Behind every good blogger is a patient husband

I don’t talk enough about my husband here. And I really should. We’ve been married for 8 years and he still makes me feel like the luckiest girl alive.

Isn’t he handsome? And you wouldn’t believe his age. He’s ten years older than me, and looks 5 years younger. I sometimes wonder if he didn’t make a pact with the devil. He doesn’t have a single gray hair and his skin is totally smooth. A lot of it I think comes from his attitude. Even for a Brazilian he’s remarkably easy-going. His personality is the total opposite of my fiery hot-headness. He rarely gets stressed out or angry and somehow manages to take everything in stride, with a smile and a positive attitude.

He’s a musician and a composer. A very good one. He really should have 100x the recognition that he does. He’s far too modest and could just a strong dash of presumptive audacity. He’s just been quietly plugging away for years, which has earned him a lot of respect among the people who do know his work. But I think this might be a very good year for him. I don’t know why I think that… just a hunch.

I haven’t figured out how to post a music clip so please go listen to him here, you won’t regret it:

http://www.myspace.com/carloshenriquepereira

People are often surprised when I tell them that I’m married to a Brazilian musician and that he isn’t a sambista or a bossa nova player. When he was 18, he moved to Paris with his best friend Max, a flautist. They had a huge repertory of their own experimental jazz compositions worked out. They had planned to take Europe by storm. But whenever anyone heard that they were Brazilian, they were expected to play the "Girl from Ipanema." They had to quickly learn a traditional Brazilian repertory just to get enough gigs to support themselves.

Here’s a picture of him from the 80’s taken sometime around those Paris days. One of his wedding vows was that he would never grow his hair like that again.
(Okay it wasn’t really, but it should have been.)

I once heard the joke:

What’s the difference between a jazz musician and a pizza?

A pizza feeds the family.


Funny, in a sad sort of way. But fortunately for me, far from the truth. Other than being a loving husband and a wonderful musician, he’s also a good provider. For the last 20 years of his life he’s worked as a producer/engineer. He owned a recording studio for 14 years in Brooklyn where he built a great reputation and worked with all sorts of big named musicians.

When we moved, he brought the studio with him (a nerve racking adventure, fraught with potential disasters – we shipped a ton of sensitive equipment and a grand piano, rolled on its side, in a metal container, across the equator!) He has since been building a steady reputation and now has people coming in from São Paulo and Rio to record with him. Recently he got a recording that was done in one of the most expensive studios in Rio. But the studio botched the mix so badly the client thought the project was lost. Someone suggested my husband and in a week he was able to re-mix it into a wonderful record. The client was stunned – who is this guy and what is he doing out there in Minas?

You can click here: Nave Studio for more info on the studio. If you know any musicians, there isn’t a better deal south of the Equator.

So that’s all I have to say for now. Just a gratuitous plug from the luckiest girl in the world --- and one more photo to thoroughly embarrass him.