Ramiro Musotto was a visionary and an incredible berimbau performer. Of Argentinean origin, he found a spiritual home in Salvador da Bahia where he quickly developed a reputation and a career as a creative musician and performer. Sadly, he passed away at just 45 years of age due to cancer. Taking into account his uniquely beautiful recordings Sudaka (2004) and Civilização e Barbarye (2006), it is powerful to imagine what more he might have done for the berimbau had he lived on today.
Musotto was deeply studious and committed to researching the traditions of the berimbau in capoeira and beyond. He began sketching a book, “The Berimbau in Capoeira,” which included dozens of pages of his own transcriptions of classic capoeira recordings by Mestre Bimba as well as Mestres Gato Preto, Canjiquinha, Vavá, and many others. Under the seal, Harp Dan Special Projects, a much richer yet still incomplete second edition of the book under the title “The Berimbau of Bahia” seems to have been published in 2010 with support from the Secretaries of Culture and the Economy.
Arcomusical is committed to completing and extending Musotto’s book in its original format with bilingual text and links to Musotto’s own artistic output as well as the many wonderful recordings that informed Musotto’s transcriptions.
