Alceu Valença, 'eternal boy', reaches 80 years old without taking off the jovial cover of 'crazy beauty' in life and on stage

Alceu Valença turns 80 today, Wednesday, July 1st, with a body of work totaling 316 compositions
Leo Aversa / Disclosure
♫ ANALYSIS
♬ Born on July 1st, 1946 in São Bento do Una (PE), a city in the countryside of Pernambuco, Alceu Paiva Valença turns 80 today without taking off his cape in life and on stage jovial character of bicho crazy Beauty, title character of a 1992 song.
Dissociated from the lyrics of Frevo Folhão, the epithet Bicho Crazy Beauty suits an artist who, by his own electric nature, defies the inflexible tangle of time by becoming an octogenarian without losing energy.
It is this energy that has characterized the singer and composer from Pernambuco in the national imagination since the 1970s, a decade that revealed Alceu Valença to Brazil in the migratory current that moved northeastern artists to the Rio-São Paulo axis in search of visibility throughout the national territory.
From the same generation as fellow countryman Geraldo Azevedo (with whom he debuted on the music market on an LP recorded as a duo and released in 1972) and Zé Ramalho from Paraíba, Alceu Valença made a name for himself by creating a sound that packs aboios, frevos, maracatus, baião, xotes and cirandas at high voltage, sometimes even with the power of rock, but without making rock, as the artist often emphasizes in interviews.
Since his first solo album, "Espelho cristalino", released in 1974, Alceu followed a path that opened doors - including those of psychedelia applied to northeastern music - and pointed out paths for successors such as Lenine, also from Pernambuco.
Touring Brazil since March with the show "80 girassóis", created to celebrate the artist's eight decades of life with a retrospective of his work, the singer is a disciple of King Luiz Gonzaga (1912 - 1989) who found his own north in the northeastern dynasty.
Alceu Valença is a solar image artist and, from this luminous perspective, the title of the show "80 sunflowers" is in tune with the singer's vivacious temperament. Always based on the future tense, Alceu followed paths that forked, starting from Olinda (PE), Recife (PE), Rio de Janeiro (RJ) or Lisbon (Portugal), without ever failing to outline a trace of unity between these cities that shape the artist's particular musical and poetic universe.
"I'm an eternal boy, I feel eighty in reverse, eight years old perhaps. Or the eight drawn horizontally, which is the symbol of infinity", poetizes Alceu in the promotional text for the tour that will pass through the city of Rio de Janeiro (RJ) again on Friday, July 3, with the artist's presentation at Fundição Progresso.
Alceu Valença manages to be a national name and, at the same time, a symbol and living legend of Pernambuco culture, the basis and compass of work that echoes aboiadores, singers and repentistas, totaling 316 compositions and 839 recordings made in 54 years of his recording career.
Of the 316 songs, "Anunciação" (1983) is the most played and responsible for the growing renewal of the artist's audience. "Tropicana" (Alceu Valença and Vicente Barreto, 1982) and "La belle de jour" (1992) also attract and swell the audience's chorus at Alceu Valença's shows, a crazy beauty who faces the incessant tangle of time, "lord of wrinkles and marks", with the defiant energy of those octogenarians who remain eternal boys.
Alceu Valença considers himself an 'eternal boy' and celebrates 80 years of life with the '80 sunflowers' tour show
Leo Aversa / Disclosure

Source: G1