The new Milton & Esperanza album has many of us looking back on Milton Nascimento’s career. It led me to the rediscovery of a Night Music episode featuring Milton and James Taylor. I can’t stop watching it. Skipping ahead in the video isn’t necessarily advised. Still, at the 22:00 mark, you can hear Milton sing “San Vincente” accompanied by his own guitar and by Nana Vasconcelos. The wizardry of Nana’s voice and percussion with Milton’s transporting vocals puts me in an altered state, even on an eighth viewing, even after decades of listening and building up my tolerance to such musical magic.
Milton & Esperanza also has many of us thinking about Milton & Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in January 2025.
Native Dancer’s beloved status among musicians was for me most memorably expressed by Wayne’s Weather Report co-leader Joe Zawinul. He told me this in 2004:
“That brilliant production Wayne did outside of Weather Report, Native Dancer, it was a masterpiece. I never listen to records at home, but sometimes my wife and I and the kids put this record on. There’s not anything insincere about what he’s done there. That combination of Wayne Shorter and Milton Nascimento was sublime.”
On the rare occasion that Joe Zawinul listened to a record at home, he played one Wayne made without him during their prime Weather Report years.
I’ve long felt the album’s enchantment myself. When I decided to write a book about Wayne Shorter, I stubbornly committed to a few things. I was determined to escape the music book ghetto by depicting Wayne as a well-rounded character and by writing his life story with the benefit of conflict, scenes, dialogue, and other elements of narrative nonfiction. I’d represent running themes in Wayne’s life, like the meaning of the film The Red Shoes to his artistic development and the influence of film-at-large on his musical thinking. I’d explore the relationship between Wayne’s artistry and Buddhist practice in some depth. Finally, I’d devote serious time to reporting and chronicling Native Dancer, giving this treasured outlier in Wayne’s discography the attention it deserved.
An early marathon conversation with Herbie Hancock launched my Native Dancer research. Herbie shared a long story of meeting Milton on his 1968 Rio honeymoon, his memories of the Native Dancer recording, and much in between.
In the summer of 2003, I went to interview Milton Nascimento and other Native Dancer musicians in Rio. It was good to get back down there. The previous February and March I’d reported in Rio and Salvador. My Substack essay, “Let’s Steal Ourselves From Time,” includes that material: Bahian carnaval culture, Caetano Veloso’s role in it, my interview with him, and the overseas reporting process itself. Sometimes we have to write about the world’s cultures without visiting them, but for me, the richness of Brazilian musical culture demands immersive reporting. Time on the ground. Esperanza’s long stays in Rio during the development of her album with Milton make perfect sense to me. There’s no other way.
On that 2003 trip, I checked in at the Arpoador Hotel on the recommendation of Uri and Jan Caine, who stayed there when they made Uri’s 2001 album Rio. Arpoador Hotel was an ideal spot to settle in for a long working trip. It sat on the beach between Copacapana and Ipanema, and in the early aughts, I paid only $30-35 USD a night for an ocean view room in off-season June. The Arpoador’s bar was the sort of place where instant friendships were made, where someone was always rallying a group to go hear live music or see a soccer match. A central location made it easy to dash off when Brazilians extended last-minute invitations. Like when Native Dancer drummer Robertinho Silva invited me to his women’s drumming school one afternoon. I can still picture Robertinho’s wide grin and wink at me as he stood in a circle of gorgeous Cariocas pounding their hearts out—his earnest educational mission for women drummers created the benefit of experiencing their beauty in motion. Another night some fast friends and I went out to see Milton perform songs from his new album, Pieta, as I prepared to meet him.
I’ll never forget my first vision of Milton at his home. He sat waiting in a space that was both music room and religious shrine. Catholic saint and Candomble statues blessed a piano, organ, and guitars. Milton wore three necklaces: a medal of his patron saint San Sebastian, a leather pendant with a tooth sewn inside, and a third I couldn’t make out. He also wore several rings with small gems—no Dallas-styled flaunting of wealth but a tasteful expression from his home state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, which is known for its precious jewels. His presentation was musician as medicine man.
