Pedro Abrunhosa is a typical character from a country that is even today connected with "fado" as far as music is concerned. Anyway, he has remained for the last five years the absolute superstar from Portugal. Two albums testified in a total of seven times platin (350,000 copies), the equivalent to 2 million in France, a very rare number among us. In his country he is at a time worshipped as a rock star (it is impossible for him to roam in town) and very attentively heard (a real interpreter of the political and social life) for he is as troublesome as seducer. In his words, his route, his music, Pedro Abrunhosa is simply the name of the record to be introduced on the French market in Spring 98, a compact of his two Portuguese major CDs - "Viagens" (94), then "Tempo" (97), plus three songs from his latest album adapted by himself and sung in French of which " Si je voyais � travers tes yeux" is the first single.

A retrospect over the course of this gifted young man. His native town, Porto, is the other capital of Portugal, less aristocratic but more industrious than Lisbon, just a little like Liverpool against London. Young Pedro takes music earnestly - classic Conservatoire, contrabass department, scholarships and starting the practice of the contemporary music, then the jazz temptation with his settlement in Madrid, high-levelled Seminars and night practice in club. He accompanies Wallace Roney, Bob Moses, Bill Hart, Paul Motian, Bill Frisell, Dave Liebman, all of them making their attempts in the genre. He teaches contrabass at the Hot Club of Lisbon, leads a jazz broadcast at a Porto radio station, he founds the local jazz school (where he conducts the big band). But he feels a little limited in his own circle, he engages himself in the "Composition" for the theatre and specially for the cinema, where he signs the O.B. of two long "metrages".

After his thirty years, Pedro Abrunhosa approaches "groove" and at that time he is deeply interested in the game of the word and the voice. He progressively creates three groups - The Cool Jazz Orchestra, rather R�n B�, then The Sound Machine", at last Bandem�nio, clearly "funk", with original compositions. It is finally with this last group that he records his first album with his name - "Viagens" with the participation of Maceo Parker in some of the themes, a super special guest, a prominent sax-player, a "sax-symbol" and an ex-companion of James Brown. 130,000 copies - the most sold record in the music history of Portugal, - it is the beginning of "Abrunhosa phenomenon". Planetary "Tours", from Rio to Macau, a second record "F", followed by a book. Then, he sets his course to the West, towards Paisley Park in Minneapolis, for the third record "Tempo", under the guidance of Tom Tucker, the local sound engineer. With New Power Generation, Prince�s group, he is made the master of the house and together with some of the Portuguese invited "tops": Carlos do Carmo (the great gentleman of fado), Opus Ensemble (a classic group) and Rui Veloso (the Portuguese rock leader). In two weeks 190,000 copies of this album are sold in Portugal, less funk more soul. And in May 97, another international Tour, that now goes through Paris: about 6,000 persons at Zenith - for the first time the young Portuguese people from Paris (the second generation) shake and recognize themselves in the artist of their country... In this year of the World Exhibition 98 in Lisbon, Pedro Abrunhosa is prominent - we will see him on stage with Caetano Veloso, the Brasilian, on 23rd July and 4th September in one Abrunhosa night, the closing of the festival.

It is the obvious (and official) recognition of a stature and of an innovating posture. But by no means has Abrunhosa (a multi-instrument player) and a multi-linguist (he speaks six languages and sings in four - Portuguese, English, French, Spanish) adopted the mould of the rock stars, detached from reality. He fights against prejudice, moral order and hypocrisy, values still highly quoted in this catholic country, made torpid and wrinkled by a half-century dictatorship. In short, Pedro Abrunhosa disturbs too much - he is incorrigible. His number one enemy is intolerance and doesn�t hesitate, even out of Portugal, to demolish it just in the middle of a concert. For this reason, Pedro Abrunhosa is always attentive, spends a lot of time discussing in public, after the show.

So we have this record, that defines the character in his essence. A Lusitanian cousin of Gainsbourg for his manner of whispering the words that he casts onto his public as a kind of nourishment, he jumps from the trip-hop ballad to the sharp funk, from the piano-voice minimalist blues to an inarticulate pseudo fado. A navigator, within the very Portuguese tradition, Pedro Abrunhosa borders the most inconvenient coasts, sometimes in lands of Europe, once the frontiers easily fall with him and Portugal stops being that land of "clich�s" and suddenly becomes just a little bit our own country...

