CéU ||| Portrait

CéU

There are few more stimulating environments to grow up in than the music cauldron called São Paulo. Maria do Céu Whitaker Poças was nurtured by the music of her father, a musicologist and arranger who was highly appreciated for his dedication to the country’s classic composers. In her teenage years CéU trained on a nylon-stringed Brazilian guitar called the violão and soon began performing onstage. By her late teens her repertoire include the traditional carnival sounds called “marchinhas”.

This was about the time New York City beckoned the ambitious artist. A chance meeting there with Antonio Pinto opened up the doors to her first self-titled album. Pinto’s notoriety as a composer was based on his musical scores for the feature films “Central Station” and “City of God”, both nominated for the Oscars. On her debut album, he produced CéU’s song “Ave Cruz”.

After her eye-opening stint in New York, the young singer returned to São Paulo where she plunged into the city’s vibrant underground scene. CéU first led a samba funk band before fronting an electro-dance group that turned the heads of several major record labels. It was the Indie label Urban Jungle that bagged her signature, and ensured CéU total freedom for her talent to express itself. The company’s investment was vindicated by the phenomenal success of her debut album that sold 60,000 albums in the first two months of its release alone, and reaching N°1 in the Billboards World Music charts.

The crystalline clarity of CéU’s voice does honour to her name (“céu” means either “heaven” or “sky” in Portuguese). There is also an adaptability that allows the precocious singer to accompany jazzy songs as easily as she does the samba, reggae, dub, electronica, bluesy or funky tunes that are on her 2005 CD. The popularity of her concerts in Europe or North America testifies to the universal quality of her music despite her refusal to be pigeonholed as “yet another sexy voice from Brazil”. Talent, hard work and intelligence are the keywords in CéU’s music that make her a strong candidate for a major international career.

November 2007

Daniel Brown

// ALSO