ANATOMY OF AN IMPROVISER: THE STYLE OF NAILOR AZEVEDO “PROVETA
Manuel Silveira Falleiros
1.5 Synthesis of Findings
Nailor experienced an intense musical life during his childhood. His routine included music theory and solfejolessons at the musical corporation, private instruction with his father, and weekly performances with both the corporation’s wind band and his father’s dance ensemble.
Later, during adolescence, he performed in bands in neighboring cities such as Araras, Cordeirópolis, and Valinhos. At sixteen, Nailor enrolled at the Carlos Gomes Conservatory in Campinas to study clarinet and theory; however, in the absence of a dedicated clarinet instructor, he sought guidance from other teachers and peers. The impact of a formal musical conservatory—teeming with music students—and his contact with musicians from the city orchestra prompted Nailor to deepen his instrumental technique. He ventured into a clarinet competition in Piracicaba, renowned at the time as the most competitive of its kind, where he encountered prominent figures in the clarinet world.
Subsequently, while studying classical music through the clarinet repertoire and performing popular music on saxophone in dance bands to support himself, Nailor was invited to join the ensemble led by MaestroSílvio Mazzuca—the most recognized group in São Paulo’s dance orchestra scene at the time. This was a high-level professional ensemble, distinguished by the production and performance of original arrangements and compositions. It was within this group that Nailor, as he himself recalls, encountered something previously unknown to him: the glamour of jazz orchestras. This was an era when the repertoire consisted of danceable music with sophisticated arrangements, imposing heightened demands on performing musicians. The repertoire also included original compositions and arrangements by Mazzuca himself, featuring Brazilian popular music themes rendered with original and high-quality orchestration. Nailor began in this orchestra in a relatively unprominent position: fourth tenor saxophone. Within a short period, he ascended to the role of first alto saxophone, with responsibility over the instrumental section. According to Nailor, the instruction he received in this orchestra served “to bring a level of refinement to his sound”⁵⁴.
However, Nailor did not work exclusively with this orchestra for long. A different musical style emerged on the dance floors—one that no longer relied on large dance orchestras—and, gradually, engagements for the orchestra diminished. During his transition to adulthood, Nailor worked at the Weril instrument factory in Mairiporã and as a clarinetist in a symphonic band in São Caetano. Neither role represented a technical or repertoire-related novelty for him. Although these positions were not particularly significant in artistic terms nor did they introduce musical innovations, they enabled him to secure his livelihood while remaining in proximity to musicians active in the state capital. This closeness to other musicians evidently provided him—not only with additional work opportunities—but also with exposure to other forms of musical expression.
Following this phase, a new period emerged that may be characterized as one of new demands for Nailor. He was invited to join a band formed to perform jazz arrangements at a nightclub called 150 Night Club in the Maksoud Plaza Hotel, São Paulo. With a reduced ensemble formation, Nailor attained a highly prominent position: that of improvising soloist. This new market demand, which Nailor encountered, required improvisation in a jazz idiom known as bebop⁵⁵. According to Nailor himself, this was the period when jazz was at its peak in the market, and he dedicated himself to studying and deepening his mastery of this language to the greatest extent possible. In an era of limited access to specialized information or instructors, he obtained methods and materials for home study through friends, while bars provided spaces to apply his studies in live settings. Here lies a crucial aspect, according to him, for his musical development: his study and musical practice were always interconnected—that is, everything he practiced during the day, he applied immediately at night.
Contact with more refined arrangements, elaborated with advanced harmonic and timbral materials, aroused in Nailor a curiosity toward this type of notation, especially since he had already possessed experience as an arranger since childhood with his hometown band. The lack of more specialized study in arrangement and orchestration was compensated by the creativity and keen analytical listening that experience and study had afforded him. For Nailor, assimilating a language of arrangement and composition was relatively straightforward, as he had undergone relevant training since childhood. From that point onward, he sought out groups with which he could both engage with and experiment in writing.
It fell to Banda Aquarius—a splinter group from the ensemble that performed at the 150 Night Club—to provide Nailor with access to imported arrangements, which enabled him to deepen his command of the jazz idiom. Formed as a big band⁵⁶, this group performed exclusively North American jazz repertoire by renowned arrangers such as Sammy Nestico and Ted Jones. The musicians involved dedicated themselves exclusively to absorbing the performance and interpretive conventions of this style, practicing and modeling their approach on existing recordings.
From this point onward, we may assert that Nailor’s passage through diverse groups and the accumulation of experiences led him to feel a need for experimentation—that is, a need to work with other musical concepts, moving beyond the sole pursuit of instrumental execution technique.
Nailor participated in Banda Savana, directed by Maestro Branco⁵⁷, which at a certain moment focused on discovering a distinctively Brazilian expression in instrumental music; during the same period, he also participated in other groups. Contact with this ensemble in particular, and with its aesthetic objectives, placed Nailor before a questioning of his own roots.
A need arose in Nailor for a musical poetics that would respond to this questioning, awakened by the people with whom he interacted. The work that best represented this aspiration to reconcile his diverse experiences was an unconventional group called Sambop. Within this ensemble, Nailor found space to experiment with a fusion of musical concepts that had coexisted with some tension in his mind. The result was a series of arrangements of bebop themes set to samba rhythms and Brazilian popular music treated with a jazz-inflected approach.
After this moment, Nailor realized that it was not sufficient merely to make conflicting elements coexist within a unified framework; rather, the alchemy of arrangement and the synthesis of composition were necessary to truly satisfy what he wished to express musically in a manner accessible to audiences.
Following these experiences, what remained for Nailor to more clearly delineate a style he had been seeking was a musical group with which he could experiment with his own arrangements and compositions that would translate his need to organize his past musical experiences. This role was assumed by Banda Mantiqueira, the group that represents his work to this day. It appears that the intensity of music in Nailor’s life has in no way diminished to the present.