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And I was not even a professional of the Portuguese guitar, it was administrative in a hospital: “the Portuguese must be fed up with me.”
The guitarist Carlos Paredes I would do this Sunday 100 years. He was born in Coimbra on February 16, 1925, and died in Lisbon on July 23, 2004, where the family had moved as early as 1931.
Son of guitarist Artur Paredesanother larger name of the Portuguese guitar, Carlos Paredes continued a family line of generations of musicians, remaining loyal to tradition and origin style, touching the Coimbra guitar, with the tuning of Fado de Coimbra.
However, it imprinted a personal approach, which led him to the main stages and to joint work with other great interpreters, such as the American Jazz Charlie Haden, with whom he edited the album “Dialogues”. Kronos Quartet adopted “green years” to their repertoire.
Carlos Paredes lived mainly in Lisboa And the city inspired many of its compositions. “Green Years”, one of the best known of his work, was composed for the homonymous film of Paulo Rocha, milestone of the new Portuguese cinema of the 1960s.
Anti-fascist combatant, opposed the dictatorship and was PIDEin the late 1950s, having been imprisoned in the Aljube jail and the Caxias Fort.
Until the 1990s, it reconciled the guitar with its activity as administrative at the São José Hospital in Lisbon. “I am a civil servant. It is not a profession that pleases me a lot, but it is a very dignified profession, ”he said, quoted in the book“ Amigo Paredes ”, by Paulo Sérgio dos Santos.
“The Portuguese have heard me so long ago that they must be fed up with me”he told the public in 1991, quoted in a publication dedicated to him by the Lisbon Library-Museum and Resistance.
And even assured: “I’m little more than a guitar amateur” – She wasn’t a professional guitarist.
Years earlier, in 1978, in the newspaper O Diário wrote: “Historically, the struggle for the defense and robustness of the spiritual integrity of the Portuguese people is to be distributed for two periods. It required the first situated in full fascism and accompanying its development and decline until the liberation in 1974, to be given the confusion of values, the castration of the arts, the replacement of more conscious forms of expression with more manipulable others. It was then necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. ”
In this text, quoted in a 2003 publication of the Lisbon Library-Museum Republic and Resistance, walls continued: “As logical, so difficult tasks began to fit intellectuals. Intellectuality and culture began to constitute the general consensus, an exclusive unit. On April 25, the process of popular awareness acquired a new and powerful breath with the ‘explosion’ of the creative capacity of the masses that agrarian reform is one of the complete and wonderful examples. ”
The guitarist wrote: “Responsibilities for the evolution of culture now belong to equivalent parts, to intellectuals and all other workers.”
In December 1993 a Mielopathy, disease that attacked him the bone structure and prevented him from touching the guitar.
This year began to record the last album, “Song for Titi”, which would be edited only in 2000.
Spectacles
To celebrate the centenary, there is a set of initiatives which have started at the beginning of the month and will be extended over the coming months, including two concerts on Sunday.
Na MAGNA CLASS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LISBONwill join at 6:00 pm Ana Telles, the Torres Vedras Fire Band, Carlos Alberto Moniz, the girl not, Gonçalo Lopes, Inês Vaz, Joana Bagê, Luísa Amaro, Mafalda Lemos, Gonçalo Lopes, Mario Laginha, Miguel Amaral, Simon Mota, Soul Minor and Ensemble directions.
The free admission show, which is part of the Music Program at the University of Lisbon, is already sold out.
Also today, in Convento São Francisco, in Coimbrathe American Ben Chasny and the Portuguese Norberto Lobo give one more of several concerts in the series of performances under the motto “Paredes”, honoring the musician of “Greens years”, who continues in Faro, on Tuesday, and In the tremor, in the Azores, in April.
The Assembly of the Republic marks the centenary of the birth of the guitarist with a concert by Luísa Amaro, on Wednesday, in the Senate Room.
The entrance to the “Carlos Paredes – 100 Years” concert, which is scheduled for 19:00, shortly after the end of the plenary session, is free, by marking.
Luísa Amaro recalled the greatest virtue of Carlos Paredes: “He was a virtuous in the Portuguese guitar: as a musician, as a coach, he was fantastic, because he He played what he had composed and interpreted perfectly. These three realities, in the same person, almost never get“.
On Friday, in Theater Circus, in Braga, Pianist Mario Laginha plays with Julian Arguelles (Saxophone), Romeu Tristan (double bass) and João Pereira (drums), in a concert of the guitarist.
Carlos Paredes’s centenary celebration program, “Variations for Carlos Paredes”, has been divided into three lines of action: the performative aspect, with shows, the research aspect, with publications and colloquiums, and the educational aspect, with workshops, visits and scripts.
The program was prepared by a working group, appointed by the Ministry of Culture and coordinated by Levi Batista (executor of the will of Carlos Paredes), from which the director of the Fado Museum, Sara Pereira, the coordinator of the Installation Team were part National Sound Archives, Pedro Félix, historian António Nunes and Filipa Alfaro (Ministry of Culture).
