Atitude muda: o Grupo Um, a produção musical independente e o Lira Paulistana (1976 – 1984)

Speechless attitude: Grupo Um, the musical independent production and the Lira Paulistana (1976 – 1984)

Abstract

Based on interviews with career managers of Grupo Um (instrumental Brazilian jazz), this article aims to study how the band performed in the transformation scenario of the Brazilian music industry at the turn of the 1970s. Having as its main objective to analyze the contributions of Grupo Um to the formation of the independent musical production that emerged in these decades, the purpose was to reflect on the group’s ways of performing in face of the new dynamism of the market for Brazilian recorded music. Among the formulated hypothesis, the relationship of close proximity that Brazilian jazz and instrumental music had with the emergence of Vanguarda Paulista and the actions of Lira Paulistana stand out; such a connection is usually overlooked by historiography. Thus, most of the bibliography on the subject delegated a supporting and secondary place to instrumental and jazzy compositions, these being basically the core of sonority not only of Grupo Um, but of other Brazilian fusion bands of that period (Divina Increnca, Pé ante Pé, Metallurgy, Medusa, among others). This relationship was built on a base of tensions with the universe of the canção (compositions with lyrics and singing), which also became more aligned with the idea of Vanguarda Paulista. This term was created by the press and consolidated itself as the link for some aesthetic transformations and experiments that circulated through Lira Paulistana (in São Paulo in the early 1980s) even though instrumental music and Brazilian jazz were umbilically present in that context.