Henrique George Mautner (born January 17, 1941),[1] better known by his stage name Jorge Mautner, is a Brazilian singer-songwriter, lyricist, violinist, actor, screenwriter, film director and poet, considered to be a pioneer of the MPB scene and of the Tropicalista movement.
Mautner was born in Rio de Janeiro on January 17, 1941, one month after his mother, Anna Illich, a CatholicCroat, and his father, Paul Mautner, an Austrian Jew, emigrated from Europe to Brazil to escape from the Holocaust. Despite being a sympathizer of Getúlio Vargas, Paul was a part of the Jewish underground resistance. Anna eventually suffered from a major paralysis due to a trauma caused by the fact that Jorge's sister, Susana, was not able to embark to Brazil with them, and so until he was 7 years old a nanny, Lúcia, took care of him; Lúcia was a mãe-de-santo, and introduced Jorge to Candomblé.
In 1948 Jorge's parents divorced, and Anna eventually remarried Henri Müller, a violinist who played for the São Paulo State Symphony, and who taught Jorge how to play the violin. His family later moved to São Paulo, where he studied at the prestigious Colégio Dante Alighieri; despite being an excellent student, he would, however, be expelled before he could graduate from high school because of a text he wrote, considered "indecent" by his teachers.
Mautner began to write his first book, Deus da Chuva e da Morte, when he was 15 years old; it was published in 1962, and in the following year it won the Prêmio Jabuti. Deus da Chuva e da Morte would be the first part of what is today known as his Mitologia do Kaos trilogy, which also comprises Kaos (1963) and Narciso em Tarde Cinza (1965).[2] In it, Mautner would define the main ideology of what he calls the "Kaos Movement".
Mautner was arrested during the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état, but was later released, under the conditions of "expressing himself more carefully". In 1966 he recorded his first musical release, the 7" single "Radioatividade", through RCA Records. Soon after he travelled to the United States, where he worked for the UNESCO and as a translator of Brazilian books. He later met poet Robert Lowell, serving as his secretary, as well as Paul Goodman, with whom he developed a strong friendship and suffered an everlasting influence from him.
In 1968 he briefly returned to Brazil, where he worked as screenwriter on Neville d'Almeida's film Jardim de Guerra, that was only released two years later.
In 1970 he travelled to London, where he befriended Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. He later returned to Brazil, settling in Rio de Janeiro once more, where he began to write for the humoristic newspaper O Pasquim. In the same year he directed the film O Demiurgo, which starred himself, Gil, Veloso, José Roberto Aguilar, Péricles Cavalcanti and Leilah Assunção. The film was censored by the dictatorship though, and never received a wide release. (In 2013 Mautner made the film available in its entirety through his official YouTube channel.[3]) Around the same time he met Nélson Jacobina, one of his most prolific songwriting partners, with whom he wrote, among many other songs, the 1974 hit "Maracatu Atômico".
In 1988 Mautner took part in a short-lived "joke side project" formed by then-Titãs member Arnaldo Antunes named Vestidos de Espaço, which also comprised Branco Mello, Charles Gavin, Paula Toller of Kid Abelha and record producer Liminha. The band's only release before their demise in the following year was a 7" single with the tracks "Pipi Popô" and "A Marcha do Demo"; the latter was included in the Titãs compilation album E-collection from 2000.[5]
In 2002 Mautner served as a guest musician on synth-pop band Metrô's third album, Déjà-Vu, providing violin and additional vocals for a track. In the same year he released a collaborative album with Caetano Veloso, Eu Não Peço Desculpa, which won the Latin Grammy Award in 2003.
A documentary about Mautner, directed by Pedro Bial and Heitor d'Alincourt, was released in 2012 to positive reception, entitled Jorge Mautner: O Filho do Holocausto; it was inspired by his autobiography of the same name, published in 2006. In the same year he collaborated with Rogério Skylab in his album Abismo e Carnaval, writing the lyrics and providing additional vocals for the track "Palmeira Brasileira".
