Word: castros
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Another key to Samba Raro's charm is that some of De Castro's songs mix in bits of Brazilian classics. For example, the gritty Afrosamba incorporates elements of Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell's 1966 song Canto de Ossanha. "The techno admirer likes Samba Raro because of the beats," says De Castro. "The soul fan loves my songs because of my soulful guitar, and the traditional Brazilian popular-music admirer catches the influences from Jorge Ben and Wilson Simonal that I put in." Yet De Castro doesn't use the past as a crutch. His originals, such as the elegiac...
...visionary, the young performer lives modestly. He shares a three-bedroom apartment in Sao Paulo with his mother, his sister, his collection of 4,000 vinyl LPs and his three favorite guitars (a Gibson B.B. King Little Lucille model, a Les Paul and a Fender Telecaster). De Castro isn't rich. Samba Raro sold about 30,000 copies, and last year De Castro pulled in about $70,000. Not bad but also no more than, according to a New York City tabloid report, Sean (P. Diddy) Combs spent on champagne one night this summer...
...Castro was born in Rio and grew up in a luxurious apartment on Avenida Atlantica. As a teen, he listened to American soul music. "At that time Max liked to copy Prince," says Joao Marcello Boscoli, a friend of De Castro's and head of Trama, his record label. "He used to slide across the floor to open the door, playing an imaginary guitar." Soon De Castro discovered the great Brazilian music that had been playing around him all along--Powell, Ben and Moacir Santos. His embrace of the music of his homeland was only logical. His father Wilson Simonal...
...ruled from 1964 to '85 (it is now a democracy). Simonal was never proved to have snitched, but his reputation was destroyed and he became unemployable. The family moved to a downscale neighborhood in Sao Paulo. Simonal became bitter, and left his wife and children in 1991, when De Castro was 18. Simonal died, broke and broken, last year. Wilson Simoninha, De Castro's older brother (also a musician), paid his father's hospital bills and funeral expenses...
...memory of his father's decline is still fresh for De Castro and still painful. "Sometimes you go into a record store and find all the works of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso and never a CD by my father," he says. "People who write the history of Brazilian music act as if Simonal never existed. Nobody can calculate the price that my family paid for that...