José Miguel Wisnik

José Miguel Wisnik channels a rigorous academic grounding in both letters and composition into his craft as a songwriter, emerging publicly through the vanguarda paulista circle. Besides issuing his own recordings, he has supplied material that reached the public via Gal Costa, Paulo Ricardo, Cida Moreira, Quarteto em Cy, Edson Cordeiro, Ná Ozzetti, Zizi Possi, Eliete Negreiros, and Vânia Bastos. Piano and music theory occupied him from childhood; at eighteen he appeared as soloist with the Orquestra Municipal de São Paulo in Camille Saint-Saens’s Concerto n° 2. Songwriting began for him in the closing years of the 1960s, coinciding with his enrollment in the literature program at the University of São Paulo. In 1968 Alaíde Costa introduced his “Outra Viagem” at the Festival Universitário da TV Tupi. During the following two decades he completed an M.A. and a Ph.D. in literary theory, issuing the volume O Som e o Sentido - Uma Outra História da Música through Companhia das Letras in 1989 together with numerous essays and articles gathered in anthologies. The 1990s brought two ballet scores for Grupo Corpo—Nazareth in 1993 and Parabelo in 1994, the latter realized jointly with Tom Zé. He has also composed for the stage under Zé Celso Martinez Corrêa and supplied scores for cinema, among them Terra Estrangeira directed by Walter Salles Júnior and Daniela Thomas in 1996. Gal Costa placed “Assum Branco” on the album Aquele Frevo Axé.