SONG OF THE DAY: Surreal

The wonderful thing about music on Earth is it’s so vast, you can’t possibly know it all. There’s always amazing shit out there to find out about. I never really consciously knew about João Donato, the Brazilian multi-instrumentalist. I’m guessing that despite that, I’d heard him on songs before, being he played with so many jazz heavyweights, like Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamria, and others. But he has a vast discography from Brazil, and for whatever reason, I downloaded this album he made with his son, Donatinho. Actually, I’m pretty confident the reason I downloaded it was because I saw it on a music blog (I’m one of the 19 people that still goes to those) with this album cover, which might be the most amazing father/son art I’ve ever seen. I DREAM of being the kind of father where my children would think art like this portrays our relationship. It was a surprise banger on my old iphone 5s working as an ipod in the past year, as I’ve gotten more and more into synthesized funk chaos to combat the AI cybertron battles with (as a soundtrack). “Surreal” is probably my favorite track. And apparently, it exists on a 45 from Japan, but I haven’t found an affordable copy as of yet. But one day, I will.
Sadly Donato passed away last summer, at the well-earned age of 88. That also means he was in his early 80s when he made this album with his son, which is also something to aspire to as a human being. We need less weird 80-something billionaires who want to control presidents to stifle current generations, and more weird 80-something kooks making space funk for future generations. That’s just textbook Futurism 101.