Confessions about Maysa, singer and pioneering composer who would turn 90

Maysa, singer born on June 6, 1936 and died on January 22, 1977, would have turned 90 today
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♫ FIRST PERSON SINGULAR
♬ Maysa would have turned 90 today. Perhaps I would have missed the journalistic timing of the event if I hadn't come across Kiko Dinucci's post on Instagram in the morning. Yes, as unlikely as the association between the Rio singer and songwriter and Dinucci, a punk samba artist from São Paulo, was, it was because of him that I remembered the 90th anniversary of her birth. And, thinking about it, the link makes sense, as Maysa was a brilliantly punk artist.
"Samba-canção has always been a violent genre, an internal violence, of organs imploded by frustrated love", characterizes Dinucci in the post. I found the artist's definition of the musical genre that identifies Maysa Figueira Monjardim (June 6, 1936 - January 22, 1977) to be polished in the national imagination of those who lived through the era of this visceral singer. Or those who came to her after her early death, at age 40, in a car accident on the Rio-Niterói bridge.
By the way, I remember the cover of "Amiga" magazine that announced Maysa's death. "Amiga" was a magazine focused on television news, especially soap operas. But it gave covers to artists from other universes when they died violently and unexpectedly because death always sold magazines.
Maysa even did soap operas as an actress. I know she acted in "O cafona", a soap opera shown on TV Globo in 1971. But I never saw her as the actress. I remember her as a singer. And curiously, Maysa's deep and intense voice reached me through the soundtrack of a soap opera.
"My world fell", the samba-song that she had composed alone and released in 1958, returned to the charts in 1976, playing in the soap opera "Estúpido cupido", shown on TV Globo at 7pm, with phenomenal success, from August 1976 to February 1977. "My world fell" was Olga's theme, the character played by the now century-old actress Maria Della Costa (1926 - 2015).
Soon afterwards, in January 1977, when "Stupid Cupid" was still on the air, Maysa died in the aforementioned car accident. After the commotion over the singer's death, I soon forgot about Maysa, attracted by other singers who were in the spotlight in the 1970s. But then, at some point, I rediscovered Maysa and started listening to the singer. And I never forgot her.
I admire the composer, pioneer in the profession then reserved for men, solitary creator of beautiful songs such as "Ouça" (1957) and "Tarde sadness" (1956), a melancholic song that I discovered in the voice of Nana Caymmi (1941 - 2025) when Nana recorded this song for the soundtrack of the soap opera "O clone" in 2001.
First singer to record an entirely original album, in 1956, and soon a debut album, Maysa never embodied the docile and cute singer that the sexist market and world expected. On the contrary. She raised her voice, spoke swear words and defied norms, armed with those priceless green eyes, two "non-peaceful oceans", as Manuel Bandeira (1886 - 1968) poetized when talking about the rushing current in which Maysa let herself be carried away in her crazy life.
If Maysa was chordata, she would not have been able to face the four hundred family from São Paulo to become a singer in 1956, in a time of morals as rigid as the hypocrisy of society. I always admired Maysa for that. She was empowered before the adjective entered fashion and the activist dictionary.
I have also always admired Maysa for the density of the artist's interpretation. I can't imagine another singer giving voice to a samba-canção like "Franqueza" (Denis Brean and Oswaldo Guilherme, 1957) with Maysa's legitimacy and authority.
"Franqueza" appears on the same 1957 album in which the polyglot Maysa recorded a French song, "Un jour tu verras", released in 1954 in the voice of co-author Marcel Mouloudji. I lost count of how many times I heard "Un jour tu verras" with Maysa.
Anyway, Maysa lives. I resort to the cliché because it is true. Every now and then someone (re)discovers Maysa, the one who talked, drank, sang and lived too much in the mere 40 years of her life, enough time for the singer to become eternal in Brazilian music. Long live Maysa!

Source: G1

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