Summer in the Global Village: An Afternoon with Brazilian Music Impresario Beco Dranoff

Just after Brasil Summerfest ended I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon on a lower Manhattan rooftop with Beco Dranoff.

Dranoff is known for the influence he’s had in bridging the gap between new sounds coming out of Brazil and the rest of the world, most visibly through his work as a founder of the music label Ziriguiboom as well as a producer for the Red Hot Organization. This year he was brought in as a guest curator (and sometimes DJ) for Brasil Summerfest, and his mark was all over the event’s slate.

In the late 80s Dranoff moved to New York from Brazil. He points to a brief interaction with Gilberto Gil prior to leaving São Paulo, as a catalyst for what was to come in the US.

After years of tour managing artists like Gil and Caetano Veloso, a conversation began between Dranoff and Marc Hollander, the head of Belgian label Crammed Discs. Together they formed a new imprint called Ziriguiboom, and their first release was Bossacucanova’s “Revisited Classics” in 1998.

Surprisingly it was rapper Marcelo D2 (then of Planet Hemp) who initially turned Dranoff onto Bossacucanova and helped plant the seed for the influential label to take off.

From there artists like Bebel Gilberto, Suba, Trio Mocoto, and Zuco 103 joined the imprint, and in particular Gilberto’s album Tanto Tempo took the world by storm… there was a period in the late 1990s and early 2000s where it was rare to enter a cafe without hearing the albums dreamy refrains.

The artists that Ziriguiboom released shaped a new era of Brazilian music, and according to Dranoff the label was at the right place at the right time. He points to having bases in New York, Brussels, and partnering with San Francisco’s Six Degrees Records, as giving the label a unique advantage.

“The 90s was a time of evolution in modern Brazilian music,” says Dranoff. “There was the whole Recife mangue beat thing, the Chico Science effect… and people discovered electronics. When we started the label [we wanted] to see if we could create a really cool Brazilian label with an international flavor, because of these three bases that we had. Luckily it worked and was a dream come true…”

These days Dranoff admits to being a bit spun around by how quickly things move in the industry. “The whole music/information process is so fast now. I think it’s good, I just hope it’s not so fast that we don’t have time to enjoy the music.”

He points to one of Brasil Summerfest’s breakout stars, Mallu, as a prime example of what’s happening in the industry today.

“Mallu is an interesting case… she basically launched on Myspace when she was 14, I believe? She self-produced and self-recorded four songs, put them up on her Myspace page, and the next thing we know she has like 400,000 hits. It went like wildfire. She’s really a product of this generation of how to use the internet to spread your art. She’s still only 19 and has 3 albums, can you imagine? I think she’s going to have a huge career,” Dranoff says.

Dranoff is already looking towards next year’s installment of Brasil Summerfest and is harboring plans for a parallel Brazilian music film festival. A few years ago he co-produced a documentary called Beyond Ipanema, and described the project to me as an overview of how Brazilian music reached the world, first with Carmen Miranda.

“The movie depicts this evolution from Carmen, to Bossa Nova, to the 80s, to the 90s, to DJ culture, to acid jazz, to today where we have really global stars like Seu Jorge, and Bebel, and CSS, and how it’s less about being Brazilian or being regional and much more about being global. And Brazilian culture was always global because we are African, we are Indian, we are European, we are a super unique example of mixed up cultures.”

Up next for Dranoff is a Brazilian TV series based on the documentary, which is in production and set to premiere next year.

The next installment of Summer in the Global Village will bring banda to the fore. Stay tuned.