Obituary: Hermeto Pascoal (1936–2025)

Born in Lagoa de Canoa in the rural Northeastern state of Alagoas in 1936, a parched land with blazing sun, growing up was difficult for Hermeto Pascoal, an albino child. Unable to spend much time outside, he was confined to the home, where this child prodigy taught himself to play the flute and then accordion. “All I had was the nature surrounding me. I listened to the wind, the sound of the water running through the streams, the birds singing, the frogs croaking… all of that was my school,” he recalled in an interview last year.

From that listening came a creative sorcery with sound, an ability to combine the people’s music with the avant-garde. Known as o bruxo – the magus, the sorcerer – he manipulated music at will, fusing jazz with the deeply traditional rhythms of Brazil: choro, forró, frevo, maxixe. His art could be folkloric, regional, popular, atonal, and always unpredictable.

Airto Moreira once called him “the most complete musician I have ever heard in my life… a genius.” That genius became apparent in Quarteto Novo, the innovative ensemble with Moreira, Théo de Barros and Heraldo do Monte, where he reinvented Northeastern song with startling originality. His reputation only grew in the 1970s, when Miles Davis invited him to collaborate, and he can be heard playing piano on Live-Evil (1970). On ‘Little Church’, his whistling accompanies Davis’ muted trumpet almost telepathically.

His most renowned work among the avant-jazz heads was Slaves Mass (1977), which demonstrated his mischievous humour; among the dissonances and manic clusters were grunts and squeals from the two piglets he brought into the studio. Yet he was equally capable of melodic beauty, especially when working with some of Brazil's best vocalists. Elis Regina understood what a musical god he was, just listen to him accompany her on Northeastern standard ‘Asa Branca’ at the 1979 Montreux Jazz Festival as he shifts and mutates the song into new forms and shapes, much to her audible delight.

Much of his fame came from his sheer inventiveness with sound. He could turn anything into an instrument – the kettle while bathing in a lake, a chair, a table. “Wherever I am is an instrument,” he told The Guardian in 2011. “There are so many instruments.” When I first encountered him in 1993, at an upmarket Barcelona nightclub, I was expecting bowls of water and surreal experiments. Rather, I found a lone figure hunched over a grand piano. What I heard was both manic and meticulous, a one-hour piece with Bach-like intensity that transfixed me from the first note.

In his late-career phase of busy jazz fusion, he was no longer the wild presence darting about the stage, grabbing whatever instrument lay at hand. Instead, he took on the role of conductor and guide, letting his younger proteges carry the momentum while he offered the occasional solo. This devotion to making music was reflected in his funeral which turned into a huge jam. As he said, “When I play, I’m not creating something separate from the world; I’m just translating what’s already happening around me. Music, to me, is the sound of life, and life is a continuous flow.”