(“You have to be Catholic to be a good surrealist,” Joni Mitchell would observe when I later described this scene to her)
Milton warmed quickly to the subject of Wayne and Native Dancer. Still, his greatest enthusiasm was for the music Wayne was making at that time with his 21st-century quartet. “He’s reinventing the jazz!” Milton kept exclaiming. He shared the feeling of arriving at a festival hotel in Italy and stepping out on his room’s balcony to see his old friend Wayne on a balcony of his own. Milton wanted to do his best to convey truth and beauty for my book about Wayne; I felt his profound love for Wayne in that intention.
As I’ve discussed here on Substack, when I mentioned that I wanted to see where Milton’s extraordinary voice came from, he said, "When can you be ready to go?” The next morning, Milton's driver picked me up at the Arpoador Hotel. Late that afternoon, I found myself in Milton's beautiful hometown of Tres Pontas, Minas Gerais, where his biographer Maria Dolores showed me around for a couple of days, deepening my understanding of Milton considerably.
When I got back to Rio, I had a voice message from Wayne. I called to catch him up on my reporting progress. Wayne was not surprised to hear I’d been to Tres Pontas— “You were drawn there,” he said. Wayne was impressed that I’d spent some time with Milton’s father Josino. Family always meant a great deal to Wayne.
“I think I need to stay here in Rio a little longer, really get writing,” I told him. “You know, my last trip here got extended, too.”
Wayne laughed. “That happens in Brazil. Stay in paradise as long as you can, soak up all that culture for your writing. Papaya for breakfast and swimming in the afternooooooooooon . . . ” He indulged in some comic crooning.
Given the book’s scope, I didn’t have time to dig into all my Tres Pontas recordings, which included interviews with Milton’s father as well as many others who knew Milton well. Those tapes still await a Milton deep dive. My book’s deadline also forced me to marshal my reporting into a more conventional account of Native Dancer’s creation than planned. The 2005 book chapter nevertheless offers rare perspective on the album with plenty of original quotes from its major players. I’ll share it now with plans to post more Native Dancer coverage here as the 50th anniversary date nears.
Before we get to that chapter, I need to address one more thing. A hard thing.
When I came into Wayne’s life in 2001, he was married to Carolina, a woman I consider a soul sister. Carolina is a powerhouse, the proverbial great woman behind the great man. It’s hard to imagine Wayne’s 21st-century outpouring of creativity without Carolina.
Wayne’s previous wife, Ana Maria, died on TWA flight 800 in 1996. Over the past year, I’ve noticed a growing misconception that Wayne somehow made music in the 70s and 80s despite Ana Maria and her dysfunction.
I’m a huge fan of the Wayne Shorter documentary Zero Gravity. (Stop reading and go watch it now if you haven’t seen it!) I’m a talking head in the doc. Like many people who’ve been close to Wayne, however, I’m mystified by the film’s portrayal of Ana Maria as an unhinged character—especially by the bizarre suggestion that the only time Wayne could talk to Ana Maria was when she was passed out on a train. Yes, Ana Maria had drinking and drug issues as well as a tempestuous personality. She also was a muse and vital creative partner to Wayne. Thoughout their marriage, Ana Maria retained the power to communicate and charm. Meanwhile, Wayne was no saint himself. During an 80s separation from Ana Maria, Wayne had girlfriends of his own, as he freely admitted. He even put me in touch with one of them.
Wayne’s road to Buddhist jazz sage was long and winding. Ana Maria was a turbulent soul; she was also a positive force in Wayne’s life. Humans are complex, thank gawd.
This is all to affirm that Native Dancer never would have happened without Ana Maria. As I discussed in the chapter.
Here it is.
Chapter 11: Native Dancers and Fairy-Tale Friends
Excerpted from Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter, 2005 (Tarcher/Penguin)
The record’s first few notes introduced a voice, one that had to be the most potent falsetto on the planet. This voice was not an acquired taste. You either loved or hated it—it was sublimely otherworldly or just eerily disembodied. The voice belonged to Brazilian pop singer and composer Milton Nascimento, and the recording, Native Dancer, was Wayne Shorter’s 1974 collaboration with the singer. It was also Wayne’s love song to Brazil, to “alegria,” or joyful fun and to “saudade,” an untranslatable Portuguese term for peaceful melancholy, for the presence of absence. On Native Dancer, Wayne married jazz to Milton’s melodies in a kind of holy union that made other Brazilian jazz efforts of the time seem like one-night stands. No one was prepared for the deeply affecting sound of this record, which was unlike any Brazilian music most Americans had ever heard.
