Musical discovery of the day: Adriana Calcanhotto. They played a song by her on the local radio station this morning when I was on my way to work. What a nice soft tune to wake up to. A perfect marriage of mellowness with melancholy. It's called Justo Agora and I asked myself all the time what "agora" meant in Portuguese. It has nothing to do with market place really. It just means "now". And the translation of "justo agora" is of course "just now". I didn't get anything out of the rest of the lyrics, the Google translation does not yield a lot of deep meaning. But the way Adriana Calcanhotto pronounces "agora" totally blows my mind. Her voice sounds like that of a young girl (she was 37 at the time of the recording) when she says that word. Three syllables consisting of only five letters of which three are vowels; the whole word sounds so open. The stress is on the second, long syllable "go", not on the first as in Greek. But most amazing is the way she stretches the "a" at the end. As if she wanted to extend the "now" far into the future. The kind of thing which charms and enchants me. Something else I learnt about the song was that it apparently is not Bossa Nova - as I assumed it was - but Música Popular Brasileira (MPB) which according to Wikipedia "is not a discrete genre but rather a constellation that combines original songwriting and updated versions of traditional Brazilian urban music styles like samba and samba-canção with contemporary influences, from folk to rock and pop." The song is on her 2002 album Cantada (English: teaser).

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