Daniel Sharp

My research focuses primarily on how traditional and experimental music is intertwined in the Americas, with a specific interest in post-plantation areas with heritage tourism economies (Northeast Brazil; New Orleans). I have developed a multidisciplinary approach involving fine-grained ethnographic research, oral histories, and narrative-centered writing that weaves cultural theory together with the everyday details of musicians’ lives.

My first book Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse: Popular Music and the Staging of Brazil is a close-to-the-ground account of musicians and dancers from Arcoverde, Pernambuco—a small city in the northeastern Brazilian backlands. The book’s focus on samba de coco families, marked as bearers of tradition, and the band Cordel do Fogo Encantado, marketed as pop iconoclasts, offers a portrait of performers engaged in new forms of cultural preservation during a post-dictatorship period of democratization and neoliberal reform. In it, I explore how festivals, museums, television, and tourism steep musicians’ performances in national-cultural nostalgia, which both provides musicians and dancers with opportunities for cultural entrepreneurship and hinders their efforts to be recognized as part of the Brazilian here-and-now. The book charts how Afro-Brazilian samba de coco became an unlikely emblem in an interior where European and indigenous mixture predominates. It also chronicles how Cordel do Fogo Encantado—drawing upon the sounds of samba de coco, ecstatic Afro-Brazilian religious music, and heavy metal—sought to make folklore feel dangerous by embodying an apocalyptic register and exposing the foundational violence that underlies stories of Brazilian regional and national origins. Publication of this book was supported by AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

My second book revolves around Afro-Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos’s 1980 album Saudades. My goal is to situate his reimagining of percussion and voice in the context of his itinerant life in New York, Europe and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. Of all the recordings in his extensive catalog, Naná was most proud of Saudades, which showcases his evocative, cinematic soundscapes on the berimbau and other percussion, working in tandem with his vocalizations, which he used as another musical instrument in the stereo mix. Naná’s longtime collaborator and roommate Arto Lindsay praised Naná’s impeccable time this way: “Naná has this kind of crystal clear time—it illuminates everything around it. It’s the time itself that is just glorious. It breathes, but never lets you down.”

The book’s focus on the Saudades record allows for an exploration of Naná’s trajectory from 1969 up until 1979, a pivotal time for him artistically, as well as in the arc of his life. During this decade prior to the recording, Naná began in Brazil, moved to New York City, then to Paris, and then back to Manhattan, touring extensively throughout Europe all the while. The record Saudades—a word for bittersweet longing deeply associated with the migratory Brazilian experience—captures the mixed emotions of the Brazilian far from home, while showcasing the vocabulary of techniques that he had been accumulating during this period. Based on numerous oral history interviews with his collaborators, the book’s themes include the relationship between popular music and cinema; the emergence of the category of world music in the 1970s and its relationship to free jazz and jazz-fusion; the relationship of Naná’s worldless vocalizations and body percussion to his work with neurodivergent children in a Paris hospital; and the ways in which Naná’s work was refiguring notions of the primitive in 1970s NYC and Paris.

In addition to my Brazil-centered work, I am also working on a New Orleans-centered project that explores many of the same themes of experimentalism, traditionalism and cultural tourism. For this project, Musical Architecture: Community Arts and Experimentalism in New Orleans, I am documenting an ambitious artistic collaboration called the Music Box Village. The Music Box Village is a project that brings together many visual artists, architects, musical instrument makers, and musicians in the service of the theme of “musical architecture.” It is an interactive visual and sound art installation by day, and a one-of-a-kind concert venue by night. Musicians experiment with sound and timbre on ingenious musical instruments embedded into the walls, ceilings and floors of small houses arranged throughout the outdoor space. The installation has been covered in glowing terms by Smithsonian Magazine, NPR and the New York Times. I am interested in questions surrounding both the creation of the art and the curation of the project. I am researching the unique musical instruments embedded in the buildings, and also the process of the project‘€™s funding and production. I interpret the Music Box Village, with its focus on sound, community and collaboration, as a nuanced response to the art of post-industrial ruins that places urban decay within a mournful tragic narrative. The project represents a convergence between approaches to avant-garde experimental music and art that are restless to break free from the confines of the museum and the concert hall, and the social aims of a non-profit community organization in a post-disaster zone. It is in the friction between these worlds that this work centers.