Wayne Shorter first flirted with Brazilian music on his 1960s Blue Note recordings, when the bossa nova craze was in full swing. In 1962, jazz saxophonist Stan Getz released Jazz Samba to popular crossover success, inspiring otherwise jazz-indifferent and sedate suburbanites to dance around their pools in beach towels. Many jazz musicians were encouraged to capitalize on the popular trend with their own recordings of cool bossa jazz. Wayne always had a subtle Stan Getz influence—like Getz, he could play ballads up in the tenor saxophone’s high register. But Wayne avoided any imitative bossa stylings: the Brazilian rhythms on “El Gaucho,” for example, from his 1965 recording Adam’s Apple, were abstracted into his own jazz mix. When Wayne met his Portuguese wife Ana Maria in 1966, he naturally began some intensive home schooling in Portuguese and Brazilian culture. His song titles such as “Feio,” “Sucurucu,” and “Manolete” paid homage to Lusophone cultures, and in 1969, he included Maria Booker’s version of the Jobim tune “Dindi” on Supernova, adding the exotic singing sound of Airto’s cuica drum and other percussion.
Milton Nascimento was a revelation for American jazz musicians, as Herbie Hancock’s introduction to him indicates. In September 1968, Herbie and Gigi Hancock went to Rio on their honeymoon, and Herbie called the only person he knew there, a young piano player named Eumir Deodato. When Eumir called back, he told Herbie he was in the recording studio with a “great young artist” and a few other musicians. Herbie excitedly invited them all over to his hotel.
The great young artist was Milton Nascimento, whose star was on the rise following his 1967 appearance on the televised International Song Festival, an event that launched the careers of many Brazilian pop musicians. But when Eumir told Milton he was organizing an informal showcase for Herbie Hancock, Milton was loathe to play. “I thought, the guy’s here for his honeymoon, not for a concert, and I didn’t feel like showing him anything anyway, because I was shy,” Milton said. “I knew Herbie and Wayne and all those musicians because they played with the Miles Davis Quintet. For me, Miles was above everything and everyone, Miles was a God and anyone who was close to him would be at the same level. I felt that I could die just by being touched by one of those musicians.”
Milton’s curiosity to meet Herbie overcame his nervousness, and he took his guitar over to Herbie’s hotel. Milton cut a striking figure. A dark-skinned black man, he usually wore white overalls and a white floppy hat—comfortable, friendly attire that clashed with the calm gravity of his gaze and serious strength of his features. Accompanied by his own guitar, Milton started to play one of his hits, “Travessia.” Herbie was stunned by his voice: “I went whoa . . . and told him to wait a minute while I ran and got my tape recorder” (In 1968 relatively few musicians had serviceable portable tape recorders, but Herbie, known among musicians as the “King of Gadgets,” did). “I recorded several of those songs that became standards in Brazil. It was awesome stuff. And just to hear Milton, just his guitar and voice, the stuff was really fantastic. And I was wondering, how did he get this harmonic concept? And melodically, the songs were gorgeous. I didn’t know what the words meant, but then when I asked to have them translated, it was so beautiful.”
The mysterious harmonic concept came from Milton’s home state of Minas Gerais, or “General Mines,” a region named for its gold and gemstone mining. Separated from the coast by a mountain range, the state’s isolation preserved Portuguese cultural traditions like Catholicism that were absorbed into native culture elsewhere in Brazil. Minas was also cowboy country, a land of vast, rolling coffee plantations. The region’s pragmatism and religious faith were a far cry from the festive sensuality of coastal cities like Rio de Janeiro and Bahia—as different in cultural climate as Appalachia is from New York City.
Milton was born in Rio in 1942 and moved to Tres Pontas, Minas Gerais when he was two, adopted by the white couple who’d employed his mother as a cook. The town’s name was Milton’s first lesson in poetic license. People who’d never been there imagined that Tres Pontas, or “Three Points,” referred to a trio of large mountains that surrounded the town. There were actually only three small hills to the north of Tres Pontas that were barely distinguishable from other peaks on the horizon. Milton learned other lessons in symbolism and faith as a practicing Catholic, and sang the church’s chant-like hymns in his falsetto. Those church music harmonies affected him as profoundly as the bossa nova rhythms he eagerly absorbed from Joao Gilberto’s records.
