Some music teachers have to try hard to come off as cool to their students.
Francisco Pais Cardoso—currently sporting shocking green and yellow Nike sneakers, a sky-blue dress shirt, mint-green necktie, bright yellow wristwatch, and lime-green sweater—the son of a Portuguese rock star, a Berklee scholarship winner and record-deal-signing jazz guitar phenom, isn’t one of those music teachers.
Today, dressed in a Technicolor wardrobe to rival David Bowie’s, the 29-year-old Wheeler music teacher is discussing “Directions” in jazz playing. He scrawls the word at the top of the whiteboard, underlines it, and says, in his smooth Portuguese-accented English, “So guys: What are some of the directions we can take when we play?”
Three guys sit in what they call “The Chill,” an area in the room featuring a loveseat and two cushy armchairs. Their notebooks, blank save “Directions” scribbled above the page, rest on their thighs. Alexy Sacco plays with his hair, Ted Mooncai scratches his pant-leg, and Cameron Musco is suddenly concerned with his cuticles. No one speaks.
“Come on, guys, let’s start talking. Just let it flow.”
A piano in a nearby practice room issues a set of major scales. The actors rehearsing upstairs start a song from “Aladdin” by shrieking in mock terror.
In the classroom, though, it’s still not flowing.
Cardoso jumpstarts the conversation. “Okay, let’s think about dynamics. I can play a solo that’s loud, or I can play one that’s… I can play it…”
His hazel eyes are hopeful behind an unruly mop of thick, tousled brown hair.
Ted looks up from a doodle-covered notebook. “You can play it… soft?” he says.
“Yes!” exclaims Cardoso, bounding up off of his amplifier/chair. He writes it on the left side of the board, “Loud” and then, on the same line about six inches over, “Soft.”
As the students become more enthusiastic, Cardoso does too. They flow through Fast/Slow, Staccato/Legato, Dense/Sparse, Motivic Development/Through-Composition, High/Low, Close/Wide, Tension/Release. He bounces up and down on the amp and drums his fingers on the sides while he waits for new ideas from the guys.
The list grows, spreads across the entire board. Every few minutes, to prompt a new set of “Directions,” Cardoso picks up a bizarre-looking instrument called a Melodica. It’s a miniature piano keyboard framed by sea-blue plastic with a flexible white tube snaking out of one side. Cardoso braces it against his chest, blows into the tube, and plays reedy, nonsensical melodies to illustrate a point.
It’s essentially a keyboard that runs on wind power. And it nearly matches his outfit.
He’s filled up the whole board, and he still wants more. He speaks excitedly now, gesturing at the overwhelming wealth of directions available to a soloist. “When an architect builds a house, they have to think about the use of each room, no matter how small. You need to think about the same things when you’re soloing—each time you go in a new direction, you have to say ‘Why am I doing this part, going in this direction?’”
The class session winds down, and an older group of guys trickles into the room. They’re here for his 2 pm Jazz Performance class, and they want to play.
Cardoso was born into music. He grew up in the quaint, touristy town of Sintra, Portugal, near the country’s picturesque west coast. The town’s terra-cotta roofs are shadowed by a Moorish castle, perched above Sintra’s center. “It’s really inspiring every time I go there to be close to that mountain—there’s some energy about the mountain that’s really cool,” he says.
Cardoso’s mother Maria was an artist and designer, and dabbled in architecture. Pretty cool, but his dad Luis was cooler—he was a Portuguese rock star.
“He had a really popular rock band, nationwide in Portugal. He’s still my hero.
I remember being really tiny, and there were already electric guitars around the house.” Luis’s band, Diamantes Negros, was popular in the country beginning in the 1960s, and they recently had a 40th anniversary blowout bash.
“Right now they are on this tour, in Portugal, and they have all these 50-year-old women that used to check them out… emmm, groupies… coming to the shows. And it’s a lot of fun to see him on stage. He’s like a little kid again,” says Cardoso, laughing.
His father introduced him to the rock greats, and then to Brazilian music—the Bossa Nova, the Samba, Gilberto and Jobim. Despite his popular rock band in high school, Cardoso felt the need to branch out. “I was a surfer that played rock guitar. I had all these chicks, all these girlfriends, but the more you learn about music, the more demand you have for expansion. Harmonically, it just didn’t do it for me to play rock tunes with four chords,” he says. “There’s a lot of jazz harmony that borrows from Brazilian music.”
The 2 pm class is here, but they can’t play because of the rehearsal upstairs. Cardoso is momentarily at a loss. “Let’s just talk about music,” he says, his face blank. The guys, older and more self-confident, ask him what kind. “Whatever kind of music you want to talk about,” he says sheepishly, hands spread wide.
Someone says “We’ve been working on Latin music, let’s talk about that.” Cardoso is immediately back in action, erasing the whiteboard and readying it for a list of dozens of “serious cats” from the Latin jazz scene.
After the Latin jazz session, Cardoso decides he’ll screen one of Wheeler Library’s jazz-oriented movies for the class. He has the guys pick between a film on John Coltrane and one on Keith Jarrett. Brendon and Jason start arguing good-naturedly.
