I first became familiar with the music of Brazilian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and producer Ed Motta when his album Aystelum was released in 2005. In particular, what immediately caught the eye was the rich artwork in the accompanying booklet.
The cover of Motta’s album is deliberately old-fashioned and resembles the opening panel of an eccentric European graphic novel rather than conventional jazz-funk artwork. It depicts a surreal landscape populated by mountains, birds, vegetation, strange architectural forms, and an unusual assortment of figures, including a central bearded, very elegant man in a blue coat and hat—the musician himself. Its comic-book drawing and fantastical geography evoke the adventure comics of Hergé and the science-fiction surrealism of Moebius, creating a world that feels simultaneously pastoral, theatrical, and extraterrestrial. Rather than portraying Motta as a conventional star, the artwork places him within a larger fictional universe, mirroring the album’s eclectic blend of jazz, funk, soul, samba, and theatrical music, as well as its vintage instrumentation and intricate arrangements. In this sense, the cover operates as a visual overture: playful yet sophisticated, it establishes Aystelum as an imaginative musical world rather than simply an album. And call me superficial if you like, but I found myself thinking, “This guy really knows what it means to dress for the occasion.”
“My wife created that artwork,” tells me Ed proudly, smiling and relaxed, during a video call that connects us from opposite ends of the world. Emerging from Rio’s Black Rio funk and soul scene with Conexão Japeri in the late ’80s, he quickly established himself as a restless stylist, moving from boogie, samba, and Brazilian soul into jazz, AOR, bossa nova, disco, and sophisticated pop. His solo albums became increasingly elaborate, with Manual Prático Para Festas, Bailes e Afins, Dwitza, Aystelum, and AOR revealing a musician as fascinated by American music as by Brazilian songcraft.
Along the way, Motta has collaborated with jazz and soul figures including Roy Ayers and Bernard Purdie, while cultivating an international cult following among listeners drawn to immaculate arrangements, vintage analog sonics, and deep-cut musical archaeology. Never content to stay in one stylistic room, he has continued to reinvent his vocabulary, from the jazz of Perpetual Gateways to the cinematic Behind the Tea Chronicles, making his career less a linear progression than a sprawling, lovingly curated map of 20th-century popular music. To mark the release of his new album, Toc-Toc, The Tonearm caught up with him in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro.
The transcript has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.Tony D’Onghia: Which kind of influence did your uncle, the legendary Tim Maia, have on your musical upbringing?
Ed Motta: He was a huge influence. He was my mother’s youngest brother, in a family of 19 siblings. A big family. My uncle gave my mother my very first two records. Thanks to him, I discovered artists such as Curtis Mayfield, Sly & the Family Stone, things like that. His own music was another huge influence, along with plenty more American music that followed.
Tony: I would like to know something about your musical beginnings. How did you discover your voice? How did you develop into the musician you eventually became?
Ed: As a musician, I started with rock. As a listener, I started with the music that was playing everywhere in Brazil in the mid- and late ’70s. That was my early background, but as a musician, I started as a drummer in a hard rock band, inspired by Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath—this kind of music. I started to sing, inspired by those singers: David Coverdale, Glenn Hughes, Paul Rodgers, the rock singers. Because of that, a band called me to be the singer. The bass player was the Pete Townshend of the band. He wrote absolutely everything; he was the composer and the ‘maestro’ of the situation. I learned a lot from him about band organization, rehearsals, and things like that. I started to be the singer there, for this band called Kabbalah. It was called that because it was similar to the name Black Sabbath.
Tony: And when did you start to approach funk and soul?
Ed: From the moment I started listening to my uncle’s music, as he was inspired by American Black music. But, as I told you, I went to play rock instead. As a musician, that was my beginning. But one album changed my life, and that is Blow by Blow by Jeff Beck. When I discovered that album, I thought, “Yeah, I can listen to Earth, Wind & Fire again.” It was a prejudice. I was trying to convince everyone else that I was this super-radical rocker, with black shirts and the band. To be honest, right now I am wearing a T-shirt from the band Mountain. Leslie West, Felix Pappalardi, you know. This is where my musical roots lie.
And then soul music came through. I’ve always been a record collector, since a very young age, and when soul music came into my life, I treated it with the same obsession, with the same desire to dig deep and get to know all of its artists. I had an encyclopedia of Black music, published by Salamander Books in the UK, and my goal, when I was young, was to know every artist in that encyclopedia. They also put out ones about jazz and rock, and I had all of them. I wanted to discover and listen to all of those artists. It’s an annoying trait of my character; I have this nerdy vision of things.
