A Platform for Ethnically and Culturally Inspired Music
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ABOUT
I recently suffered a crisis, realizing that I was losing some of my Brazilian roots here in Berlin. But then I found that rather than losing, I was even gaining something new in this town..." Anastácia Azevedo. You can take a person out of their homeland, but you can never take their homeland out of a person. Singer and songwriter Anastácia Azevedo was born and raised in Ceará in northeast Brazil. In 1990, after finishing her music studies at the Universidade do Ceará in Fortaleza, she and her partner, guitarist and songwriter Zé Eugênio, answered the call to see what life could be like on the other side of the ocean and moved to Berlin, Germany. There she studied singing at the "Hanns Eisler High School for Music" and co-founded the Brazilian cultural center "Quilombo," and began to perform there and at other venues in the city. While their music program was first characterized by standards of the Música Popular Brasileira, they started in 1992, caused by a private misfortune, to write and play also songs by themselves, in which they combined rhythms of their home with new influences from jazz and funk. "The audience's reaction was great," remembers Anastácia, then motivated to follow her own way of making music. Anastácia's talent lies in the character of her voice, which is able to combine lyrical softness with rhythmical energy. Besides playing with Zé Eugênio as a duo, she is also working with bigger casts and is experimenting with different music styles. But she particularly likes to discover the rhythms of the northeastern part of her home, for example Baião, Maracatu, Xote, and Samba, which can also be found on her debut album "Lumerê Lumerá." Between 2001 and 2004, she began to tour more intensely in Europe, starting to become a main act on medium-sized festivals like "Micro Festival" (2003), where roughly 2000 people celebrated her music with great enthusiasm. In 2005, she released her second album "Amanaiara" and toured mainly in Germany, while Anastácia began to spend more time in Brazil and worked on various musical projects with Zé Eugênio. Both of them are very successful not only with the band but also performing as a duo.