The House a Hundred Meters Away
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I was seventeen when my father was finally able to give me a flute.
For years I had played the recorder and longed for a transverse flute. Buying one was a considerable sacrifice for our family. When it finally arrived, I held in my hands the instrument I had wanted for so long.
There was only one problem.
I could not get a single sound out of it.
The embouchure was completely different. I had the instrument, but I did not yet have access to its voice.
There was no internet. So we began asking our neighbors whether anyone knew a flute teacher.
That was how we discovered that João Dias Carrasqueira lived about a hundred meters from our home in Lapa, São Paulo.
I walked there, rang the bell, entered through a side passage, and climbed the stairs to the upper floor of a building behind the house. Before I reached the room, I could already hear flutes.
Carrasqueira was a small elderly man with a neatly trimmed mustache and a beret. I would later understand that he was one of Brazil's great flutists, a musician whose life had passed through classical music, choro, radio, and the great radio orchestras, and who had been a contemporary and musical partner of extraordinary artists, including Pixinguinha.
Inside that room in an ordinary neighborhood home was a piece of Brazilian musical history I did not yet know enough to recognize.
But what reached me first was not his résumé. It was the way he taught.
There was rigor. Tone, breathing, articulation, precision. But alongside technique came serenades, waltzes, choros, and xotes. Brazilian music was not lesser repertoire, something to be played between works considered more serious. It was part of becoming a musician.
Carrasqueira taught through stories, drawings, community, and the experience of making music together. At the end of each lesson, he would compose a short piece in my notebook, often whistling it as he wrote, designed around whatever difficulty I needed to overcome.
I still have that notebook.
Sometimes I attended rehearsals in the main house. His daughter Maria José would be at the grand piano, and his son Toninho would be there as well. Both were accomplished concert musicians. I later went to hear them in places such as Teatro Cultura Artística and the Municipal Theatre.
At the time, they seemed to belong to a world very far from mine.
Years later, in 1990, I won a saxophone chair in the original formation of the Orquestra Jazz Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo.
Toninho Carrasqueira was there.
The concert musician I had once watched from a distance became the colleague sitting beside me and one of my closest friends during that season.
Sometimes the road brings people together in ways no one could have planned.
The lessons and repertoire I received from Carrasqueira also found their way into Grupo Pescador. Some of those pieces, arranged by João Alexandre, helped shape the atmosphere of Contraste, recorded at the end of 1983 and released the following year.
On the album cover, and among friends, I was Zé da Flauta—Zé the Flute Player.
The flute was not simply the instrument I played. It was one of the first garments I wore.
It gave me a voice. It gave me a place among musicians. It opened doors into worlds that seemed far beyond the reality of my family.
But that garment was not woven from talent or desire alone. Woven into it were my father's sacrifice, the question asked of our neighbors, the generosity of a teacher, and all the stories that reached me through Carrasqueira's hands and breath.
And after many of those lessons, I would go to meet Val.
We had known each other since childhood, but by late adolescence we were beginning to see one another differently. While one road was opening through music, another story was beginning to take shape.
I could not yet have known that Val would walk with me through every garment and every season that followed.
Was it coincidence that Carrasqueira lived a hundred meters away? Providence? Grace?
Each word sees something. None explains everything.
Proximity did not eliminate the journey.
Sometimes what transforms us is already very close. But even a hundred meters can contain an entire story that still has to be crossed.
And how often we hold in our hands the very thing we have longed for, yet still need someone to teach us how to find its voice.
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