As Friday night bar goers filled the streets on August 24th a select group of people walked into the intimate theater known as The Pantages for an evening with Brazilian legend Seu Jorge. He is best known in the USA for his work in the Wes Anderson film, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”. Jorge played the character Pele dos Santos, who mainly stayed in a watch post with an acoustic guitar singing David Bowie songs in Portuguese.
At about 8:15 the lights went down and the band entered the stage. With him Jorge brought a bassist, keyboardist and drummer. He came out and took a seat with his acoustic guitar. The band and him played a bunch of Brazilian infused jazz. In this portion he performed his song “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” One of his only songs that has portions of English, at least for this show. Jorge then left the stage and brought out his daughter to sing a song. She performed Nina Simone’s “Four Women” and completed floored the audience with her talent.
Then the stage turned blue and Jorge sat by himself before going into his “David Bowie Set”. Once he began “Life on Mars” the crowd went nuts. You could here people humming and singing the English version along with him. He then went into “Lady Stardust”, “Rebel Rebel” and for the final song of the Bowie portion “Space Oddity”. The crowd reacted with such excited by whistling and clapping along to the song.
For the final part of the show he started to add a bit more of a beat with a rock and dance influence. During the last song of the main set, half of the audience was standing and dancing. When Seu Jorge came back out everyone was on their feet. He opened his encore with his upbeat classic “Carolina”. The crowd rushed the isles and stage just to get room to dance and to be closer to this truly remarkable band. Everybody who was in”ThePantages” left dancing, smiling and laughing. Needless to say Seu Jorge was a monster of a performer. I know very little of what he said, but he sure could entertain an audience.
