Building a Musical Language of My Own: Revisiting Pelos Ares, My First Album with Orquestra Urbana

The search for a musical language of one’s own runs through the work of many musicians, even if it is not always framed as a direct question. For those devoted to creating music, it may emerge as a desire to develop a distinctive artistic voice, find individual characteristics in the way they write, or build an original project that does more than reproduce what already exists.

During my undergraduate studies in Composition at Unicamp, I recognized this restlessness in the environment around me. Among both students and professors, there was a clear desire to avoid repeating established paths and to explore other possibilities. In the world of concert music, this search often manifested itself through experimental procedures, less conventional sonorities, and territories that seemed relatively unexplored.

In conversations with jazz improvisers, the same question took a different form. How could we master a language deeply without limiting ourselves to repeating its patterns? In improvisation workshops I attended during that period, both in Brazil and abroad, I heard great soloists discuss the importance of transcribing solos by ear, reproducing phrases, and absorbing the vocabulary of musicians we admired. But those conversations almost always led to another problem: after absorbing so many references, how could we transform that knowledge into something of our own?

Although it emerged in different ways, the underlying restlessness was similar. The point was not to create without influences, but to understand how what we learn, hear, and practice can be reorganized until it becomes part of a musical language of our own.

This question was a constant throughout my education and continued to accompany my artistic path:

How can we absorb a tradition while transforming all of it into a language that is genuinely our own?

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When I began writing this article, my intention was to revisit Pelos Ares, my first big band album with Orquestra Urbana, and reflect on what that work represented more than a decade after it was recorded.

The front and back covers of Pelos Ares, featuring artwork created by my father, Joaquim Caetano de Lima Filho.

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As I returned to the repertoire, however, the focus of the reflection began to shift. I realized that the album documented a period when the search for a musical language of my own was already clearly present in my writing. In those works, I was bringing together Brazilian music, jazz, large ensemble writing, and the use of improvisation as part of the form, allowing different musical worlds to coexist within the same compositional language.

This realization transformed the very shape of the article. What had initially been a reflection on an album became an investigation into how influences and experiences can be reorganized through creative work to shape a musical language of one’s own. The text presented here follows that shift and takes Pelos Ares as the point of departure for a much broader question.

I do not present this path as a model or something to be imitated, because every musician builds a language from particular experiences, references, and circumstances. By sharing mine, I hope to open new questions and possibilities for others who are also seeking their own way of creating.

Two moments from the Pelos Ares sessions at Estúdio Sincopa in Campinas: working with the wind players in the recording room and signaling that we were ready to begin a take (2015).

At the time the album was recorded, I did not yet see these questions as parts of the same process. Each composition functioned as a specific investigation and began with a different influence, curiosity, or musical question. At that point, these explorations still seemed independent. Over time, I came to recognize them as parts of the same trajectory.

A Period of Education and Experimentation

The pieces that eventually formed Pelos Ares were written over approximately eight years. When the earliest ones emerged, I was still at Unicamp, pursuing a combined course of study across the Composition and Popular Music programs.

Conducting the Coletivo Orquestral at my graduation recital in Composition, held at the Unicamp Institute of Arts Auditorium in 2009. Some of the works presented during that period later became part of the Pelos Ares repertoire.

During that period, my musical life was divided among my education in composition, my work as a saxophonist, and my early work as an arranger, music director, and conductor. At the same time, I was conducting an undergraduate research project on the language of the Brazilian big band, focusing on Nailor Azevedo “Proveta” and his writing for Banda Mantiqueira.

During my interview with Nailor Azevedo “Proveta” at his home in São Paulo, as part of my undergraduate research on the musical language of Banda Mantiqueira.

At that time, much of my education came through musical life itself. I played in different groups, took part in rehearsals and concerts, listened to many albums, attended classes, and spoke constantly with other musicians. Score analysis, studies in arranging and orchestration, and occasional transcriptions were also part of this path, but they were integrated into the experiences and projects in which I was involved.

I had been writing music since before college, but the practice was still sporadic and generally connected to a performance, an opportunity, or a specific project. Although I was studying Composition, I was not yet devoting as much sustained time to writing as I would in the years that followed.

Moving to Miami profoundly changed my relationship with writing. Between 2011 and 2015, while completing first my master’s degree and then my doctorate, I also served as a Composer Fellow at the Henry Mancini Institute, worked in the institute’s archive, assisted with activities involving the orchestra, and interacted daily with some of the musicians, composers, arrangers, and music directors I most admired. Composition and arranging consequently began to occupy a much more consistent place in my routine.

It was also during this period that I gradually stopped identifying primarily as an instrumentalist and began to define my work more clearly as a composer, arranger, music director, and artistic producer.