On January 17, 2016, coinciding with his 75th birthday, Mautner published his eleventh book, Kaos Total.[6]
On July 28, 2016, it was reported that Mautner suffered a heart attack and was rushed to the Hospital Samaritano in Rio. He underwent a surgery to implant four stents into his heart, but eventually recovered.[7] One month later, on August 30, he announced that he began work on a 10-volume series of books about his years as a militant for the Brazilian Communist Party during the mid-1960s.[8]
In April 2019 he released his first studio album in 12 years, entitled Não Há Abismo em que o Brasil Caiba.[9] One of the album's tracks is a tribute to feminist/LGBT activist Marielle Franco, murdered in 2018.[10] The album was considered one of the 25 best Brazilian albums of the first half of 2019 by the São Paulo Association of Art Critics.[11]
Personal life
In 1968 he married historian Ruth Mendes, with whom he had a daughter, Amora (born 1975), who became a famous telenovela director.
2004: MORAIS JUNIOR, Luís Carlos de. Proteu ou: A Arte das Transmutações. Leituras, audições e visões da obra de Jorge Mautner (Editora HP Comunicação; re-issued in 2011 by Editora Litteris)
2004: Jorge Mautner em movimento (Edited by César Resac)
Related Research Articles
Caetano Emanuel Viana Teles Veloso is a Brazilian composer, singer, guitarist, writer, and political activist. Veloso first became known for his participation in the Brazilian musical movement Tropicália, which encompassed theatre, poetry and music in the 1960s, at the beginning of the Brazilian military dictatorship that took power in 1964. He has remained a constant creative influence and best-selling performing artist and composer ever since. Veloso has won nine Latin Grammy Awards and two Grammy Awards. On 14 November, 2012, Veloso was honored as the Latin Recording Academy Person of the Year.
Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst was a Brazilian poet, novelist, and playwright. Her work touches on the themes of mysticism, insanity, the body, eroticism, and female sexual liberation. Hilst greatly revered the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and the influence of their styles—like stream of consciousness and fractured reality—is evident in her own work.
Jorge Duílio Lima Menezes is a Brazilian popular musician, performing under the stage name Jorge Ben Jor since the 1980s, though commonly known by his former stage name Jorge Ben. Performing in a samba style that also explored soul, funk, rock and bossa nova sounds, Ben has recorded such well-known songs as "Chove Chuva", "Mas, que Nada!", "Ive Brussel" and "Balança Pema". His music has been covered by artists such as Caetano Veloso, Sérgio Mendes, Miriam Makeba, Soulfly and Marisa Monte.
Gal Maria da Graça Costa Penna Burgos, known professionally as Gal Costa ( ), was a Brazilian singer of popular music. She was one of the main figures of the tropicalia music scene in Brazil in the late 1960s and appeared on the acclaimed compilation Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis (1968). She was described by The New York Times as "one of Brazil's greatest singers."
Rui Manuel Gaudêncio Veloso is a Portuguese singer-songwriter and musician. Commonly called "The father of Portuguese rock", Veloso was a major figure in the boom of Portuguese rock music in the 1980s. His 1980 debut album Ar de Rock, which includes the hit single "Chico Fininho", is considered a landmark of Portuguese rock. During the 1980s and 1990s, Veloso released numerous other successful singles and albums in Portugal.
Zé Ramalho is a Brazilian composer and performer. Zé Ramalho has collaborated with various major Brazilian musicians, including Vanusa, Geraldo Azevedo and Alceu Valença.
Branco Mello is a Brazilian musician and actor, best known as the vocalist and bassist of Brazilian rock band Titãs. He has also played small but significant roles for the movies.
José Gabriel Lopes da Silva, also known as Gabriel Mariano, was a Cape Verdean poet, novelist, and an essayist.
Dalton Jérson Trevisan is a Brazilian author of short stories. He is described as an "acclaimed short-story chronicler of lower-class mores and popular dramas." Trevisan won the 2012 Prémio Camões, the leading Portuguese-language author prize, valued at €100,000.
