dalton portella

Dalton Portella And the Bastards of Boom
by Jennifer Farbar
The East Hampton Star, April 13, 2006

But for a mishandled piece of dental equipment during what should have been a routine root canal procedure, Dalton Portella’s parents might never have met.

“They were both from Brazil — my mother is German-Brazilian — but they met in New York City. My father was there working and my mom had come to have a medical procedure.”

Mrs. Portella needed a skin graft for burns she got from X-rays she had after her dentist slipped and she swallowed a root canal tool. “The hospital in Brazil had just gotten the X-ray machine and they didn’t know how to use it. They never found the instrument, it probably just dissolved or something,” Mr. Portella said, shaking his head at the crazy possibility of such a thing.

“So I was conceived in New York, but I was born in Miami and spent the first 11 years of my life there. Then we moved to Rio.”

Mr. Portella had taken a break from rehearsing with his band, the Bastards of Boom, to step out into the sunshine on the deck of the house on Springy Banks Road in East Hampton where the band has been rehearsing all winter. Inside the house, which belongs to Curtis DeForest, who plays the surdo in the band, a fire roared in a huge brick fireplace as the five members of Mr. Portella’s band continued to play.

Pulsing like a heartbeat behind the sliding glass doors were the percussive sounds of the surdo and ripinique drums, the cowbells, shakers, triangle, and the birdlike “heep heep” of the cuica, a small, goatskin-covered instrument that is played by rubbing a dampened piece of cloth on a slim bamboo stick that extends down its center.

Instruments — the musical, not the dental kind — and chance played an important part in shaping Mr. Portella during what he is fond of calling his “deformative years,” those he spent living in Rio de Janeiro as a teenager. Mr. Portella, who is 48, lives in Montauk with his wife of 18 years, Gabrielle, and their 10-year-old daughter, Bryn.

He started playing guitar because, as is the case with many aspiring boom-boom makers, he wanted to play the drums. “I knew my mother was never going to buy me drums — we didn’t have any place to put them and they were too loud. But then Christine, my younger sister, won a guitar in a raffle at school, so I sort of absconded with it and started playing Brazilian music with my older sister, Blanca.”

Mr. Portella and his older sister played in school talent shows and at community gatherings. (He played guitar, she sang.) “The first place we performed in public was for a youth group in a Catholic church in Miami,” he recalled, laughing at the memory. “I’m so anti-organized religion now,” he continued, “it’s funny that I started there.”

After his family moved to Brazil when he was 12, Mr. Portella continued playing, by himself and on his own, in relative isolation. He developed, he said, a unique style by being “self-taught and secluded,” and listened to a lot of music from the northeast of Brazil.

“Even at that age, it appealed to me, those songs about pain and suffering and drought, and I always wanted to incorporate that into the music I grew up listening to, like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and Yes.”

That idea percolated in his head for a while, as he moved first to California and then New York City, and went to art school. Then, out of nowhere, came a phone call — not for Mr. Portella, but for a friend who was renting a room in his loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

“It was Richard Siegler, who said he was putting together a samba band on the East End. I was like, ‘Yeah, count me in.’ I had played samba in New York in the early ’80s and was thinking about how to get back into it, and, in the back of my mind, carrying around the idea for a band that would play a less traditional kind of Brazilian music, the way I had been doing on my guitar.”

That was about five years ago, Mr. Portella said. After a couple of years of playing with the 15-odd musicians in Mr. Siegler’s group, the Escola de Samba Boom, Mr. Portella saw a chance to bring his privately honed rhythm to a wider audience.

Incorporating vocals and guitar, Mr. Portella and his bandmates started getting together to play an “adulterated” form of the samba music played by the Escola de Samba Boom, in which guitar and vocals would be included. (Traditional samba music features neither.) They called themselves the Bastards of Boom.

Some three years later, the band members have clearly benefited from diligent rehearsal and dedication to the improvisational path they are exploring together. They regularly perform both as the Bastards of Boom and with the Escola de Samba (a May 13 show at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett is planned for the Bastards of Boom), and Mr. Portella’s band has played several benefits for the Surfrider Foundation, including one last winter at Guild Hall.

“It’s my way of giving something back,” said Mr. Portella, who has been surfing for decades.

Mara Hogan supplies the vocal soundtrack that overlays the surdo, conga, berimbau, cuica, and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of drums of all shapes and sizes and other Brazilian percussive instruments that emerge from Mr. Portella’s grab bag. Like Mr. Portella and other members of the band, Ms. Hogan is a surfer. Originally from upstate New York, she came to the South Fork to study marine biology at Southampton College and now works as an environmental planner for East Hampton Town.

Roni Diaz, who plays the congas, the berimbau, and the cuica, said that the members of the Bastards of Boom didn’t so much follow as “feed off of” one another. Mr. Portella concurred, adding that as the band grows, they are becoming more adept at collaborating and improvising with their various instruments.

“We always leave room to just vamp and groove,” said Mr. Portella. “Because one of the things I like about this is it’s just so rhythmic, so groove-oriented. When I get people dancing and they’re really responding, I don’t want to stop the song after three minutes, you know, so we go for seven minutes.”

In addition to being a musician, Mr. Diaz is also a practitioner of capoeria, the Brazilian martial art that was originated by African slaves. It is, essentially, said Mr. Diaz, a martial art disguised as a form of dance, just as the bow-shaped berimbau, which is fashioned fromthe wood of the berimba tree, is a musical instrument designed to double as an actual bow when necessary.

The instruments played by the band include many traditional Brazilian gourd, wood, and animal-skin-based creations, as well as triangles, tambours, and even a large hubcap, which is played like a cymbal.

Rafael Pimente (“like pepper,” his bandmates joke) also plays the congas and the triangle, as well as the surdo, the large bass-sounding drum that is the basis of samba music. Like Mr. Portella, he grew up in Rio De Janeiro.

Mr. Diaz and Bastian Kuberek, the third in a trio of percussionists who fashion riffs to ride on the rhythm of Mr. Portella’s amplified guitar, are from Mina Gerais, a Brazilian state that is north of Rio. (Mr. Kuberek and Mr. Diaz have performed capoeria onstage when the band performs.)

“It’s where all the gold came from,” Mr. Kuberek said of Mina Gerais, “all the people there were gold miners, about 500 years ago.” It is also, both Mr. Diaz and Mr. Kuberek added enthusiastically, the birthplace of Milton Nascimento, the legendary Brazilian musician.

All of the band’s percussionists double, triple, and quadruple on the various instruments, which, despite the presence of Mr. Portella’s guitar, combine to create a sound that is as unmistakably Brazilian as the girl from Ipanema.

“My great-grandmother on my mother’s side was a pianist,” Mr. Portella mused when asked whether he thought music was in his blood. Then he paused, offering a story about how necessity and circumstance can combine to create the unexpected — and the exceptional.

“When I first moved to Brazil, Ipanema Beach had built a pier; they were laying a sewage line about two miles out to sea and they were dredging near this pier, and they kept dredging and piling up the sand and dredging and piling up sand . . . it created this amazing surf break.”