Following the orchestral score during preparations for Jazz and the Philharmonic at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami, with Chick Corea at the piano and the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra onstage (2013).

Maria Schneider and Proveta: How Their Influences Entered My Writing

In Pelos Ares, the question of how to absorb a tradition and transform that knowledge into a language that is truly our own can be observed in the way specific references became part of my writing. To make this process more concrete, I want to bring together the stories of two creators connected to the world of big bands whose bodies of work are nevertheless very different: Maria Schneider and Nailor Azevedo “Proveta.”

It was primarily between 2007 and 2011 that I immersed myself more deeply in the work of both. This period began two years before I completed my degree in Composition and continued until I completed my degree in Popular Music. During those years, I was becoming more familiar with Maria Schneider’s music while conducting undergraduate research on the language of the Brazilian big band, focused on Proveta’s writing for Banda Mantiqueira. Each of these references helped me think about a different dimension of what I was seeking in my own writing.

Maria Schneider presented a way of integrating composition and improvisation that interested me deeply. As a saxophonist, I valued the unpredictability of a solo and the possibility of creating something singular in each performance. As a composer, I was interested in form, thematic development, orchestration, and the construction of long-range musical narratives. I wanted to understand how these two perspectives could participate in the same musical thought.

Proveta, in turn, showed how elements of samba, choro, and other Brazilian traditions could be transformed within big band writing. Although his approach was quite different from Maria Schneider’s, both influences became part of my education during a decisive period.

These influences did not enter my writing as models I sought to reproduce. They expanded the questions I was already asking and offered possibilities that would, over time, be reorganized within my own work. The story of how I encountered Maria Schneider’s music helps make this process more concrete.

Curiously, I heard of Maria Schneider before I ever heard her music. During the early years of my undergraduate studies, while spending a brief period studying in Canada, I showed one of my compositions in a private arranging lesson. After hearing the piece, the teacher commented that some of its ideas reminded him of a composer named Maria Schneider and asked whether I knew her work. I had never heard of her. At the time, however, I let the comment pass and did not seek out her recordings.

A few years later, back in Brazil, I heard Maria Schneider’s name again in a different context. During a concert series presented by CPFL Cultural in Campinas, I attended a performance by an American jazz group that included pianist Frank Kimbrough. After the concert, I spoke with him and explained that I was studying composition and considering studying in the United States, driven by my strong interest in writing for jazz orchestras. During our brief conversation, Kimbrough mentioned that he also played with Maria Schneider and asked me, “Do you know her music?” Once again, I was surprised and curious that I still did not know her work.

At the time, however, I had difficulty finding her albums. They circulated primarily through more direct sales channels, were not widely distributed in stores, and her music was not yet readily available online. When I finally gained access to the recordings and was able to hear those works, I fell in love with her music. Maria Schneider’s music became one of the bodies of work that have moved me most deeply in my life. Beyond this emotional impact, I recognized in it a concrete reference for compositional questions that were already part of my writing.

My copies of Evanescence, Coming About, and Concert in the Garden, autographed by Maria Schneider and accompanied by brief inscriptions she wrote in each one.

With Maria Schneider after attending a performance by her orchestra in New Jersey, during a trip to the United States before I moved to Miami.

In the jazz tradition, it is common for a piece to present a theme and then open into a sequence of improvisations over the same harmonic structure. This practice has produced some of the most important moments in the history of the genre and continues to offer musicians an extraordinary space for creation and interaction.

My interest was not in replacing this practice, but in exploring another possibility. I wanted to understand how a highly developed piece could coexist with improvisation without either dimension seeming to interrupt the other. I was also interested in how a solo could become part of the work’s architecture rather than functioning only as an isolated episode, and how a composition could preserve its formal identity while opening space for the musicians’ individual personalities.

In Maria Schneider’s music, I found one of the most compelling responses to this compositional dilemma. The improvisers did not interrupt the narrative. The solos emerged as extensions of the written material while the work continued to move forward, the form continued to transform, and the musical architecture remained alive.

In conversation with Maria Schneider at the piano at the Frost School of Music, during the interview that formed part of my doctoral research.

I was already familiar with orchestral accompaniment figures, often called backgrounds, written to support a soloist and integrate the solo into an arrangement. In many cases, however, these passages appeared as isolated sections or were repeated with different soloists over the same harmonic structure.

Maria Schneider was one of the first composers I observed using this kind of orchestral writing more extensively during solos. The orchestra did more than accompany the improviser: it continued to present, connect, and transform material while the solo participated in new formal sections and in the music’s unfolding development. Improvisation was no longer restricted to a repetition of the theme’s harmonic structure, but became part of the composition’s development.

I remember listening to some of those recordings and feeling genuinely moved. I recognized in them a possible path for bringing together aspects of music that already interested me, without having to choose between the freedom of improvisation and the formal development of a composition.

