Mateus Aleluia returns to Portugal for five concerts
It is already on Friday, in Évora, that Mateus Aleluia’s tour begins in Portugal, followed by a concert in Lisbon, on October 27th, where he will return for a second date, on November 4th.
There is also a concert, on October 30, at the Womex festival, in Porto, where the documentary “Aleluia, O Canto Infinito do Tincoã” will also be presented, about the artist’s life and the trajectory of Os Tincoãs, and another in Coimbra, to November 6th.
In an interview with Lusa agency, the singer says he is “very happy to return to Lisbon, Portugal, as a whole”, after having passed through the capital, in the early 1980s, with the band Os Tincoãs.
For the singer, the city he saw almost 40 years ago “is not the same”.
“Lisbon, every day that passes, she presents herself to the world for the true role she was born to play, a very important role for the world. I think it’s an aggregating role. Portugal was born to include”, he considers.
Mateus Aleluia began his career in the cult group Os Tincoãs, which remained active between the 1960s and 1980s.
When he joined the group, after a member of the initial formation had left, the trio from Bahia played “songs that were a hit at the time”, such as “bolero or cha-cha-cha”.
All the members of the group were from Cachoeira, “a city in the back of Bahia, where everything reminds us of Portugal”, says the musician.
Cachoeira is also “an Afro-Baroque city par excellence. It has an entire population, almost 80% of which is the human mass who crossed the Atlantic, who came from Africa, and after the Portuguese and the indigenous people who were there before”.
“During the day, this is a normal city, but at night, when Candomblé was prohibited, the Candomblé chants began in the back of the city. (…) In the morning, the bell of the Catholic church would wake up the city. Right after the bell, when mass began, it was the church’s organ and harmonium that also awakened the city”, she narrates.
From this meeting, the association Cidade do Vale do Paraguaçu “was formed artistically, culturally, from the human point of view, in an integrated way, within the Afro and Baroque, on the part of music, without having any guidance from the pedagogical point of view, orthodox”.
“That was how Os Tincoãs set out to sing this Candomblé song”, says the artist.
In 1983, he moved to Angola to do cultural research, in a “research program to identify similarity and advantage, from a ritualistic point of view, of the region and the musical influence of all this that could come from Angola”.
“If we in Brazil have such a well-founded culture, both from a Baroque and from an African point of view, we think that this culture comes from worship – both from Catholic worship and from Candomblé,” he explains.
This work informed what a solo would later do, which began with the project “O Afrobarroco em a musical lecture”.
Continuing this work, in 2010, Mateus Aleluia’s first album, “Cinco Sentidos” appeared.
This was followed by “Fogueira Doce”, in 2017, and “Olorum”, in 2020, works that will surely emerge in his performances in Portugal.
The singer is finishing “Nações do Candomblé”, which is based “on research in Benin, Nigeria and Angola, by the cult”, and which will be released at the end of November, he added.
As to whether the Portuguese audience will have the opportunity to listen to any of the new repertoire, the musician says that “the stage time is so short that it’s not possible to present much, but if there’s an opportunity”, he unveils “a smell of novelty”.
In addition to her music, the documentary “Aleluia, O Canto Infinito do Tincoã”, by Tenille Bezerra, is presented at Womex, which takes place in Porto, from 27 to 31 October.
“I accepted it because it didn’t seem like a very invasive thing and it would be something more linking all this content in a spontaneous way and there is a lot of contextualization, but also letting a person who watches the documentary also start to imagine, to place themselves in this world”, explains the musician.
Mateus Aleluia also liked the approach “which deviates a little from the standard – he is very philosophical, very poetic, very spontaneous. He is very free”, he concludes.
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