André Ferreira da Silva, better known by his pen name André Vianco, is a Brazilian best-selling novelist, screenwriter, and film and television director. Specialized in urban fantasy and horror, supernatural and vampire fiction, he rose to fame in 1999 with the novel Os Sete. As of 2016, his books have sold over a million copies, and in 2018 he was named, alongside Max Mallmann, Raphael Draccon and Eduardo Spohr, one of the leading Brazilian fantasy writers of the 21st century.
Luis Carlos Verzoni Nejar, better known as Carlos Nejar, is a Brazilian poet, author, translator and critic, and a member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras. One of the most important poets of its generation, Nejar, also called "o poeta do pampa brasileiro", is distinguished for his use of an extensive vocabulary, alliteration, and pandeism. His first book, Sélesis, was published in 1960.
Olavo Luiz Pimentel de Carvalho was a Brazilian self-proclaimed philosopher, political pundit, former astrologer, journalist, and far-right conspiracy theorist.
Rogério Tolomei Teixeira, known professionally as Rogério Skylab, is a Brazilian singer-songwriter, lyricist, classical guitarist, poet, essayist, record producer, actor and former television presenter. Describing himself as a "corpse within MPB", his unique musical style which granted him a passionate cult following is characterized by minimalism, repetition and eclecticism, and his lyrics and poems are permeated by grotesque, shocking and offensive imagery; acerbic allusions to popular culture; metafictional devices; absurdist scenarios; pessimism; profanity; nihilism; and scatological and black comedy – although he denies that his work is purposefully humorous.
Alexandre Magno Abrão, known professionally as Chorão, was a Brazilian singer-songwriter, skateboarder, filmmaker, screenwriter and businessman. Best known for being a founding member and the vocalist/main lyricist of the influential rock band Charlie Brown Jr., Folha de S.Paulo critic André Barcinski considered him "the nearest thing to a punk hero Brazilian mainstream music ever had", and Eduardo Tristão Girão of Portal Uai called him "the bad boy of Brazilian rock" and "the spokesman of the youth of the 1990s". Having been born and raised for most of his childhood in São Paulo, Chorão was the only Charlie Brown Jr. member not to be a Santos native, and its only founding member to remain consistently in all of the group's line-ups.
"Maracatu Atômico" is a song written and composed by Brazilian musicians Jorge Mautner and Nélson Jacobina in 1974, and originally performed by Mautner on his self-titled album released in the same year. It is one of the duo's most famous creative outputs, thanks to the numerous cover versions it received over the years, the most famous of them being the one made by Nação Zumbi in 1996.
Abismo e Carnaval is the tenth studio album by the Brazilian musician Rogério Skylab; the first installment of what he calls the "Trilogia dos Carnavais". It was self-released in 2012. Contrasting with the rock-influenced sonority of Skylab's previous releases, the three albums of the Trilogia dos Carnavais head towards a softer, less experimental direction inspired by Brazilian traditional genres, such as samba, bossa nova and MPB, and by the Tropicalista movement.
Flávio Basso, better known by his stage name Júpiter Maçã and by its English-language variation Jupiter Apple, was a Brazilian singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and filmmaker. Before beginning a solo career in 1994, he was already known for being a founding member of bands TNT and Os Cascavelletes, both pioneers of the Rio Grande do Sul rock scene in the mid-to-late 1980s/early 1990s.
Anna Veronica Mautner was a Brazilian psychoanalyst, writer and a professor at the University of São Paulo.
Rubens Francisco Lucchetti was a Brazilian fiction writer, illustrator, writer and scripts for films, comic books and photo comics. Luchetti wrote more than 30 books under his name and over 1500 crime and horror fiction works under several pen names. He also wrote screenplays for films directed by José Mojica Marins and Ivan Cardoso. Lucchetti died from respiratory failure on 4 April 2024, at the age of 94.
Vladimir Pinheiro Safatle is a Brazilian philosopher, writer and musician. He is a professor of Theory of Human Sciences at the Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences, University of São Paulo. His intellectual production focuses on the areas of epistemology of psychoanalysis and psychology, political philosophy, critical theory and philosophy of music.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