As I was discovering and becoming more closely acquainted with Maria Schneider’s music, my undergraduate research led me into an equally deep exploration of Proveta’s writing for Banda Mantiqueira. I studied his arrangements, transcribed musical procedures, and observed how elements from different Brazilian traditions were transformed within that orchestral context.

The second page of the full score of Prêt-à-Porter de Tafetá, by João Bosco and Aldir Blanc, in an arrangement by Nailor Azevedo “Proveta.” I reconstructed the score from Banda Mantiqueira’s individual parts and made these notes on articulation during my interview with Proveta.

If Maria Schneider helped me think about form, improvisation, and narrative development, Proveta showed me possibilities for constructing a Brazilian language in large ensembles. The two references did not point in the same direction or offer equivalent solutions. What mattered was the way the questions raised by each began to intersect within my own writing.

This intersection becomes especially perceptible in Samba de Proveta, a track from Pelos Ares dedicated to him and recorded with Proveta as the featured soloist. The way the solo develops within the form, along with some of the composition’s harmonic paths, was deeply influenced by musical ideas I recognized in Maria Schneider’s work. At the same time, the piece’s Brazilian language enters into direct dialogue with Proveta’s musical world and with what I had studied in his arrangements.

https://youtu.be/ok-A2wBDG3Q?si=8jrQAm-__W0EUjQq

Samba de Proveta did not emerge, therefore, from the simple juxtaposition of two influences. The piece arose when different references were reorganized through my own questions, the decisions I made during the compositional process, and my practical experience with Orquestra Urbana.

This process may offer one possible answer to the question guiding this article. Absorbing a tradition does not mean hiding our influences or remaining bound to them. It means allowing different references, experiences, and musical problems to pass through our work until they find a configuration that could not exist in exactly the same way in someone else’s music.

From Influence to Investigation

Although I can now recognize how these references intersected, the repertoire did not emerge from an organized plan to construct a musical language of my own. At the time, my influences expanded the questions I was trying to explore, and my attention was focused on the possibilities opened by each work.

At the first of Orquestra Urbana’s two performances at Central das Artes in São Paulo, as part of the Movimento Elefantes program. The concert took place while we were developing the repertoire that would later be recorded on Pelos Ares (2014).

Each new work emerged as an attempt to explore a specific territory. Sometimes the point of departure was a formal question. At other times, it was a sonority. In still other cases, it was a curiosity about rhythm, texture, improvisation, or musical development.

Looking at Pelos Ares today, I see that the album functions almost as a record of these investigations.

The works were not written to form a concept album. They emerged at different times, for different reasons, and in response to different questions. What brings them together is not an external theme, but the fact that they were written during a very specific period in my artistic education.

Without reconstructing the entire history of each track here, a brief overview helps show how these investigations became concrete musical choices.

In Abertura Suburbana, I treated the winds as a large percussive body and transformed influences from maracatu into rhythmic layers. Rather than relying on a clearly defined thematic melody, the piece finds its primary compositional material in textures and rhythmic structures.

Casa do Lago was one of the first works in which I explored a continuous, through-composed form, with different soloists appearing gradually and participating in the music’s development. Written during the period when I was most intensively discovering Maria Schneider’s work, it is one of the compositions in which her influence appears most directly.

In Quebra-Cabeças, I investigated less conventional harmonic paths and musical figures that fit together, separate, and return in different configurations. Part of this exploration was influenced by composer and trombonist Helge Sunde’s writing for the Norwegian group Ensemble Denada.

In Samba de Proveta, elements of samba and choro are developed within an extended form, while the soloist assumes the role of a central character throughout almost the entire work. The title also plays on the fact that the Portuguese word proveta means a laboratory test tube, a reference that becomes perceptible in passages where the meter is constructed in a deliberately irregular, almost experimental way.

Febre grew out of my interest in independent melodic lines and the contrapuntal density I found in Alan Ferber’s music, transformed into a texture marked by simultaneity and instability.

Sob(re) Pedais is organized around ostinatos and pedal points over which other musical elements are constructed, creating both a sense of support and tensions produced by harmonies moving across these stable structures.

Finally, Pelos Ares (Temporal) also reveals Maria Schneider’s influence in the creation of distinct formal moments in which the trumpet and saxophone soloists each occupy their own sections and participate in the work’s progression. At the same time, the composition translates the image of a gathering storm through accumulations of energy, changes of direction, moments of suspension, and sudden explosions of intensity.

Viewed side by side, these pieces do not reveal a ready-made formula, but different attempts to transform references, images, and curiosities into concrete compositional decisions. It is this investigative attitude, more than a single aesthetic or external theme, that gives Pelos Ares its unity and makes it possible to recognize in this repertoire the first contours of a musical language of my own.

