Naomi & Goro’s Rio, Tempo
Interviewed and written by: Anri Suetsugu
Strumming and singing away the luster of Rio
On very rare occasions, coincidences do come about. It was just when Café Bleu Solid Bond was playing in my room that the editing desk contacted me asking me to run the interview. It’s my favorite album of the bossa nova duo, Naomi & Goro, released in 2013, covering The Style Council’s first and classic album Café Bleu in its entirety.
To hear about the latest album, I sat down with Goro Ito at a café on the 11th floor of a building in Shibuya, in the afternoon of the very next day the Rio Carnival opened under a state of public health emergency declared by WHO for the outbreak of the Zika virus.
This 11th release from the duo – which is the first output as an original studio album in 7 years under the name of Naomi & Goro – is titled Rio, Tempo and contains 9 songs. Over the past 7 years, Ito has been intensely involved in various collaborative projects and has also made 3 new pieces solo.
With also a release under the name Naomi & Goro & Naruyoshi Kikuchi (avant-garde jazz musician/saxophonist) in between, Ito starts off by saying: “It was hard at first to get back the sense of playing as Naomi & Goro,” also revealing that “we didn’t have any ideas at all ―it wasn’t like we had kept on writing original songs and accumulating them for some time later.” He continues: “The original notion that ‘perhaps it would be nice to go back-to-basics and work between only the two of us’ gradually changed as we made the songs. We ended up wanting to do more (laugh).” In the end, the duo invited the regular rhythm section from Rio as well as Aya Ito (violinist) to the production. Masayasu Tzboguchi (jazz musician and main man of electro jazz unit, Tokyo Zawinul Bach) also participated in the production playing the Rhodes piano on the 2 tracks close to the end of the album. The album opens with the track “Brigas Nunca Mais” co-written by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. The 7th track ”Rio” is, according to Ito, “a cover track that’s been played frequently at our shows, but for some reason never made it to be on our album”, that happily finds itself listed on the album this time.
Through the production process, a mode to ‘dedicate the album to Rio’ gradually emerged, leading them to ask Paula Morelenbaum of the Jobim family to write 2 songs for them. “I e-mailed him my own feelings I have toward Rio – a city that I’ve visited as much as 4 times for recording purposes,” and had Morelenbaum write the songs specially for the album. In the latter half of one of those songs that sing about oblivescence “Oblivion (Esquecimento)”, there is a line that goes sweetly like this:♪Rio doce e o, Mar salgado se encontrarao (sweet river and salty sea waters meet)... These lyrics by Morelenbaum that compares love affairs into brackish waters lets the listener see through the very original enthusiasm of when these two Japanese, Naomi & Goro fell under the spell of Brazilian music and decided to form a musical duo as well as the wake of the duo’s career, not limited to the simple subtlety of man-woman relationships as the lyrics may superficially suggest.
Ito explains: “I started playing bossa nova after turning twenty following a fairly big detour. At the beginning, I used to get caught in a dilemma of a Japanese trying to make themselves sound like it, or get into a twisted way of thinking that bossa nova wasn’t the thing I really wanted to do (laugh). I was extraordinarily cynical.” A pretty unexpected saying from Ito. Though, the initial insecurity in his stance ends up flying out of the window the moment Ito set foot in the city of Rio for the first time for recording works. “The locals gave us praise, saying things like ‘Hey, you’re doing well for a Japanese’ (laugh) or ‘And it actually sounds nice and Japanese’. I know it must have been half-flattery, but they were complimenting us nonetheless. Ever since then, things became ‘much easier’,” Ito looks back.
Rio, Tempo is one great piece overflowing with the yearning for the local culture of this wonderful city Rio, and also with their heartfelt thoughts for fellow musicians!
