Vitor Ramil: Warming Up to the Esthetic of Cold

Sweat rolled down his skinny, near naked body. On the evening news, he watched sweat drip from others nearly as naked: thousands of revelers in skimpy outfits chased frantically after a sound truck topped by a live band - a trio elétrico, a rolling mass of stage, the contraption that symbolizes Salvador’s riotous Carnaval. In some sun-drenched part of Brazil, they were enjoying an “off-season” Carnaval weekend.

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Soon the anchor cut to another segment, this one set in Ramil’s native Rio Grande do Sul. Winter was approaching down south. A rare snowfall had descended. On the screen, kids scampered around. All bundled up. Throwing snowballs.

“What am I doing in Rio de Janeiro?” Ramil asked himself. “I’m an exile,” he told himself.

Like so many budding musicians from the hinterlands, Ramil had moved to Brazil’s former capital to make his musical mark in the country’s opinion-forming and cash-rich “center” – the Rio-São Paulo axis, as some call it. None of that seemed to matter now. Sweating before his TV set, Ramil was experiencing what storytellers call a “point of insight.”

Teenage Reality Dream & Alter Ego Calling

Ramil grew up in a musical household. His father would routinely belt out classic tangos of his native Uruguay, only to become so chocked up by nostalgia that he couldn’t finish. Two older brothers became the duo Keiton and Kledir. Small wonder then that little Vitor began recording his first album when he was only 17. The record came out a couple of years later, in 1981.

Precocious in the studio - but not on stage. At first, Ramil’s public performances were not only rare but – let’s say - restrained. Ramil had all the stage presence of a young James Taylor. You Haven’t Got a Friend, or so it seemed on that lonely stage.

Smart enough to recognize his weaknesses, Ramil invented a friend. He conjured up an alter ego, the Baron of Satolep (Ramil’s hometown, Pelotas, spelled backwards). The baron proved relaxed on stage, entertaining - and quite a risk taker. “I was able to act the way I did around the house,” Ramil recalled.

The baron also belied an inventive streak in the subdued young musician, a trait that soon found an alternative creative outlet. Ramil the writer soon published “Pequod,” a novel with its overt nod to ‘Moby Dick.” Meanwhile Ramil was fashioning details of both the baron’s life and his fiefdom, the good old township of Satolep. As you can see on his website, Ramil’s fantasyland comes replete with a street map. Too bad Jorge Luis Borges never got around to visiting.

Speaking of Argentinean writers, Ramil’s disposition often seems more akin to that of a Latin American intellectual than the stereotypical happy-go-lucky carioca or baiano. This might be yet another manifestation of the psychological chasm between the gaúchos and their national brethren to the north. Once upon a time that chasm led to armed revolt, the 1835-1845 Farroupilha rebellion. Even today, a vocal minority of extremists in Rio Grande do Sul continue to advocate separatism. (No separatist himself, Ramil nevertheless pays homage to the Farroupilha rebels in his song “Indo ao Pampa” (To the Plains) on the CD Ramilonga (released in 1997): “Almost year 2000/Suddenly I fast-forward/To 1838, I fast-forward because it is clear/The men back then/Are way ahead of the ones in 2000.” Admitted Ramil: “We sometimes feel more like Uruguayans or Argentineans than Brazilians.”

Cold Sweat

Uruguayans and Argentineans? Well, sort of. Ramil still felt connected enough to Brazil to try to make it in Rio de Janeiro. Or at least the Baron of Satolep tired to make it in Rio de Janeiro. By the mid-1980s, the young man who had launched a promising career in the studio fell into a streak of nearly a decade without recording an album. The baron kept going with live shows, but by Ramil’s own admission, the shows began running off into the gutter. “I was doing punk. It was putrid, the lyrics and everything,” he said. “The time had come to kill off this character.”

Which brings us back to the opening scene of our story. (Remember, in our last episode, Ramil was sitting in his Copacabana apartment, sweating in the tropical heat, sipping chimarrão, and watching trio elétricos contrasted against southern snow on the TV news.)

Trios vs. Snow. That contrast brought forth the Esthetic of the Cold. In Bahia, as the song goes, only the dead fail to heed the trio elétrico’s siren call. “I’d never chase after one of those trucks,” said Ramil. “In the south, hardly anybody would do that.”

Not only that, but... “I thought of the cult of the body, of the overt sexuality,” he said. That’s the esthetic of tropical Brazil, he recognized. “I thought about Rio Grande do Sul. We don’t operate that way.”

