ANGRA Guitarist Discusses Early Musical Influences

Mark Kirby of eJazzNews recently conducted an interview with ANGRA guitarist Kiko Loureiro. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

eJazzNews: What was your childhood like? What type of family did you come from — poor, middle class, upper class?

Kiko Loureiro: I come from a middle class family. My parents could afford to buy a decent guitar for me, and pay for some private guitar classes when I started.

eJazzNews: What kind of music was played in your home as you grew up?

Kiko Loureiro: Primarily bossa nova and other types of Brazilian music, which my mother liked to play; as well as the classical music that my father was into. The Brazilian music was always the music I respected and admired the most. I mixed that with the rock and heavy metal music which I was discovering from records and video clips.

eJazzNews: When did you start to study music? What incident or occurrence made you decide to take up music when you were a child?

Kiko Loureiro: I was 11 when I started taking classical guitar lessons. I had private classes for acoustic guitar for two years. In 1984, when I was 12-years old, KISS came to Brazil. It was the "Creatures of The Night Tour" and it was a big thing. I got even more passionate about music and rock. At the age of 13, I received my first electric guitar. That year we also had a great festival in Brazil called Rock in Rio. It was a huge media event. QUEEN, IRON MAIDEN, OZZY, SCORPIONS, AC/DC and WHITESNAKE were all performing there. That event made me get into music in a serious way. The following year, I discovered North American rock guitar virtuosos such as Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Greg Howe. But at the same time, I was playing cool stuff such as Baden Powell while discovering the magic and complexity of Wayne Shorter, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and others. I always had private classes with good teachers from the Brazilian music community. To this day, I keep both styles in my music. I play my rock guitar style on my solo album "No Gravity" and Brazilian music such as that featured on "Universo Inverso".

eJazzNews: Are there differences, musically, between Sao Paulo and Rio and the Northeast of Brazil? Are there regional and ethnic differences in the music of the different parts of Brazil?

Kiko Loureiro: Hell yes! Brazil is bigger than Europe! We have an incredible variety of styles, cultures and ethnicities; we are a mix of Native Indians, Europeans and Africans. The Indians were not eliminated as they were in the U.S., Chile and Argentina. Africans could somehow keep their cultural traditions, unlike in the US, playing percussion and doing their Macumba (voodoo thing). That's why our music is really based on percussion and chants, a bit similar to Cuba and Caribbean countries.

Read the entire interview at www.ejazznews.com.