Waldemar Bastos Downloads

Waldemar Bastos is an intuitive musician who belongs to a new generation of African artists - urbane, cosmopolitan, and able to draw from wealth of influences, local and not so near, to create indelible songs. "My music arises out of a plethora of paradoxes. I am a professional musician who... Learn More »

Waldemar Bastos is an intuitive musician who belongs to a new generation of African artists - urbane, cosmopolitan, and able to draw from wealth of influences, local and not so near, to create indelible songs.

"My music arises out of a plethora of paradoxes. I am a professional musician who barely studied music, an African performer whose first album was recorded in South America, an artist from a war-torn country whose principal themes are peace and optimism, and a singer-songwriter who is considered to be the voice of Angola, although I presently live in Portugal.

"I was born in 1954 in the Zairian province of São Salvador do Congo - one of various geographical entities bearing the names of "Zaire" and "Congo" in south Central Africa remaining after the Europeans finished dividing up the continent with a triangle and a ruler after World War II. My country, Angola, has been wracked by war. The first was one of liberation - to rid ourselves of the Portuguese colonialists. It began in the early '60s and lasted until 1974 when the Portuguese dictator Salazar was overthrown and Angola became an independent nation. The second, which began shortly after the end of the first, was a civil war. Fomented and funded by the United States and South Africa on one side, and the former Soviet Union and Cuba on the other, it has lasted almost to this day.

"Although both sides in this war have tried to claim my music as their own, I have consistently refused to "sell out" politically, to be drawn into partisan politics for money. In my music, I have just as consistently offered in response to the fratricide in Angola a simple message emphasizing the value of all life, the beauty and abundance of this world and the profound need for hope. It is apparently a message that resonates with my compatriots from all political factions and ethnic backgrounds - when I gave a free concert in 1990, more than 200,000 people crowded into Kinaxixe Square in the capital of Luanda. It is even said that only my songs have the power to make both President dos Santos and Jonas Savimbi dance.

"My musical career began at the age of seven when my father, an itinerant nurse who had himself played the piano and organ when he was studying in the seminary, came home and found me playing the accordion he kept under his bed. To his astonishment, I was actually playing songs I had heard on the radio. So he and my mother offered me a choice between a bicycle and music lessons as a present the following Christmas. Although all of my friends in Kabinda, the town where we lived, were dying to have bicycles, I chose the music lessons. I studied with one of my brothers, and while he fastidiously learned to read music, I would simply hear scales once and repeat them with ease. One day the teacher's daughter noticed I was not looking at the score as I was playing and when her father asked me to identify notes, I couldn't. At first, I was traumatized, but I soon realized that I had been blessed with what in Portuguese is referred to as a dádiva, a profound gift or natural talent for music. More than twenty years later, when playing with a symphony orchestra in Brazil for my first album Estamos Juntos [We're Together], it was no trouble at all for me to follow the conductor or other trained performers in spite of the fact that I could not read a note of music. I still play exclusively by ear.

"I met all kinds of people when I was growing up, since both of my parents worked as nurses and traveled around Angola treating victims of tuberculosis, leprosy, sleeping sickness and other diseases. Although I was raised speaking Portuguese, (since learning indigenous languages was prohibited by the colonial authorities), I heard various indigenous languages such as Kimbundu and Ovimbundu, and I was exposed to a number of musical traditions.

"I distinctly remember hearing the songs sung by those waiting for relatives and loved ones in the hospitals, and the funeral music sung for those who succumbed to diseases. On the radio I would hear songs from America and England, like the Beatles and the Shadows, and from Brazil romantic ballads like those of Angela Maria. My first band was called Jovial and we played all over Kabinda. Later, I formed other bands that toured the entire country, offering concerts and playing in ballrooms, performing, in addition to pop songs, tangos, waltzes and other dance music.

"After Angola became independent in 1973, I began to perform music I had composed "Angolan music" but the climate in the '70s in my newly independent homeland was not supportive of artists, either financially or politically. In 1977, a number of urban artists were killed for participating in what was called "anti-state activities." During this period I traveled throughout the socialist bloc, to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Cuba and the former Soviet Union. In 1982, having decided I was in potential danger in Angola, (During the colonialist period I was put in prison by the Portuguese Political police) and that the communist government that had replaced the colonialists was even more repressive than their Portuguese predecessors, I defected from a cultural delegation visiting Portugal.

"In the '80s, I lived in Brazil and recorded my first album with the help of Chico Buarque. I had met several years earlier when he had come to Angola as part of Projeto Kalunga [Project Sea], which was an attempt to put Brazilian artists in touch with the roots of African slave culture that form such an integral part of Brazilian culture and music. Chico sang with me on the album, Estamos Juntos, along with Martinho da Vila and João do Vale.

"I returned to live in Portugal and for a time in Paris, continuing to tour and perform in France, Spain, Germany, Cape Verde, the Azores and other locations. I recorded my second album, Angola Minha Namorada [My Sweetheart Angola], in Portugal in 1990 and my third, Pitanga Madura [Ripe Pitanga Berry], in 1992, whose title song became an enormous hit in Angola and was played by radio stations on both sides all over the country during the national elections held that year.

"Whereas my parents, who nursed the sick, and my brother, who treats wounded soldiers, have devoted their lives to healing the body, I have devoted mine to healing the soul. The most profound paradox underlying all of my work is the power of love, which for the spiritual diseases of war and human cruelty is the only antidote."
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