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Artist
Dom Mita
12+ albums
funksoulbrazilbraziliangroove
about
The whatmusic.com interview... I was born in Bauru, a city in the interior of São Paulo. Not only was my grandfather a musician, a violeiro, a repentista from Minas Gerais and the son of Africans, but my father was a sanfoneiro - an accordionist. When I was nine years old I went to a school run by monks where I studied orfeonic song and became the lead chorister, until I was thirteen when I moved to Rio de Janeiro. In Rio I went to live in the Morro de São João in Engenho Novo. There you'd hear samba all night, every night, and this got me into playing some percussion instruments, as well as singing. I was greatly influenced by samba and the 'balanço' of the samba that was so different. I really became a percussionist through necessity because of the lack of work as a singer. I started out playing pandeiro and then moved onto the drums, playing every kind of music - samba, bolero, jazz, mambo, cha cha cha. I began writing songs in 1962 pretty much at the insistence of another songwriter, Roberto Correa, from the vocal group Os Golden Boys. I was 22 years old at the time. In the late 50s and early 60s in Copacabana the big thing was the jam sessions. Anybody and everybody who was interested in playing and growing musically just had to be there. Of course, that went for me, too. Round about that time I met Edison Machado, the drummer who created the 'samba no prato' [cymbal samba]. Up until that time kit drum samba had been played exclusively with brushes on the snar
