Joaquim de Brito is a versatile Portuguese musician. With classical training in piano and composition, Joaquim soon realized that he wouldn’t align with a single particular style of music or art form. For him, there’s no end to the search for a sound, an effect, or something unique to share with the world. Alongside his classic studies, Joaquim has always been a passionate percussionist with influences spanning the Portuguese, African, Brazilian, Indian, and Irish traditional music. He has composed several soundtracks for short films, animation, documentaries, and Theatre plays. While in Lisbon (Portugal) Joaquim plays regularly with different bands – he’s the percussionist for the Irish/Folk/Funky Band “MeltingPot” and a member of the band “The Tourorists”. In Seattle (USA), where he lived for two years, besides playing with musicians from the Northwest music scene, he worked on several music and visual art projects of his own. Now, back in Portugal along with his life as a musician, Joaquim is hosting an Open Mic for all ages and arts in Lisbon, makes woodblock prints and he’s trying to reshape his work to the Portuguese reality, always seeking to find and share something that touches those around him.
Shaka’s lo-fi Experience
Joaquim de Brito, aka Shaka, is a Portuguese musician. While living in Seattle, and Inspired by the Northwest’s unique combination of urban energy and pure nature, Shaka created the “Shaka’s Lo-Fi Experience” – a tribute to Jimi Hendrix’s groundbreaking electric sound and to Naná Vasconcelos’s unparalleled percussive talent. In Shaka’s Lo-Fi Experience, Joaquim charms the audience by playing his berimbau (a single-string percussion instrument of African origin) and lo-fi apparatus.
Artist note: My solo project, “Shaka’s Lo-fi Experience”, was born from a personal necessity of expressing myself and also as a tribute for two musicians that have a strong influence on my core as a musician. As I was playing more and more with this project, suddenly I started to use it as a way of expressing feelings of hope, mourning, revolt, of admiration related to actual things that were happening in the “Real World”. This way, I found myself expressing through the Shaka’s, pieces like the one that I wrote when the refugee crisis was mediatized in 2015, the StandingRock/Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016, and more recently the fire that burned to the ground The Nacional Museum of Brasil in January of 2018. “Shaka’s lo-fi Experience” is, therefore, my intimate and most interventionist musical project, always permeable and in constant mutation.
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