Guest Lecture Recital – Patrick Angello, guitar; Anita Ekman, visual artist/presenter

 Valongo, Afro-Brazilian Guitar 

This performance, proposed by artist Anita Ekman with Brazilian guitarist Patrick Angello, explores the connections between the United States and Brazil in the history of the African Diaspora through the music that emerged around the largest slave port in the world: Valongo Wharf in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Exploring the Brazilian instrumental musical genre choro, which emerged around 1870 before the rise of jazz, Angello interprets the history of Afro-Brazilian rhythms on the guitar, creating musical reinterpretations of the Indiana University archives produced by African American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner, who, from 1940 to 1941, visited Brazil to document the languages used in the Afro-Brazilian religious tradition known as candomblé. 

Patrick Angello (b.1984) is a music director, composer, guitarist (6- and 7-string), arranger, and teacher specializing in pedagogical methods for Brazilian guitar. Born in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Angello learned to play the main genres of Brazilian popular music through contact with the creators of choro and samba. These mentors included Dino 7 Cordas and Valdir Silva, the musicians primarily responsible for the popularization of the 7-string guitar in the history of Brazilian popular music. Angello has accompanied such samba masters as Nelson Sargento, Beth Carvalho, Dona Ivone Lara, and Ataulfo Alves Junior, and has also accompanied Zeca Pagodinho on recordings. He has participated as an instrumentalist in the recording of the DVD Samba Social Clube 2, and he played 7-string guitar with Elza Soares’ band from 2012 to 2014. 

Anita Ekman (b.1985) is a Brazilian visual and performance artist and researcher of pre-colonial art and rainforest history. Her collaborative performances at archaeological sites and in museum collections analyze the Atlantic World and the role of women in the Brazilian Rainforests. Developing a series of photographs and videos based on the performances, Ekman and her collaborators—including Guarani Nhandeva anthropologist and curator Sandra Benites—discuss the protagonism of indigenous people allied to the African Diaspora in the history of the Atlantic Rainforest and Amazon. She has given lectures at Indiana, Tufts, and Harvard universities, among others. Her artworks have been published on the websites of the Museum of Modern Art and Harvard’s Peabody Museum as well as in Od Review  and  Select. A summer 2023 fellow at the Clark Art Institute, Ekman is co-curator with Benites of the exhibition  Ka’a Body: Cosmovision of the Rainforest  at Paradise Row in London and Radicantes in Paris.  Her first solo exhibition was Women of Samba – 100 Years of Samba (2016, Magnet Galleries – Melbourne, Australia).