Cerrado Cigano is an interpretation of mine fusing the rhythm of Baião from the northeast of Brazil with Chorinho, which is an instrumental branch of samba. The melody is sung within a gypsy scale with the main part doubling each note similar to the way accordionists play melodies, like in the northeast of Brazil. The melody just came out this way and afterwards I set the bassline to accent the rhythm of Baião. Cigano, in Portuguese, means Gypsy and I have been living in the Cerrado, which is an arid bio-diverse mountainous region of Brazil, for the past two years. Thus the title Cerrado Cigano felt right for the song that was elaborated,manifested and recorded here.
This tune is one of a series of songs that I have finished recording in 2023. All of them were composed originally on paper a few months into the pandemic back in 2020. I developed a severe case of tendonitis and had to stop playing guitar to let my body heal but my mind kept going. To keep the creative juices flowing I pulled out the notebook of staff paper that I had barely used the seven years I had been traveling at the time and put it to use. Each week I chose a rhythm that I had encountered in Brazil, analyzed it and focused solely on that rhythm to compose daily songs, creating a melodic theme and going from there. It was my first time composing on paper and definently my first time composing without sound. I did this for five weeks composing tunes in the rhythms of: Maracatu Baque Virado, Coco de Raiz, Carimbo, Bumba-Meu-Boi and Frevo. I felt I did enough on paper and was curious what I had made. I had healed enough to at least tinker with notes again on the guitar at this point, and I began arranging the songs with sound. It was an interesting process to hear what I had wrote without sound to hearing it and then revising and putting harmonies underneathe. Cerrado Cigano was originally thought to be a frevo but I changed the accent of the rhythm to fit the groove of Baião.