Beleza!
September 12, 2007 | posted by Braddigan | 6 Comments

Beleza! Valeu Valeu a todos :) yea that's as far as my portuguese goes after a week rolling through the hills of Brazil... & what a beautiful country? unreal. mountains, trees, every shade of green, cliffs, beaches, & little towns scattered like gravel all over the countryside with some of the warmest smiles you've ever seen wherever we went...

so i've got to rewind the tapes a bit here - back to the the first time i heard mention of this amazing bass player from Brazil... i was in Hawaii hanging with some friends at YWAM when i overheard some of the local musician guys talking about this guy Tiago Machado who was set to return from a few months travels... they said he was a great bass player and remember wondering why that i'd try to cross paths with this guy before heading back to CO... i knew when i heard a friend in Hawaii mention this bass player from Brazil.

Sao Paulo was such a wild experience... i flew in from Nicaragua, 10 hours total of flight time, and arrived at Sao Paulo's Int'l airport at 8:30pm - well we had a gig scheduled for 9:30pm the same night as it turns out and when i got there at 9:20pm we found 1,500 people waiting there for us... it was epic! such a killer cool crew of people and such a warm welcome to Brazil... it really set the tone for the trip, such grace and warmth - i mean we've never played there before, we've not paid our dues in any way, and people were lining up around the block to come in and see us play... really because of three things: 1. Walking on Water's films are big down there and so our music has been there a little ahead of us 2. any int'l band is celebrated down there bc they're super hungry for new music 3. there are a crazy core group of Dispatch fans down there too... unreal - but yea, what a crazy first hour in Brazil being whisked off to an "i must be dreaming" show that was there waiting for us...

so we left the sprawling city of Sao Paulo and headed off into the countryside in our tiny little hatchback of a tour bus! it was hilarious... we were supposed to have a van reserved but the rental shop just shrugged their shoulders and gave us our little turtle of a car... she was a speedy little number though and we must have put in about 400-600km a day - Piritininga, Curitiba, Floripa (Florianopolis), & Guaruja were our stops on this test the waters tour... Rio was on the docket but we had to can it in favor of some other towns... but we'll be back there for sure in January ...

Check out a cool video Rey put together and some photos from Tiago and some friends down there...
-Braddigan

UPDATE: Our friends at Plywood Surfboards wrote a post with photos from our visit (in portuguese). And our friends who came to the show in Floripa serenaded us when we arrived!

Labels: brazil, concert, dispatch, nicaragua, tour