“I want to watch Jarrett’s The Art of Improvisation,” says Brendon.
“Dude, let’s watch ‘Trane,” counters Jason.
“But we’ve already seen the Coltrane DVD.”
“But dude, it’s ‘Trane.”
“Hey man, we’ve already seen that one. Let’s watch Jarrett.”
“Dude, ‘Trane.”
“We’ve seen it!”
“‘Trane, dude.”
The guys eventually come to a democratic agreement to watch the Jarrett movie. The overhead lights go off and pallid winter light filters in through the basement windows. For an hour, everyone in the class is transfixed by Jarrett’s on-screen contortions and intricate improvisation.
Everyone but Franklin.
Cardoso is sprawled in the middle of the semi-circle, head propped uncomfortably on a sax case. He glances back momentarily, and then again, for longer, and begins to laugh. The other students look to see what’s amusing their teacher.
Franklin’s asleep, chin buried deep in his jacket, shoulders up around his ears, lanky legs splayed and twitching every once in a while. Cardoso snorts incredulously while the other guys snicker. The laughter builds for about a minute until Franklin, unconsciously self-conscious, awakens. He mumbles something about “only sleeping for about five minutes,” yielding guffaws, and then the class period’s over. The guys file out, good natured banter coloring their exit.
Cardoso stays behind, surrounded by The Chill, electric pianos, plastic chairs scattered here and there, and the detritus of many different kinds of instruments. Old sheet music, broken reeds, guitar strings, and busted drum-sticks lie here and there on the carpeted floor.
Cardoso’s music soon outgrew the constrictive borders of Sintra. At 16, he began attending conservatory in Lisbon to bolster his technique and a year later heard about Hot Clube de Portugal, a concert hall and jazz school which served as the nexus of Portugal’s jazz scene. “There are so few musicians in Portugal, that if you go there you start to know everybody that’s in the community.” He began taking lessons with the instructors at Hot Clube, and then began to play with them as their equal.
While Cardoso was playing at Hot Clube, his mother and father started their own music school in Sintra. “At that time, I was both taking lessons and teaching lessons, for my parents. They owned the school and a music store, and I was one of the owners. I was eighteen,” he recalls.
With all of this expansion, the conservatory began to feel constrictive, as well. “They were very rigid there. I was very into jazz and rock, and they just wanted me to hold my guitar at a 45-degree angle. They just have a really strict way of looking at music and the way you play. And I found that I would have a classical teacher say ‘You should play like this,’ and then they couldn’t play it, so I wouldn’t know how to myself. And you can’t take them seriously when they can’t even play that well,” he says. “Now at Hot Clube, it was like ‘You want to sound like this,’ and then they would play and they would kick my ass. I respect much more somebody that is a good teacher, and also somebody that could play.”
As Cardoso progressed at Hot Clube, he began to hear about the opportunities available at conservatories abroad, in America and Holland, for example. “Berklee was always the most resonant, and it’s a really great school.” At the age of 18, he traveled to France for a Berklee College scholarship audition. “I went to Paris, a weekend by myself with my axe on my back. If I didn’t get a scholarship, I couldn’t go.”
Cardoso got the scholarship, and left for Berklee that fall. He worked for the first two years as an accompanist for percussion and vocal ensembles to pay for the $2000 not covered by his award and then, thanks to high academic standing, got a full ride for the rest of his time at school.
When Cardoso plays the guitar, it’s like watching a gasping fish flop its way off the dock and back into the water. His average-sized hands caress the neck, and his right elbow drapes comfortably over the oversized curves of his stunning Guild electric. Its mellow blonde wood is smartly outlined in black, and brilliant mother-of-pearl inlay glints from its dark headstock. It sounds sexy, warm and rich with a hint of bite when he really digs the pick in deep.
He’s in guitar mode now, as he coaches his Performance group, the same gang from the Jarrett viewing. Brendon and Colin are on guitar, Franklin, Jason, and Alden are on various percussion, Michael plays the piano, and Adam fingers an alto sax nervously. The guitarists sport gorgeous fatbody electric guitars in colorful sunbursts that look a lot like Cardoso’s.
They look on in matching wonderment as he warms up, his tapered fingertips moving effortlessly up and down the neck in more and more complex scales. He finishes with a flourish and shouts “Okay! Let’s pick a tune to warm up with!”
The group quickly decides on a ‘Trane tune called “Equinox.” Alden strokes the ride cymbal, and begins a slow, confident swing beat. The guitars chime in with impressionistic ambiance, and the piano joins, pushing a smooth bassline. Finally, irresistibly, Adam drops the melody on top. It’s a smooth, cool tune, and it transforms the space instantly.
The guys cycle through a solo order, spurred onwards by Cardoso’s shouts of encouragement. At one point, Adam comes in too early, and Cardoso’s the only one who hears it. Raising his eyebrows in alarm, he sings the melody frantically to reset the rest of the ensemble around the sax player.
