Legendary jazz guitarist and composer Pat Metheny once said that Brazilian popular music “may have been the last in the world to have sophisticated harmony.” Metheny, winner of 20 Grammy Awards, is one of many international artists who fell in love with the Brazilian music of the 1960s and 1970s and incorporated it into their own compositions. Another example is Greg Kurstin, an award-winning music producer who studied Brazilian Popular Music (MPB) in New York and now works with stars like Paul McCartney, Pink, and Adele. Precisely Kurstin and the English diva have been sued for plagiarism: the sambista Toninho Geraes, composer of hits that Zeca Pagodinho, Diogo Nogueira, Martinho da Vila and others have sung, accuses them both of almost completely copying the melody of ‘Mulheres’ (song recorded by Martinho da Vila in 1995) on the single Million years ago, released in 2015 as part of the album 25.
The dispute over intellectual property coincides with the pre-release of Adele’s new work after a six-year hiatus: the singer, who will release her fourth album on November 19, entitled 30, was forced to silence fan comments on her social media after Brazilians sent a flood of messages in her posts and live streams demanding that she respond to accusations of plagiarism. For now, both she and Greg Kurstin are silent.
“This silence is an evasion strategy,” says Fredímio Biasotto Trotta, Toninho Geraes’ lawyer, who in February of this year sent two extrajudicial notifications to Adele, the British record label XL Recording, Sony Music and Kurstin. In a press release, Sony states that “the issue is currently in the hands of XL Recordings [propietaria del fonograma] and Adele herself ”, since the record company was only the distributor of the single in Brazil and the contract would have already expired. XL Recording, meanwhile, has yet to comment on anything. “We are gathering evidence to present a lawsuit before the British Justice, where the judges are usually rigorous in cases like this,” says Trotta, who has been working in the sector for three decades and has been a musician since he was 11 years old.
Their lawyer does not report, however, the value of the compensation they are asking for. The notifications ask Adele and Krustin to report the income earned from the sales of the album that includes Million years ago and for the monetization of the song on the platforms of streaming. The album Tá delicious, tá gostoso, by Martinho da Vila, in which the theme appears Mulheres, was a best seller in Brazil at the time and sold 1.5 million copies, according to data from Columbia Records. Composer Toninho Geraes, however, does not want to take legal action and is content to have his name appear in the composition credits of Million years ago, according to his lawyer. “I just want to defend my musical legacy,” he says.
Geares learned of the striking similarity between the songs thanks to Misael da Hora, son of Rildo Hora, author of the arrangement of Mulheres and collaborator of the greatest Brazilian samba players. “He told me, thinking it was an authorized version in English, and I was shocked,” he says. The expert report requested by his lawyer identifies 88 identical, similar or slightly varying measures between the two songs, as well as equal parts in the introduction, chorus and ending of both songs.
“Brazilian music is very well known, it is a reference and is studied a lot all over the world, especially the MPB of the sixties and seventies, but in general all the melodies until the beginning of the nineties”, comments Trotta. Perhaps one of the most emblematic cases in this regard is that of Jorge Ben Jor, who in 1979 requested compensation from Rod Stewart for having plagiarized the song ‘Taj Mahal’ (published five years earlier) in the chorus of Da you think I’m sexy?. Stewart publicly admitted to plagiarism in 2012, calling it an “unconscionable act” in his memoirs..
Honoring Trotta’s argument, the bossa nova musician and multi-instrumentalist Edu Lobo filed at least two international lawsuits for plagiarism of his songs from the sixties: one against a French composer who remained anonymous and another, in 1994, against the Japanese composers Tsukasa Yamaguchi, Eiji Takehana and Yasuhiro Nara, who copied his song Ponteio numa outra, renamed as Beatitude in the Multidirection compilation. The case was settled with a financial settlement of undisclosed value. More recently, the heirs of composer Luiz Bonfá (who died in 2001) accused the Belgian-Australian Gotye of plagiarizing a small part of the song ‘Seville’ in the hit Somebody that I used to know, which won the 2013 Grammy for best recording. Gotye reached an agreement to add Bonfá as a co-author of the song, in a credit that is even part of the Australian Copyright Association.
The lawyer Caio Mariano, a specialist in copyright and intellectual property, considers, however, that cases like these are not common. “At the end of the day, in music there are also coincidences, so it is necessary to demonstrate fraud – the will and intention to copy something – to be able to accuse someone of plagiarism,” he says. “Something that happens a lot is the unauthorized use of musicians like Tim Maia, Arthur Verocai, among others, who have a very rich work. In the genesis of genres like hip hop and rap, for example, is the culture of introducing samples in songs. The problem is when they do it without proper authorization, without worrying about whether they are violating copyright, “he continues.
Regarding the dispute between Toninho Geraes and Adele, Mariano says that “there is a very striking similarity in the harmony, the tempo and the structure of the songs.” The lawyer points out that Brazilian law follows international copyright conventions and that these conflict situations are usually resolved outside the courts, with agreements and negotiations. It remains to be seen if this will be the path taken when Adele and her producer break the silence.
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