Milton’s adoptive mother Lilia was a musician who associated with the composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. His father Josino was an electrician who ran a radio station on the side. Milton sang popular songs by request on the air, but at twelve he became worried about losing his charming falsetto to puberty. Then the radio transmitted a kind of revelation back to him. “I associated emotion with a female voice, so I was afraid I would lose my heart when I couldn’t sing with a female voice anymore,” Milton said. “Then one time I was playing next to my father’s office when I heard a singer come on the radio. It was Ray Charles, a man, and he was singing with heart! Then I knew that no matter what happened to my voice, I would never lose my heart.” Milton didn’t lose his falsetto but did gain a bass voice, which only gave him a greater range of expression.
Milton moved to Minas’ capital, Belo Horizonte, playing bass in a jazz band and taking up with a group of musicians who called themselves Clube da Esquina, or the “Street-Corner Gang.” His big break came in the 1967 International Song Festival, when he also released his first album, Travessia. By then it was clear to everyone that he was no ordinary singer. Robertinho Silva, who played drums with the singer for over 30 years, said Milton’s strong identification with Minas made him unique: “Unlike most musicians, Milton had an influence from the Gregorian Chants of Minas as well as from bossa nova, and he played bass in a jazz dance band. So Milton was totally different at that time.” Like Joao Gilberto and other bossa nova artists, Milton played the guitar in rhythmic counterpoint to his voice. But his sweeping lyricism and peculiar sense of harmony differentiated him from other bossa artists, and from peers like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil who were busy pioneering the wild rock/bossa collage of the “tropicalia” style. Milton brought a jazz sensibility to folk and church melodies, and while he did reveal the influence of the Beatles’ psychedelic sound, it was subtle and tempered by melancholy. Milton was his own thing. Later, when Milton toured Europe, a Copenhagen festival poster listed him as one of its performers. The poster gave a stylistic label for each act—jazz, rock, fusion, etc. Beside Milton’s name it simply said, "Milton."
A few English-speaking fans first heard Milton on Courage, which he recorded with producer Creed Taylor for CTI records in 1968. The record didn’t do much to expand his popular audience in the U.S., though musicians did take notice. “It was great for me because the U.S. musicians liked this album very much,” Milton said. “One talked to another, then another and then another and jazz musicians were especially interested because the jazz musicians at the time were the most open to everything. Word spread very quickly.”
Herbie and Tony Williams both played on Courage, but Wayne said someone else actually stirred his interest in Milton: a “hip little Chinese girl” named Darlene Chan, a young festival promoter in California. “I had just been to Brazil and fell in love with Milton,” Darlene said. “I was amazed that Wayne didn’t know about Milton, because with Wayne he’s ‘there’ even if he’s not there. Milton just blew me away, and I immediately had the thought that they were of like minds. I just knew that Wayne should hear him, because Wayne’s mind is so unfettered by prejudice, and Milton was unfettered in a similar way musically.”
“I was moved by how Milton had moved away from bossa nova and away from the typical Brazilian pop format,” Wayne said. “He was not like [bossa nova artist Tom] Jobim—he’s got more of an Indian or Amazonian or African element. And he told me that from his early childhood whenever he wanted to express the sound of his voice, he used to go out in the countryside around his hometown and sing until it sounded right to him. His musical approach has a lot to do with that.”
Milton’s sound was transcendent to Wayne: “Coltrane and Miles said if you have a sound, the sound will take you places further than the instrument demands. A lot of people have a one-dimensional sound. If you have an unusual or unique sound, it’s got to go places. Some like the synthesizer cause the sound will take you places. I don’t hear unique sound from the vocal quarter, and that goes for film too, they all speak in same tessitura, same sound corridor. I hear the tessitura cycling around Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks. Anthony Hopkins is one of last who still, you know, has coloration in his voice. And all the high-talking singers could drown you, Motown could drown you in altitude.”
