MOJO PRESENTS
After decades of toiling in the shadows, ROGÊ is the artist taking classic Brazilian music into the future, and he’s bringing cratedigger’s talisman/ genius arranger Arthur Verocai with him. Prophets ignored in their own land? Maybe not for much longer. “This is just the beginning,” they tell DAVID HUTCHEON.
Shore thing: Rogê strums along in Malibu, California, summer 2022; (below) debut international LP Curyman.
Photography by JULIAN KLINCEWICZ
IT’S A FINE DECEMBER MORNING IN NEW YORK CITY. AS MARQUINHOS’S PENALTY thumps against the Croatia goalpost and Brazil’s World Cup ambitions evaporate, however, a 10-year-old boy starts crying in another room and his father, Rio de Janeiro-born Roger José Cury, AKA Rogê, AKA (in homage to that city’s cultural hub) “the Prince of the Lapa nightlife scene”, turns his attention to MOJO. “Sometimes the best don’t win,” he shrugs, wearing the experienced, rueful smile of one who has seen promise and potential dashed on the rocks of reality many times before.
Our meeting was first postponed after he discovered when Brazil’s quarter final kicked off, then again when it went to extra time, and once more as penalties loomed. But, with years of playing guitar in the bars of Rio behind him, and with his debut international album, Curyman, released in March, it finally looks as if the time is right for the 47-year-old.
“I’ve always loved samba,” he says. “I went to music college in Rio, academia was important, but my real school was Lapa, my teacher was the musician Arlindo Cruz. He introduced me to [the Afro-Brazilian religion] candomblé and helped me write sambas for school parades. I’d be the only one without curly hair in the middle of the favela with all these guys, and Arlindo would say: ‘Yes, he’s a white boy, but he’s a composer, he’s different… and he’s my white boy.’”