The Role of Orquestra Urbana

The language documented in Pelos Ares was not built only at the piano or the computer. My memories of that period run through the rehearsals, recordings of performances, score revisions, and the experience of hearing those ideas take shape through my interaction with the musicians. Orquestra Urbana was the environment in which this music could be tested, transformed, and developed before reaching the studio.

Conducting an Orquestra Urbana rehearsal at Estúdio Mafra in São Paulo during preparations for the recording of Pelos Ares (2015).

At the time, I recorded rehearsals whenever possible, returned home, listened to everything again, and took notes. Often, it was while revisiting those recordings that I noticed details I had missed in the moment. A theme might need further development, a transition might not work as well as I had imagined, or a soloist’s contribution might suggest a new direction for the piece.

An excerpt from a preliminary version of the full score of Samba de Proveta, with pencil annotations made while preparing the parts for the recording.

The natural consequence was that the music kept changing. The musicians often joked that every rehearsal brought a new version of the parts, and there was a great deal of truth in that observation.

During a rehearsal in 2014, the saxophonists fully unfolded some of the accordion-fold parts, revealing the length of the music we were using for this repertoire.

Today, I see this not only as a characteristic of the way I worked, but also as a consequence of the role Orquestra Urbana played at the time. It functioned as a laboratory in which the works could be tested and continually developed. Many of the most important decisions emerged precisely in the encounter between an idea and its practical realization. Rehearsals were therefore integral to the maturation of the works, creating a space for listening and concrete musical feedback that guided revisions and new compositional decisions.

Much of the repertoire recorded on Pelos Ares was built through this dialogue between the written page and the experience of hearing the music come to life. This was one of Orquestra Urbana’s decisive contributions to my education: working with a group that could follow the process over time allowed each work to develop through rehearsals, performances, and revisions before it was considered finished.

Orquestra Urbana performing at Jazz nos Fundos in São Paulo after the release of Pelos Ares.

The Recording

When the project was selected for support through ProAC (Programa de Ação Cultural), the State of São Paulo’s cultural funding program, the opportunity arose to bring together on an album a body of music that had been developing for years.

One of the stories that best represents this period involves Samba de Proveta. The final version of the piece was completed in the early hours of the morning before the recording session. The following day, I organized the parts and went to the studio. The first time I heard that complete version played by the band was during the session itself, with the musicians responding to the material in real time. This episode captures the creative moment in which the album was made.

At the conclusion of the Pelos Ares sessions, with the musicians and production team gathered in the control room at Estúdio Sincopa after the final day of recording (2015).

The Day I Heard the Finished Album

There is an enormous difference between finishing a recording and hearing a completed album. Anyone who has participated in a recording project knows this. For weeks or months, attention remains focused on selecting takes, making editing decisions, refining the mix, balancing instruments, and navigating a series of small choices that ultimately make it difficult to perceive the work as a whole.

That is exactly what happened to me. Throughout the recording and post-production of Pelos Ares, I was completely immersed in the process. My attention remained focused on questions specific to each track, the artistic decisions that still had to be made, and the countless details involved in completing the album.

The album was mastered by Felipe Tichauer, a Brazilian engineer based in the United States whom I had met during my time in Miami. When I received the final versions of the tracks, my attention was no longer tied to the technical decisions that had occupied the previous stages. For the first time, I could hear the album as a listener and relate to the music as a whole. It was a deeply meaningful moment. I felt both pride and a profound sense of accomplishment as I finally heard the completed album after years of work. Listening to it in this way allowed me to recognize something I had not yet been able to see while immersed in the process.

With Felipe Tichauer at his studio in Miami, holding one of the finished copies of Pelos Ares after the album was mastered.

For years, I had studied this world through score analysis, my research, and listening to the music of composers such as Maria Schneider, Bob Brookmeyer, and Nailor Azevedo “Proveta,” among other musicians who expanded my understanding of what a big band could be. When I heard Pelos Ares in its finished form, I felt that these influences no longer appeared only as external references. They had been reorganized through the questions guiding my own writing.

The album therefore came to represent more than a collection of compositions. It documented a specific moment in the construction of my musical language. Today I realize that, although each work had emerged from a particular opportunity or investigation, many of them were already exploring similar musical interests.

When I return to these recordings, I find questions that continued to accompany me in my subsequent work. Some have changed form; others remain present to this day.

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About the Author

Rafael Piccolotto de Lima is a composer, arranger, music director, and educator. A Latin Grammy-nominated composer and recipient of multiple international awards, including 13 DownBeat Awards and honors from ASCAP, he develops artistic projects that connect Brazilian music, jazz, orchestral writing, improvisation, recording production, research, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

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