Milton’s falsetto was gorgeous in high altitudes, and he also had a rich palette of tonal color in the bass register. The singer said he was always happiest near the ocean. Growing up far from the sea in Minas, it was as if he conjured its immensity and motion with his own voice. If Motown singers “drown you in altitude,” as Wayne said, surfing along a wave’s summit, Milton dove down octaves below the surface and used his bass to power his way to the top, lifting you up to glide along on the crest of his falsetto. There was a good reason for Wayne’s attraction: He used his soprano saxophone to similar effect.
Wayne covered Milton’s “Vera Cruz” on Moto Grosso Feio, an album he recorded for Blue Note in August 1970. Wayne’s melodic side emerged when he set in on Milton’s tune, as if it were simply too beautiful to mess around with. By 1972, when Weather Report traveled to Brazil to play Rio’s Municipal Theater, Wayne’s appreciation of Milton’s music had deepened considerably. Ana Maria read a local newspaper announcement of some Milton shows that were happening on the same nights as Weather Report’s performances. Wayne and Joe were so eager to hear the Brazilian singer that they rushed through their own show. “They cut their Weather Report concert short,” Milton said. “They kept a car running right outside the stage, so that they could run out, grab the car, and head over to my concert to see at least half of it.”
In the liner notes to a CD reissue of Milton’s Travessia, singer Caetano Veloso discussed Weather Report’s interest in Milton’s show: ”Milton suggested a fusion that . . . merged with the ‘fusion’ inaugurated by Miles Davis. It was interesting to note that this Brazilian fusion bewildered and thrilled the very same followers of the American ‘fusion.’ Milton was performing at a theatre alongside the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas in 1972, just after I had arrived from Bahia, and I was as impressed with what I saw and heard as were the Weather Report’s musicians, who were visiting Rio at that same time. Maybe for different reasons—and with different consequences—but at least with the same intensity.”
Ana Maria encouraged Wayne to record with Milton, and that opportunity came when Wayne heard that Flora Purim was bringing Milton to the U.S. in 1974. He and Flora shared travel expenses for Milton and two of his closest musical associates, keyboardist Wagner Tiso and drummer Robertinho Silva. After rehearsals with Flora in New York, the Brazilians performed with her at the Montreaux Jazz Festival in early July 1974, where they recorded 500 Miles High for Arista Records. When they returned to the U.S., they went to Wayne’s house in Malibu, where they lived and worked for two weeks, recording Native Dancer on September 12th, 1974.
Wayne was insistent about bringing together the right personnel for this record with Milton. Along with himself and Herbie Hancock, there were the Brazilians: Milton, Wagner and Robertinho. There were also two players from the pop scene, Dave McDaniel, a bassist with Joe Cocker, and Jay Graydon, a guitarist, producer and songwriter. There was Dave Amaro, Flora’s guitarist, on a couple tunes, and Airto on most of them. The engineer was Rob Fabroni, who had worked with the The Band and other rock groups. And finally, Jim Price, a multi-instrumentalist who had worked with the Rolling Stones, produced the record. “This grouping of people showed how Wayne perceived my music,” Milton said. “There was a little of everything here and there, but all in the right places. Aside from being beautiful, this record opened a new way for me to put together pop, blues, jazz, everything. Wayne is amazing cause besides being an excellent musician, he has perception in the heart and in the mind that’s above average.”
The Brazilian musicians were clearly awed by the novelty of recording with one of their jazz heroes in America. Wayne knew he had to demystify their inflated notions about the session; if they went into the studio with that reverence, the music might be stiff. So Wayne eased everyone into the recording with a two-week retreat and hang at his home. Ana Maria, the Portuguese-speaker, translated as necessary. Sometimes the musicians found other ways to get meaning across. “Wayne and I understood each other, even though I didn’t speak English,” Robertinho said. “We would stay up all night in his kitchen talking about whatever, and Ana Maria would come in and laugh so hard, cause she didn’t understand a single word of what we were talking about. She’d say, ‘How can you guys be talking?’”
Though his house was full of Brazilian musicians, Wayne was emphatic about not making a stylistically pure “Brazilian” record. “I didn’t try to impose components on Milton and those guys,” Wayne said. “There were no barriers, no demarcation lines. In reality there is no ‘Brazilian Thing.’ If I had heard something from Poland, like a hip polka, I would have called them and said let’s do something together. Something like Chopin’s ‘Mazurkas,’ where the polka is so far removed, but not that far removed from what he did. Music is like a piece of clay. You get inside it, make a cubby hole, and then punch your way out.”