After the run-through, Cardoso critiques each solo, focusing, as all good teachers do, on the best aspects and then getting down to the rudimentary adjustments each player needs to make.
To the drummer: “When I play with a drummer, he needs to tell me where the tune is. I don’t want to hear, every solo, ‘Ting ting ta ding ting.’ You need to vary it up more.”
To the sax player: “I know you put your guts into it, and so it sounds good. What matters is that you stand there and blow your brains off.”
And so on, around the circle.
Later, the group switches to a few Latin tunes, which they’ll play at the Wheeler Holiday Concert. These are more challenging than Equinox, with highly complex poly-rhythms in the drum-set, and fast sixteenth-note melodic runs. At one point, Cardoso corrects the piano player’s line—“You’ve gotta play all the fourths above that.” Michael groans from baby grand, and Cardoso smiles knowingly, musician-to-musician. “It’s a pain in the ass,” he says with a wink, and then deftly demonstrates both the melody and the harmony he wants to hear from the piano.
Colin and Brendon breathe as one, their shining eyes locked on his hands..
While at Berklee, Cardoso met his future bandmates. Every year, Berklee puts together a promotional tour of Europe to promote the school and encourage new talent to apply for scholarships. The band they cobbled together was almost all international: Massimo Biolcati, an Italian born in Sweden, on Bass, Leo Genovese, an Argentinean pianist, and Ferenc Nemeth, a drummer from Budapest. The group, featuring a rotation of horn players, toured Europe frequently for five years.
They’ve been playing together for all of the nine years since those early Berklee days. Cardoso counts the guys among his best friends, especially Ferenc. “We’ve spent as much time together as musicians as we have as friends. I’ve lived with him for a lot of the last ten years,” says Cardoso.
The group, called the Francisco Pais Quintet, recorded their first album “Not Afraid of Color” last year for the jazz label Fresh Sound. It’s a powerful, forward-thinking album, featuring an eclectic mix of classic jazz and some more current drum-and-bass and pop-influenced tracks. “I wanted to make sure I had a good sound, had a really solid album. I took my time, you know. It’s not rushed,” he says. “I have a record that I’m really proud of the energy I put into it.” It’s due out in January of this year.
Another thing Cardoso is “really proud of” is his teaching. According to Lisa Brackett, head of Wheeler’s Performing Arts program, he has a right to be. “When the position opened, we interviewed lots and lots of candidates. When Francisco came, we could see that he was a talented musician, but we needed to watch him teach,” says Brackett.
“He was very young but he was, hands down, a brilliant teacher. He communicates very well with the kids. He demands practice, and somehow gets them to want to do it. We wanted a pied piper, we didn’t just want someone who would come and jam with the kids. Francisco is that teacher,” she says.
Since 2003, Francisco has taught about 35 students at Wheeler, and advises another 7. “All of the kids I have are really great. But if you have someone that’s like me when I was in high school, then you have a problem,” he says, chuckling. “I am the youngest teacher here, so it’s kind of weird. But I love it here, and I think the people are really nice.”
One of Cardoso’s favorite memories from Wheeler was helping a young pianist named Julian Shore record a jazz album for his Wheeler senior project. Shore, one of Wheeler’s star musicians, laid down a number of tracks at a Boston recording studio with the help of Cardoso’s friends from New York. He recently won a full scholarship to Berklee, mirroring his mentor.
Cardoso has some misgivings about devoting so much time to teaching, though, especially with the imminent release of “Not Afraid of Color.”
“My career needs to… I need to start to look after my playing, and this is taking a lot of energy. I think if I get a balance between playing more and teaching here. I like this, but I have to explore the other possibilities.” His eyes sparkle hopefully, and he says, “If I could fill the three months of the summer break with touring and working, it would be really nice, really perfect.”
He commutes from Boston every day, leaving his wife, Ianka, behind. She’s a graphic designer at Northeastern University originally from the Dominican Republic. “My wife is great—she’s very patient, to be married to a musician. You play gigs at night, and you have all these girls coming to speak to you,” he says. “It’s a very different lifestyle from the day-job.”
Regardless of his misgivings, one thing’s very clear: Cardoso is a remarkable influence on his students. Brendon Integlia, 17, was breathless in his praise.
“Every day he amazes me. He really pushes us with his playing. He doesn’t really have to say anything—he does that with his instrument,” he says. “There’s a great deal of respect for him in class. Him being young brings a freshness, because we’re playing stuff that’s so hip and current.”
Integlia picked up the mandolin in seventh grade, and played for several years before getting into guitar. With Francisco’s encouragement, he picked up the electric guitar last year. The decision proved to be life-changing.
“I want to study jazz after Wheeler. Last year, with Francisco, my musical drive became really intense. I want this to be me. He’s been great with nurturing that attitude, that desire. I can talk to him about schools, about career possibilities, because he’s out there doing it right now,” says Integlia.
“It’s inspiring how he’s such an amazing musician, but he’s still decided to teach, to share his music with us.”
Q: What do you call a Portuguese guy who’s asleep in his car?
December 14th, 2005 | #