Fraga, released Mocofaia, the debut album by the trio of the same name.
Music critic Leonardo Lichote wrote the following: “The Afro-Iberian-Indigenous words in the lyrics and the keys that sustain the drumskins and strings all point to Brazilian music’s profound ancestral heritage.”
The word “mocofaia” means “mess, disorder”. But every song Luizinho puts his hands on is reorganized in new terms: what was told in measures is now told in clefs; the profane is sacralized; what was a mess becomes mocofaia.