In the opening bars of “Ponta de Areia,” Milton’s voice sounded like an ocean breeze gracing the hinterlands of Minas. “Ponta de Areia” referred to the final stop on the train line that connected Minas with Brazil’s shoreline. Though the melody had the singsong quality of a nursery school rhyme, its odd 9/8 meter could be hard to follow. “When we first arrived in New York, there was a birthday party for some musician there,” Milton said. “They wanted to hear me play something, so I went to the piano and started playing ‘Ponta de Areia.’ Some musicians grabbed their instruments but none of them could follow the rhythm. Wayne walked into the party. I talked to him in a way I never do. I said, ‘This song I’m playing, I want it on the record. It’s got to be the first one. Otherwise I’m not in.’ My mind must have been flying to the moon!”
Wayne smilingly watched everyone struggling with the song and said to Milton, “You’re very tricky cause it sounds like a children’s song but no one can follow you.” Wayne did start off the album with the song. “It was about a train that was everyone’s friend, and a train station that someone tried to get rid of,” he said. “Most of the Tin Pan Alley songwriting style was infantile, except for some of the stuff that Sinatra did. But Milton didn’t just write songs about romance, that ‘You and me baby’ stuff.’” Along with his regular lyricists, Fernando Brandt and Marcio Borges, Milton wrote poetic rhapsodies on his homeland’s history and sing-along homilies for a better future. If Sting got together with the poet Pablo Neruda, they might come up with something like Milton’s lyrics.
“What can I say?” was Milton’s terse description for “Lilia,” a song named for his adoptive mother. “What can I say?” seemed like an irreverent response to a pesky demand for explanation, but the comment actually had some serious bearing on his music. Milton sang “Lilia” with wordless vocals, which was for him a style born of necessity and perfected under pressure. Under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 60s and 70s, the ruling regime monitored pop music, censoring anything seemingly rebellious. Musicians couldn’t say much that was acceptable to the censors. Milton’s compatriots Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso were exiled to London because of their controversial music. Airto Moreira and Flora Purim escaped the artistic restrictions by moving to the U.S. But Milton felt a responsibility to work within the repressive climate. “I had to be in Brazil, it’s my country and I had a job to do,” Milton said. “I didn’t want to leave, no matter what happened.”
When Milton recorded Milagro Dos Peixes in 1973, the censors denied clearance on several of its songs. His record company asked him to write new lyrics. But Milton didn’t want to play the military’s editing game, which had no clear rules or logic. “The censors didn’t really know which ones were protest songs and which ones were not,” Airto explained. “Sometimes they’d say, ‘No you can’t sing that,’ and it wasn’t even a protest song, it was a love song.” So Milton protested by singing without words, using his voice in an instrumental role. Fans got the message and the record was a hit. (The censors then became suspicious of Milton’s voice itself. “At the time I did lots of stuff with Nana Vasconselos,” Milton said. “Stuff without lyrics, just sounds and voices and birds, and censors would ask, ‘What does this voice or bird mean?’ It was funny.”)
Milton’s voice had always been expressive, but after using wordless vocals it became supremely so. On Native Dancer’s “Lilia,” a single note trembled with all his doubts as a black kid in an all-white town; then a melodic leap triumphed with love for his mother’s protection. On “Tarde,” he seemed to lean into a pitch as long as an entire afternoon, until its tone finally gave way to perpetual twilight. Even more dramatic expression came in his musical interaction with Wayne. “After Wayne soloed, when Milton would came back in, you couldn’t even tell it was a voice,” Herbie said. “Because when Wayne played, it sang, and Milton’s singing has an instrumental quality.” Beyond their telepathic trade-off of tones and timbres, the two men shared a spiritual passion in their sound.
Wayne was so enchanted by Milton, his “brother,” that he wanted to use him throughout the record. Milton tracked vocals for each song, but then advised Jim Price not to include his voice on all the tracks. So Wayne’s three original tunes on Native Dancer were instrumentals, though the spirit of Milton’s soaring lyricism suffused Wayne’s solos, which were some of the most romantic and purely emotional of his career. One tuneful instrumental was “Diana,” a ballad Wayne wrote for the newborn daughter of Flora and Airto. Wayne paid tribute to his wife with a more pensive ballad, “Ana Maria.” The song didn’t embody her personality so much as it chronicled her shifting moods.
