The Life Aquatic

BRAZILIAN BOWIE: Last night, we headed downtown after dark for a remarkable musical experience. We had the rare opportunity to see Brazilian-born artist Seu Jorge sing David Bowie classics in Portuguese. 

The enormous auditorium was nothing and everything but one man, a guitar, and Bowie's songs. We have motion picture director Wes Anderson to thank for it, because he sought out Jorge for the film "The Life Aquatic" to sing Bowie classics in Portuguese. That was in 2004. This year, the year Bowie left, was the first time Jorge has toured with these songs. 

We had cheap seats, but our seats ended up being rather amazing - box seats right atop the stage (look for the white arrow above).

The music - it was astounding. Amazing. But that's just my opinion. Let's see what the kids have to say about it. Annabelle up first ...

Seu Jorge is a Brazilian musician who, most famously, performed the music for a movie called "The Life Aquatic." He played the music on his guitar and sung in his native Portuguese. The songs on the the soundtrack were his covers of David Bowie songs, which he is most famous for. He covered many Bowie classics such as “Rebel Rebel”, “Lady Stardust” and others. He has a hard time speaking English, but when he makes renditions of these songs in Portuguese, it sounds amazing. You can really tell that he enjoys this music, even if he has a hard time understanding it. We had the rare chance to see him in concert, and it was truly amazing. I wish we could see him play again, because it is definitely worth it, and it’s amazing to hear the music in real life.A

 And here is CJ's take ... 

In 2004, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a strange parody film poking fun at ocean documentary films in the vein of those of Jaques Cousteau, was released. While it was a critical disappointment and a commercial disaster at the box office, film would go on to gain a cult following. One of the things that The Life Aquatic would become known for was its soundtrack recorded by Seu Jorge, a Brazilian musician and songwriter. The soundtrack of The Life Aquatic, known as "The Life Aquatic Studio Sessions", was mostly composed of covers of David Bowie songs sung in Portuguese. For more than 35 years by that point, David Bowie had been a world-famous songwriter and performer from England, known for his androgynous "Ziggy Stardust" on-stage persona that he used in the 1970s.

While I'll probably never know why the makers of The Life Aquatic chose an obscure Brazilian man to record Portuguese covers of David Bowie music for their aquatic parody film, I do know that the covers of the songs are very nice, even when they sound very different from the source material (as in the case of Seu Jorge's cover of Rebel Rebel). Right now, I am writing about Seu Jorge because I actually attended a concert of his at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle. This was my second visit to Benaroya Hall, and my first visit was for a National Geographic presentation about travelling in Antarctica, covered in an earlier report of mine. This event was very different, and I enjoyed it for different reasons.

For most of the songs, while I didn't and don't know a word of Portuguese, I was able to figure out what particular words or phrases in the songs he was saying. However, there is a possibility that Seu Jorge's covers do not contain literal translations of the lyrics of the original versions, so I probably won't know unless I learn Portuguese. Seu Jorge played with an acoustic guitar for the entirety of the performance, so they sometimes sound different than the original songs, as stated before. Also, Jorge, between songs, would tell stories in very hard-to-understand English, which sometimes elicited laughs from the audience (the things he was saying elicited laughs from the audience, not his difficult-to-understand English). At one point, Seu Jorge told us that he did not practice English very much, which is presumably the reason for the tough-to-understand pronunciation.

Near the end of the concert, they rolled a large projector screen behind Seu Jorge, where what I assume to be clips from The Life Aquatic were projected. I did notice the already severely-dated CGI fish and sea creatures, but it's still interesting seeing what came out of the minds of the makers of The Life Aquatic.

Jorge was a charming storyteller. Yes, it was a struggle to understand him, but the effort was worth it. He seemed genuinely surprised and overwhelmed by the crowd and its positive feedback. 

If you'd like to hear some of his magic, check out the link below. He plays a Brazilian song first. The Bowe starts around the 4:30 mark.