“Invitation to Remix Maysa” in the diva’s birthday month!

Another arm of the versatile DJ George Mendez, from Las Bibas From Vizcaya, the project received an official invitation to perform, in 2021, the reinterpretation of six super hits by the most notable diva in Brazilian music. “Tarde Triste”, “Ouça”, “Bom Dia Tristeza”, “Franqueza”, “Meu Mundo Caiu” and “Resposta” are the ones chosen, summarizing in their titles some of the viscerality of Maysa’s art.

And Vizcaya knows this: “Maysa wrote her songs with her soul bleeding and performed with her heart in her hand bathed in alcohol. Author, a voice with a unique timbre and a person with a very strong temperament and personality. Without fear, without mincing words, she threw a millionaire marriage and an almost title of nobility in São Paulo society upwards, to live her dream of music, to live her job as a singer and performer.”

“Invitation to Remixar Maysa” brings current electronic elements to something that is eternal because it is human, too. Because life is happy and also sad, day and night, it is disappointment and achievement, being born and dying, doubt and also certainty. Listening to Maysa’s aggressively melancholy lyrics and voice in times of toxic perfection on social media is a remedy against the oppression brought by this perfect world.

Maysa was a huge Brazilian celebrity, successful in the United States, a pioneer on Japanese TV and received a standing ovation in Paris singing in French – an honor felt until then only by the giant Piaf. But Maysa was human, she had her limits, she couldn’t deal very well with a fame that, like her art, wasn’t just made of flowers.

Maysa felt the bitter taste of persecution from a press that needed to please mid-20th century society. A structure that relied on an obedient wife who waits for her husband to get home from work, has no professional prospects and only works at home. It was never Maysa’s thing – who, in her four-hundred-year-old marriage in São Paulo, found a loophole: she was able to continue singing, but reverting her income to charity.

Who was Maysa? No one at the time was able to decipher her mesmerizing eyes, which when we read her biography and everything that remains of her we know: Maysa was nothing more than a woman who wanted to be herself, without harming anyone (even if she played, thankfully which was out of sight, a bottle in Elis Regina).

Maysa was already the freedom that would explode in the second half of the 1960s. Maysa was Woodstock in a country that danced to the sound of an orchestra, there was no way to be understood. But looking now through time, it is possible to see that she was just like so many women we see today: determined, independent, creative, capable, free.

Vizcaya has the right feeling to know that humanity has no date, good music doesn’t age and lessons can be found in every decade. Just remix them.

By Ezatamentchy