Born in Ituaçu in Bahia’s Chapada Diamantina mountain region, Moraes started his musical life on accordeon, playing at São João festivals, taking up guitar a few years later and moving to Salvador, Bahia, where he was to study medicine. There, he met one of the founders of the Tropicalísmo Movement, the legendary Tom Zé, at a music school, who introduced him to Salvador’s vibrant 60s musical underground. A few years later, in 1968, Moreira helped to form the band Os Novos Baianos with Baby Consuelo, Pepeu Gomes,
Luiz Galvão, and group founder Paulinho Boca de Cantor. Between 1969 and 1975 Os Baianos established themselves as one of Brazil’s leading rock and MPB bands, patenting a unique mix of samba, forro, frevo, pop, rock and baião, much of it with a psychedelic twist. In a recent interview with O Globo newspaper, Moreira admitted that most of the best songs written by him and his composing partner Galvão during those years were deeply influenced by LSD, despite the fact that the overall inspiration for the songs was bossa nova originator João Gilberto.
There were several albums but perhaps the most celebrated was 1972’s Acabou Chorare: an album that even today features in the Top Five all-time favourite records of many Brazilians of that generation, with stone classics such as Preta Pretinha, Best é Tu and A Menina Dança. The album has been an acknowledged inspiration to the work of many modern Brazilian bands such as Tribalistas, Orquestra Imperial and others.
Moreira was the first person to sing with a trio elétrico at Salvador Carnival, first with the legendary Armandinho, and later with Dodo É Osmar. Moreira’s frevo-influenced trio elétrico compositions – os trieletrizados, as he called them - soon became the hallmark of Salvador’s unique sound and approach to ‘A Festa’.
Active until the last months of his life, Moreira spent much of 2019 writing and performing the show Elogio à Inveja, in which he interpreted the songs of some of his favourite Brazilian composers and singers, such as Lupicínio Rodrigues, Vinicius de Moraes, Chico Buarque and Orlando Silva.
In Covid quarantine at his home in Rio de Janeiro throughout March, it’s fitting that the last composition of this giant of Brazilian popular music was a light-hearted ‘cordel de esconjuro’ (a sort of exorcism poem) about coronavirus, in which he says. ‘I’m frightened of coronavirus/but in Rio I’m much more frightened of the stray bullet…’
