Tiganá Santana: A Beginner's Guide

I’m an artist inspired by life; I’m not an artist inspired by art,” the man with the deep, mellifluous voice tells me on Zoom from Santos, Brazil (whose football team once boasted a certain Pelé). “Of course, I adore the artistic universe, but this is part of life – like nature, our conversations, the relationships we build. That’s my inspiration, my raw material. It’s a translation: from life to art.”

It may be unsurprising that this thoughtful, multilingual singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, artistic director and more besides also has a doctorate in translation and lectures at the universities of São Paulo and his native Bahia. Or that he was writing poetry at age nine. While his mother wanted him to be a diplomat, her son aimed to be a writer. Becoming a musician, he reveals, “actually was a surprise to me.”

Born in 1982 in the Afro-Brazilian city of Salvador, music nevertheless marked Tiganá’s childhood. His mother “is an actress, but she sings very well,” his grandfather played saxophone and clarinet, and two of his uncles played acoustic guitar. At family gatherings, they would play and sing popular Brazilian music together. Guided by an uncle, he dived deeper into “the music universe”: João Gilberto and Dorival Caymmi initially, then international artists – from Ali Farka Touré to the composer Arvo Pärt. Saxophonist Jan Garbarek’s 1979 album Folk Songs and the ECM label’s ‘Scandi-jazz’ in general taught him about space and silence and what he calls “this music of atmosphere.”

Taking up the acoustic guitar in his teens, Santana began to compose, initially setting his poetry to music until gradually he began “to subordinate lyrics to music.” In 2010, he released the highly atmospheric Maçalê, first in Brazil and then abroad: a mélange of self-penned songs sung in Portuguese, French and, significantly, Kikongo and Kimbundu. Santana became the first-ever Brazilian artist to write songs in African languages. Why had it taken so long? “It’s part of the colonialistic project,” he explains, “to cut out reference to the African elements that constitute the Brazilian culture. That’s why many of us are not aware of its deep presence in our daily lives. We speak, think and write based on many deeply embedded African languages that are part of the Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Brazil.”

The album opens with the words of his Candomblé religion’s venerable spiritual mother, blessing his creative career. At this point, Santana felt that his career wouldn’t be that long: three albums perhaps, but “something pushed me to conceive new artistic projects” – such as a performance at a festival in Belgium with his “important career partner,” percussionist Sebastian Notini. Based in Sweden, Notini suggested recording there together. The result was The Invention of Colour, recorded live two years before Pether Lindgren of ajabu! picked it up and released it in 2013. Displaying a mastery of space, silence and atmosphere, it confirmed Santana’s stature as one of Brazil’s most important new artists. It also spotlighted his singular five-string ‘drum-guitar,’ tuned to complement the timbre of his voice. “Having one string less, I’m kind of forced to have this more percussive guitar,” he explains. “The frequencies issued from my guitar and my voice inhabit the same territory.”

A Songlines Top of the World album, it also triggered a UNESCO artist-in-residence sojourn in Senegal. “A very, very interesting experience,” he relates. “I started meeting musicians from Senegal, Mali and Guinea… Playing with [them] taught me a bit more about my music.” Rehearsing every evening for four months, they recorded the resulting Tempo & Magma, again live, in Youssou N’Dour’s (poorly insulated) studio – whenever “there was some silence,” he laughs. “There was a mosque on one side of the studio and building work in progress on the other.” One of the numbers is a “Guinean hunter’s chant.” Back in Brazil, Santana overdubbed on top of it his recording of another venerable Candomblé priestess, Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, singing a song for the Yoruba hunter deity. “When Sebastian and I started to match the two,” he enthuses, “they combined perfectly – like magic.”

Or serendipity: like a subsequent meeting in Paris with the globetrotting Cuban pianist, Omar Sosa. The pair agreed to record together. Four years went by until “Omar came to São Paulo and in ten days together we made the album in a lovely studio on a farm in the middle of the countryside.” The resulting album was as felicitous as its title: Iroko, the African deity worshipped in both Cuba and Brazil.

Santana is a ready collaborator. He has worked, for example, with the singer Virgínia Rodrigues on a homage to Dorival Caymmi that involved performances first in São Paulo in 2018 and then in Salvador the following year. He has also produced her most recent album and artistically directed the one prior to that; producing is a role he loves and has undertaken, alongside collaborators, for his own albums, Vida Código (2019/2020) and the latest, Caçada Noturna. “Just to think about how to combine the songs… It’s like literature, like a tale. To tell a story – musically, artistically, instrumentally.”

In 2017, the German music curator Martin Hossbach invited him to perform Milton Nascimento’s 1973 album, Milagre dos Peixes with Notini and bassist Ldson Galter, at festivals in Berlin and two years later in Avignon. Seven songs from the original album were released on Hossbach’s own label in 2020 as Milagres. Initially, Santana felt he “could not add anything” to another artist’s songs. But then, it “made sense to match these two different periods.” “Milagres’ lyrics were prohibited during the 70s by the dictatorship,” he explains. “When I accepted to re-record it, I could establish an association with what was happening here in terms of… the presence of fascism in Brazil.”

Santana is a busy man. “Sometimes I’m more focused on my music projects, sometimes I share them with other artistic activities. But the musical projects are always the main activities of my soul.” Despite all the acclaim, this philosophical artist remains refreshingly humble. “When we can communicate and touch another person’s feelings, we have everything. It’s my whole soul. When I reach someone, it’s like life telling me, just keep going.” One sincerely hopes he will.

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue, read the magazine online – subscribe today: magsubscriptions.com