Jazz is not linear music. And neither does the path of those who play it. Sónia Cabrita say so. Sónia Little B Cabrita didn't want jazz or drums. She is now the first drummer to record a jazz album under her own name.
“When I started playing, in 1994, what I wanted was to be a guitarist, and I made a rock band all girls. Everyone chose the instruments they wanted to play, and me, who was last, got the drums”, says Sónia Cabrita.
Joined the Philharmonic Association of Faro to learn to play. It was the beginning of a long path with sticks in hand. And also in rock. “From 1994 to 2002 it was just rock, there were 'n' bands… However, and at the same time, I met Zé Eduardo [from Grémio das Músicas] who made the Jazz Festival in Faro, but at the time Jazz didn't tell me anything. It entered me through one ear and left through the other”, he says.
Until Jazz came for lack of paths in Rock. “I got fed up! I got to a point where I felt that [Rock] didn't lead anywhere and I decided to talk to Zé Eduardo and told him: 'I want to learn to play music for real'”. That's what he did. He attended the Barreiro Jazz School and “it all started to make sense”.
“That” was the risk, the feeling of creation that you can't get in rock or other styles: “In jazz, I'm free, I'm always creating, at the limit. What we do is new at every moment”, he explains.
A drummer to compose?
It all starts in 2007. The pretext was the harmony lessons. “I thought: there has to be something else…”. And the big hit comes, in 2010, in a composition workshop with Jesús Santandreu. “It's just that writing for a drummer – who's a guy (or a guy) who goes 'boom boom boom' – it's kind of weird, but that really made me click. I understood zero, but I tried to put it into practice, I started to compose some themes", he says Sonia Cabrita, which became “Little B” in Jazz because he always played the song with the same name [Little B Poem].
“As a drummer, I've always played as a sidewoman, that is, they tell you to play something, you play and you try to satisfy the leader of the band. It turns out that I got to the point where I wanted to do something of my own too, I wanted to do something that I felt and not just what I was told to do. I went to do it the other way around…”, he says. And the opposite was to do, to risk.
“It's just that all drummers in Portugal, and there are many good ones, are in tow. Only one, Jorge Moniz, who could have been a conductor, has an album of his own. It's something that takes work, maybe that's why. If we go to the United States, any drummer knows piano, music theory, tugas don't know an ox”.
The result is there: “I'm not doing anything new, it's a bit my face and something I like, which I did for myself”.
Rock influences? “Of course Rock is and was part of my life, but I made the themes without thinking about what they were, whether they were good or bad” Influences? Of course: Cindy Blackman and Tony Williams are the names.
To be a female drummer?
If being a female drummer is not common, it is even less common to be a female drummer in Jazz. Sonia “Little B” Goat she doesn't know if she plays differently from men, but she knows that being a woman brings her even more effort to assert herself. “Do I play different? I don't know, it's just that I was never a man. But there are people who think that because I'm a girl I make life easier and it's completely the opposite. First they say: 'Oh how funny a girl'. Then it's: 'It's not bad for a girl'. What I feel is that people don't take you [ndr: me] seriously [because you're a girl]. In classical music, for example, that doesn't happen: either you know how to play, or you don't know how to play”, he explains. In jazz, the story is different: it takes twice as much work and effort.
But it was work and effort that led Sónia “Little B” Cabrita to be the first Portuguese drummer to compose and edit a jazz album. And the path just started. “I'm not working on the next one yet, but that's the way to go: if all goes well, I want to record another – and another, and another and another…”.
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