Originally populated by European immigrants, notably from Germany and Italy, Rio Grande do Sul guards its cultural heritage perhaps more jealously than anyplace else in Brazil. But the Centers of Gaúcho Tradition (CTG), now spread throughout Brazil and indeed abroad, emphasize early traditions of rural farms and ranches. Kind of like the way Texas hangs onto its open-air ranger image even as urban sprawl and traffic jams leave cities like Dallas, Houston and Austin clogged and unrecognizable to anybody’s forbears.

Like much the rest of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul too is now highly urbanized. The population of capital Porto Alegre hovers somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5 million. Even little Pelotas rings in at 350,000. “There’s a gaúcho stereotype, but there really isn’t any unifying identity for urban music,” said Ramil. “The idea of cold. It is something that differentiates us. It is a metaphor. So I launched the idea.” The Esthetic of Cold, he called it.

Get Back

After six years in Rio, Ramil returned to Rio Grande do Sul in 1991. He wasn’t only returning home physically, but also revisiting musical roots. And the fragile roots of the young sapling had grown broad and deep. “I eventually arrived at the milonga,” said Ramil. At a recent concert in São Paulo, a friend asked me how I’d characterize Ramil’s repertoire. “He sings a lot of milongas,” I responded confidently.

Then she threw a curve ball: “What’s a milonga?” Except to offer a circular argument – that which Ramil mostly plays – I had trouble verbalizing the concept. James L. Taylor’s (probably no relation, dunno) classic Portuguese-English dictionary calls milonga “a kind of sad or mournful folksong of Uruguay and Argentina.” Brazil’s moral equivalent of Webster’s, Aurélio, offers something similar as its first definition, but it grants a concession to Rio Grande do Sul in a second entry. In RS, it would be “a metallic and sad sort of music, in binary rhythm, sung with acoustic guitar accompaniment.”

Anyway you look at it, milongas – at least those penned by Ramil – are sober, inherently thoughtful, often downbeat, and sometimes sophisticated, even cerebral. Take this snippet from the song “Espaço” (Space) on the 2000 release Tambong: “Bedroom to not sleep/Living room to not live/Door to not open/Patio to suffocate.” About as far as one can get from dippy bimbo anthems of É O Tchan. When Ramil does covers, they’re of Bob Dylan songs.

Ramilonga, the 1997 release that represented the first CD of the Cold era, was in fact subtitled The Esthetic of Cold. As if part of a symbolic manifesto, the CD includes a couple of songs set to the words of João da Cunha Vargas, a traditional gaúcho poet who committed his verses to memory and declaimed without ever writing down a single word. In the liner notes, Ramil spelled out what he meant by his newfangled, frigid style. He called it the Seven Cities of the milonga: “Rigor, Profoundness, Clarity, Concision, Purity, Lightness and Melancholy.”

Ramilonga is probably the choice for purists, those want their roots well irrigated. The title song represents the nostalgic lament of the migrant who left Rio Grande do Sul. It was written well before the CD was envisioned: during his “exile” in Rio, Ramil dared not include the song in his live performances – lest he break into tears and prove unable to finish the song.

Another interesting cut on the CD is “Noite de São João” (Night of Saint John). A celebration inherited from the Portuguese, the revelry surrounding Saint John’s feast day has evolved into a mid-winter festival to rival Carnaval, especially in rural areas. The non-stop parties in Northeastern cities like Caruaru and Campina Grande have long engendered upbeat and jovial classics like Luiz Gonzaga’s classic “São João na Roça” (Saint John in the Countryside). As if to reclaim the Saint John icon, Ramil offers a melodic, understated piece based on a poem by the modernist Portuguese hero Fernando Pessoa.

If Ramilonga is for the true believers, Tambong is an invitation to the uninitiated. Come experience the refreshing breeze of the Esthetic of Cold. Guests include emerging MPB stars Lenine and Chico Cesar. Two Dylan covers (“Gotta Serve Somebody” and “You’re a Big Girl Now”) made the final cut.

Maybe the most interesting thing about Tambong is its Mercosul quality. It was recorded in Buenos Aires, with vocal tracks in both Spanish and Portuguese. Backing musicians included both Brazilians and Argentineans.

Ramil, it seems, wants to move Brazil’s “center” from Rio-São Paulo to an axis anchored in Porto Alegre and Buenos Aires. “I don’t feel like I’m on the margin,” Ramil said. “I’m in the middle of a different story.”

Vitor Ramil’s websites:
Satolepage
Vitor Ramil