Tony: With one of your early bands, Conexão Japeri, you achieved your first commercial hits. How did you get from that kind of very funny, electric, and danceable funk and soul to your more sophisticated jazz compositions? What led you to pursue this kind of artistic path?
Ed: This transition happened pretty much because I used to write my songs on acoustic guitar. When the piano came into my life, I started to write songs with it. And then the songs became more sophisticated, more intricate: the chord changes, the melodies. That was also because of the artists I began to study and research during that period. I was searching for Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, all of these guys. And the compositions became shorter.
Tony: You also spent some time in the USA, right?
Ed: In the early ’90s, I lived in the USA for one year, and I recorded an album that is still unreleased to this day. The executive producer was an Italian guy, Willy David. He was also the producer of Pino Daniele, Tony Esposito, Enzo Avitabile, and Tullio De Piscopo, all these musicians from Naples. And he used to say, “You are the Pino Daniele from Brazil.”
Tony: Actually, I find some inflections in your voice that remind me of his style. You also made a Gino Vannelli cover, and some people in Italy felt that Pino’s style was inspired by Vannelli’s, like a sort of Italian Gino Vannelli, who, by coincidence, was born into an Italian family in Canada.
Ed: You know, what is jazzy sounds all the same to some people.
Tony: That happens with reggae too. Some people think it’s all the same, and, unfortunately, the same happens with jazz. Talking about the USA, you also produced an album entitled AOR, adult-oriented rock. It was a sort of homage to that kind of genre and that particular era, right?
Ed: It was my homage to an era that had a major influence on my life, through listening to the radio. I didn’t own much of that music on vinyl, CD, or cassette, at least not at that particular time, but it was a radio thing here in Brazil, and those artists had a huge success: the Doobie Brothers, Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins. I love this kind of music. And so I set out to explore that genre and began to study it.
Tony: You also curated and released a compilation named Too Slow to Disco Brasil that included Brazilian artists who, in a way, were inspired by that kind of scene, right? Or maybe more than the boogie, funk, slow-disco stuff.
Ed: Everything. As the Japanese call it, Black Contemporary Music, BCM. A kind of AOR music that includes Earth, Wind & Fire, Al Jarreau, Chaka Khan, Ray Parker Jr.—polished slow music.
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Tony: Another record of yours that impressed me a lot is the penultimate one, Behind the Tea Chronicles. That’s a very particular album because it’s jazzy, in a way that you had already experimented with before, but it was more inspired by movies and TV series, right?
Ed: That happened because I composed some soundtracks in Brazil. Five for cinema and animation movies. All in all, I made a lot, and I also wrote a musical in Brazil. It ran for one year, one year on stage; it’s called Seven, the Musical. It’s pretty much inspired by Broadway for sure, Broadway and cabaret. That record came out on the German label MPS, quite a legendary label.
Tony: The new one, Toc-Toc, is also published by them.
Ed: Yeah, I think it’s the very first R&B electric-funk album that they’ve put out. So it’s pretty much different from their aesthetic, because they are a classic jazz label. There’s a jazz solo on this album, but it’s not a jazz album per se.
Tony: I made a certain mental connection: I thought back to your AOR album, and I imagined listening to it on a road trip to the beach, while this new album would be the one I’d listen to later, while driving through the city at night, amid neon lights, bars, and nightclubs. It’s very nocturnal. It’s also intriguing because it starts like the Black music albums of the ’80s, with the up-tempo stuff at the beginning and then the ballads come in the second half. As they used to say back in those days: A-side for dancing, B-side for romancing.
Ed: Yeah, this new album is a certain comeback to a style of music that I grew up listening to: Cameo, the S.O.S. Band, Gap Band. I love Gap Band, yeah. “Yearning for Your Love.”
Tony: Compared to your other releases, it sounds very synth-heavy. There are a lot of keyboards and a big bass. It’s also very intimate, sensual. The listener gets the impression that they’re looking at you in the studio while you play, at night, maybe alone, with just a couple of synths and a drum machine.
Ed: Aesthetically, it sounds like a one-man band, but in reality it’s a two-man band. It’s me and the producer, Michel Limma. We are the only musicians on the album. It’s the two of us. I play guitar, bass, piano, synthesizer, and drum programming, and he plays synthesizer and all of the bass synthesizers. He’s a piano player, and I play some piano too.
Tony: What are your plans after the release of Toc-Toc?
Ed: In the near future, I will go on a little tour with this album. But more generally, tours after almost 40 years in Brazil are pretty big events. They must be, because there are lots of hits to play during the concerts. Then you have space to add one or two songs from the new album, because you can’t do a concert focused only on that. But that’s what I’m trying to do, too.
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