Milton later recorded the tune on an album of his own. “The poetry that Ana represented to him came across beautifully in that song,” Milton said. “Ana was a perfect companion for Wayne. She brought him many things, she was a link for him to get to know many things, cause she was involved with so many people.” The relaxed intimacy of the session inspired Wayne to play the melody with loving affection on soprano. But the rhythm section intermittently rose up and struck back at his horn lines, personifying another aspect of Wayne’s wife: “One of the best things for Wayne was how Ana would kick his ass,” Joe Zawinul said. Ana Maria’s presence went well beyond this eponymous ballad. Wayne said she was the “10th player” on the record, her contribution “equal in desire and performance.”
On “Beauty and the Beast,” Herbie delved into street funk rhythms on piano that captured all the urban optimism of his 1969 album Fat Albert’s Rotunda. The final tune on the album was Herbie’s “Joanna’s Theme,” from his soundtrack to Death Wish starring Charles Bronson, a song that was a rare tender touch in the film’s bleak story of revenge. Herbie was in a romantic mood too, accompanying Wayne’s soprano with lush arpeggios.
“When the album was near to completion we all knew authenticity and honesty had won,” Wayne wrote in the liner notes. Reviews, however, were sharply divided. Native Dancer was “rhythmically monotonous Gallic balladry” with “generally mellifluous, often naive meditations,” as Coda and Jazz Journal International respectively judged it. Down Beat, on the other hand, called it “an entirely accessible, thoroughly satisfying LP that continuously discloses harmonious surprises and bursts of sweet wildness.”
Whatever its critical reception, Native Dancer raised Milton’s profile, especially in Europe, and he went on to become one of the most popular Brazilian musicians in the world. In Brazil, the American saxophonist with the sympathetic sound intrigued Milton’s fans. “For Wayne to record Milton’s music the way he did, so deeply and with jazzy roots but that kind of Afro-Brazilian bluesy stuff, it was very well done,” Airto said. “It got the attention of the Brazilians cause he hit right there at the target and everyone said, wow, what is this and who is this?”
For many Brazilians, the record was an entrée to jazz: they sought out Wayne’s Weather Report records, then bought his records with Miles, and then checked out his Blue Note catalog of the 60s. Native Dancer had an extraordinary effect on some people, Wayne said: “I got a letter from a surgeon who said he listens to all kinds of music: ballet, opera, and that my stuff with Milton has inspired him to be a better surgeon in the operating room, better husband to his wife, father to his kids, citizen in the world.”
For years after they recorded together, whenever Wayne and Milton were performing anywhere in the same vicinity, one would make a guest appearance at the other’s show. In Milton, Wayne found a musician who gave voice to his own flights of fancy, and a friend who was as stubborn as him in refusing to give up on imagination. Wayne later played on several of Milton’s recordings, many of which bore the unmistakable influence of Native Dancer. On Milton, Wayne joined the singer on one of his most unabashedly idealistic “castle in the sky” tunes, “Fairy Tale Song.” Milton’s English lyrics included lines like these: “Where are all your friends from the old days, Tinkerbell and Peter Pan? Where is all the hope Snow White tried to give you? Show me all the games you know from the stories/ So that I can play.”
Milton likes to tell a story about a time when Wayne was at the singer’s oceanfront home in Rio for a party. Everyone drank to high gaiety, except Wayne (“No drinking? That doesn’t sound like me at all,” Wayne joked. “Maybe I was on antibiotics”). Wayne’s sobriety didn’t prevent him from suddenly deciding he was a storybook character. He stood on a window ledge, yelling, “I’m Peter Pan, I can fly!” and then jumped out the window, landing on the balcony a few feet below. Milton later converted that balcony into a small outdoor amphitheater and dedicated it to Wayne with a commemorative plaque. “When I think about the gifts that music brought me, Wayne is one of the most important ones,” Milton said.
In complete awe -- of Milton, of Wayne, of Ana Maria, of you and your way with words. Thanks
Thank you, Michelle. This is brilliant.