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HAVE YOU SAID PORTUGAL?

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Pedro Abrunhosa�s Portugal is living by now the preparations of Expo 98, the last world exhibition before the next millenium and the very first occasion for the country to show the planet its true indentity and also its modernity. In this moment Lisbon is a gigantic shipbuilding-yard, a fight against time in order to be ready on the scheduled day. But it seems that Portugal has always had this time problem, sometimes rash and ahead of its own epoch, other times desperately blocked.

It is unbelievable how much the Portuguese have always travelled ! Across the seas, of course, which is not a nowadays fashion. By the end of the XVth century, they settled in Azores, Madeira anda Cabo Verde. Bartholomew Dias goes around Boa Esperan�a Cape, Vasco da Gama settles his trading depots in Guin�, Mozambique, Angola, Macau, Goa. A colonial empire that will be linked to Portugal for nearly five centuries. In 1500, another navigator, Cabral, discovers Brasil. A small kingdom, but a huge empire. The more so that the small farmers make their way (that of emigration) on to another direction - towards continental Europe. Simply because the agriculture production is much more expensive than that of the colonies. Morality: post-Renaissance Portugal is one million citizens in the country, the double, out of it. Portugal was again hit by time in this XXth century. Chiefly since 1933, when a certain Salazar takes hold of power. A kind of flabby fascism, and thirty five years moral order, self-sufficiency, obscurantism, police supervision . No doubt were the Portuguese spared by the World War II, but with no access to progress. Then, there springs the syndrome of the cardboard bag, headed for the "Eldorado" - France, for instance, full-time jobs, and the warrant of an assimilation well accepted by the receiving authorities: the million Portuguese living in France help flourish the small trade and civil construction. Besides they are not revindicative, they remain silent. Old Salazar pays all his attention to PIDE (the political police) and stars loading the burden of the liberation movements of the African colonies. Portugal vegetates, its youth is cut off from the world.

th April 74. Gr�ndola Vila Morena, Jos� Afonso�s song, resounds over the national radio, it is the signal, young army officers and soldiers leave their headquarters and it is the triumph of the liberating "Coup d��tat", still another incongruence. A movement of captains through a revolution of pinks, a noble startle - but we are in 74, the year of the first oil shock and the 01 year of unemployment in Europe. Bad synchronization . Of course both the word and the political prisoners are set free, the Left starts its first steps in power, and the African colonies are hastily discolonized - Angola, Mozambique, Guin� Bissau, Cabo Verde, S�o Tom�.

The adhesion of the country to the European Community in 89 sets the Portuguese clocks right according to the European time. For instance, fado, that sort of blues from Tagus (Tejo) borders, whose intransient "diva" is Am�lia Rodrigues, is no longer the only emblematic musical expression. The intervention minstrels, such as Jos� Afonso, the "rockers" turned at a time both to the sea and to Europe, as Rui Veloso and Her�is do Mar enchant a youth to whom the Stones were nothing but a pure abstraction. Later on, there will appear another more glamorous generation of fado singers (fadistas), as surely Madredeus and more recently M�sia or Paulo Bragan�a (with the label of the indiscreet David Byrne). As for the Africans of the second generation, descendent from the immigrants of the ex-colonies, they are faced with the same crawling xenophoby that rules in the other countries of Europe. General D the "top-rapper" from Mozambique living in the dormitory towns circling Lisbon, hardly succeeds in dribbling all the prejudices of the millieu, the same happening to the Black Company. But, after all, weren�t the Angolan Bonga and Ces�ria �vora, the granny from Cabo Verde, promoted in France much earlier than in Portugal?

We shall understand better that the "groovy" and incendiary carism of Pedro Abrunhosa has provoked such an effect upon an audience as big as the whole country. And still bigger, because as a real conqueror, there he leaves "to take by storm" the old Continent. The Tower of Bel�m, the iron galleon, raised centuries a go by the edge of Tagus, has witnessed the departure of many expeditions. But now it is the CD, the musicians of Prince, Paris, Internet. If he was a child in this end of the century, Vasco da Gama would probably be called Pedro Abrunhosa !!!