I was in Rio de Janeiro in September of 2003, staying in the Copacabana district, where each day I ate lunch at a restaurant right on the beach so I could watch the pretty women walk by with the waves crashing in the background. Each day around 4:00 or 4:30 PM (I eat a late lunch in case you didn’t guess), I heard a voice crying in the urban wilderness, a voice that sounded like Pavarotti singing in Portuguese! As the voice grew closer I realized it was a street cleaner, called a “gari” in Portuguese, who sang at the top of his lungs from morning to night as he made his rounds sweeping the streets and emptying the trash!
Turns out he was famous in the neighborhood and had been given the name “Gari Pavarroti” by the locals. I was quite impressed by his singing voice and remember wishing that I could compose a musical piece worthy of such raw vocal talent as his.
I returned to Dallas and a couple months later I was sitting in room listening to Pachabel’s Canon in D Major when Oliver Sudden I heard the words to The Lord’s Prayer framed in a melody that went perfectly with the background of the music! Not only that, but the words were in English AND in Portuguese!
Being the lousy singer I am, nonetheless I set about recording my own voice singing the melody as best as I could. Then I made contact with a friend in Rio, who just happened to be the mother of the woman I had recently been forced to call my “ex”. I asked her if she had heard of the Gari Pavarotti even though she lives in Ipanema instead of Copacabana. She told me that she hadn’t before a couple days earlier, when she read a story about him in the newspaper and saw him on television!
I contacted the newspaper journalist who wrote the column about him and told him I had composed a song that I wanted Gari Pavarotti to record. Not only did he provide me with a way to contact him, but he published a column telling about the “American Composer” who was looking for the street cleaning opera singer named Valerio da Silva!
So I found myself in Copacabana again shortly thereafter, bringing with me my trusty notebook computer and microphone, where I spent two weeks working diligently for about four hours a day with Valerio trying to get a perfect take on at least the Portuguese version of the song.
Sadly I discovered that even though his talent was enormous, his training was lacking and his discipline was non-existent. Out of the dozens of takes I ended up with, I might have been able to construct one good one if I had the audio engineering talent that would let me assemble one good track from a bunch of not so good ones but I don’t.
Attached is a copy of the first version of the song, the one with my pitiful singing voice.
I still have a dream of one day having a finished product with a female singer doing the English part and a male singer – Valerio – doing the Portuguese. One thing that may surely have hampered me in my quest was my failure to understand the true meaning of the words in the Prayer, as you will see if you read the “Solving the Formula of the Lord’s Prayer” above. And perhaps after two years Valerio may have practiced enough to deliver not only a perfect take, but a public performance on the streets of Copacabana like the one I had envisioned when I went down there back in 2003!
So if anyone knows of a female singer who has a heartfelt talent for singing sacred music at the top of her lungs, please introduce me to her, will you? And forgive me my out of tune singing voice as I will forgive you if you criticize me (and rightfully so). Just click on the colored dots and imagine what it will sound like when I finally have the right voices in the right places for a change!
P.S. - it was 7 years later that I finally found a church music director in Canada that produced the whole thing, choir and all, for a total of $400! He worked on it for several months and called it a Labor of Love! I think you can feel all that love when you listen to it!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2un8vlyfan99an1/LordsPrayerInDMajor.mp3?dl=0
