One of those addicted to the stranger, Francisco de Assis França, later known as Chico Science and a Pisces dedicated to the discipline of love, who ran an amusement park in his mind, seemed to have no trouble following Sladjena's advice. After the manner of Salinger, he started to unclog the veins of the American Amsterdam - as was the wish of the Dutch who came to Recife - with a beach-based movement that marked the end of his no-good days: the search for the perfect beat, like Afrika Baambata might have said.

All this under a motto that marked his brief stop around these parts: "Fun taken seriously" - as he defined his antics and attitude. This month celebrates the fourth anniversary of the day when the Crabman gave up life and left this world.

An encounter between a Fiat Uno and a light post, on a bridge on the Recife-Olinda border, at around 7 PM of February 2nd, 1997, put an early end to the Crabman's career, before his 31st birthday. Th 174-page police report estimated that Science was doing around 110 km/h - average speeds at that point are usually high, as the avenue that leads to the bridge is a long, straight one. With head, chest and face trauma, the greatest event to appear on Brazilian stages since Jorge Benjor was taken to Hospital da Restauração, the state capital's emergency center. Among the victims of carnival violence, his body was left out on a corridor while he awaited his turn.
As news on the accident made their way across Recife and Olinda, maracatu drums and small frevo bands silenced. Bereaved friends and admirers cursed God and His world. Though there was an effort by the police to insinuate that Chico was under the influence of drugs at the time of the crash - medical examination only found "a barbiturate psychotropic," which can be found even on mild tranquilizers - the musician, according to friends who couldn't have hid something like that, hadn't even had a beer before lunch, as in the "A Praieira" lyrics ("a beer before lunch is great for better thinking"). He was looking the other way, unprepared for death, as sang his friend Otto, a former member of early Nação Zumbi formations.

A few days prior to Science's death, Carlinhos Brown wrist-slapped the musicians from Pernambuco in a press conference. He said that CSNZ mixed maracatu with "peripheral" music, in a criticism of the band's collage. The criticism annoyed the bandleader. In reprisal of which, Nação Zumbi members shredded a corbeille sent by Brown for Chico's funeral.

The coroner's report, attached to the police file, indicated a structural fault in the vehicle, related to the failure and release of the safety belt clasp - the belt itself didn't break. According to the paperwork TRIP obtained, "the device should keep the driver in his seat, even in a lateral crash, taking the body's weight at times of sudden deceleration." In the midst of the present storm of vehicle recalls, Science's family filed a lawsuit to hold Fiat do Brasil criminally responsible. The case is to be tried in the first half of the current year. "I hate to even think about compensation, as you can't put a price on human life - if it were only that I'd have been against filing the suit - but we have to verify criminal responsibility, even if only to set an example for other similar stories and families under the same circumstances," says Goretti França, the sister with whom Chico lived and whose car he borrowed.

"Chico Science e Nação Zumbi" shook New York to the core. Their music expressed the pain and pleasure of one's personality, caught between the past and the future, between technology and tradition, silence and noise, muck and heaven"- DAVID BYRNE, musician and former leader of Talking Heads

The voyage started in the suburbs-downtown direction. When Francisco França flagged down the bus that goes from the peripheral neighborhood he lived in to the main Recife thoroughfare, Agamenon Magalhães (named after a crooked politician), music was about to not only gain a new label, but also a respectable buzz, that brought to the international scene an impact that can only be compared to that of pretty-jazz bossa nova. In a few lines, soon after the release of de album Da Lama ao Caos (Sony, 1994), Spin magazine nonchalantly stated that Chico Science & Nação Zumbi's music was none other than what English jungle attempted to do and failed at.
The Queen had been dead for ages and Londoners lacked the precise spice provided by the Pernambuco beat. The suburban soul that now echoes in the roar of Nação Zumbi, with Du Peixe, Lúcio Maia, Dengue, Pupilo, Toca, Marcosm, Axé, Gilmar Bola 8 and Gira (who left for a period and now resumes his Lamento Negro Project, one of the bands that were at the roots of CSNZ). There was no lack of ragga jungle in the late Chico's world, as we will see later.

Back on the road
When Francisco França flagged down that bus, he had with him friend/airline employee b-boy, of Legião Hip Hop. Jorge Du Peixe (the dude was mad about tanks and aquariums from rumble-fish to jack dempseys , hence the nickname ["Du Peixe" = Of Fish]), another soul arising from peripheral Olinda. "Man, I'm having an idea that rocks," yelled Science at a contemplative Du Peixe, wearing his eyes at the scenery that he beheld on at least two thousand trips on the same bus line.
Silence in the bus. "Isn't there mambo? Isn't there calypso?" Science asked.
"Yes..." replied the airline check-in employee.

"Chico pumped speed and enthusiasm into the veins of his homeland's music, opening one of those rare paths that prevent time from turning back. There's no need to say anything more about this revved-up clock. The fun rolls on its own, non-stop" TOM ZÉ, musician

A ROLL OF DICE
by h. d. mabuse*
In the 1970s, mathematician Michael Barnsley, with his Theorem of Collage, shows the world that in nature, a few simple rules - to which is added a certain amount of randomness - comprise the code required for the creation and development of everything around us. As an example, Barnsley conceived the Chaos Game, which can be played with a piece of paper, a pencil and a coin. One starts by choosing a spot on the paper and setting tow movement rules, one for heads and the other for tails. For example: if it's heads, draw a two-inch trace to the left; if it's tails, a trace 10% closer to the center of the page. An draw on.

The Science of Randomness
The first time I saw Chico playing with a coin was in mid-1986. A Chico who was not yet Science (he signed "Chico Vülgo) was featured on Radio Transamérica FM, where Fred "Zero Quatro" Montenegro had a show called novas tendências ("New Trends"). Chico spoke to us about the funk dances in Rio Doce, of his band, Orla Urbe, of his friends (particularly Jorge Du Peixa, who was then an airline employee), and of the future. Some time later we formed a band called Bom Tom Rádio, centered around Chico, Jorge and I, and which was a lab for sound experiences that would later be refined by Nação Zumbi. A strange formation, comprising bass, drum-machine, scratches and an MSX computer that doubled as a sequencer, the band played acid house in Recife in 1987 with no idea of what it was doing. Out of Tanz Music (an improvised home studio) came the embryos of songs such as "Maracatu de Tiro Certeiro," "O Encontro de Issac Asimov com Santos Dumont no Céu" and "A Cidade:" digital sequences filtered through guitar pedals and mixed with electronic beats merged with bass, while Chico sang - when no new lyrics were available, he read Raymundo Faoro texts mingled with whistles and ocarina riffs.

In a practice session for a Bom Tom Rádio showe, Chico spoke for the first time of the new beat he was working on with people from the Peixinhos area. A mix of maracatu de baque-virado and rural maracatu with James Brown's and Charlie Wright's soul and L.L. Cool J.'s and De La Soul's hip hop. To define the groove he returned to the mangue (mangrove) near his home. This is how I recall the birth of Mangue.

"Chico Science is our Bob Marley"
LENINE, musician

BOOZE AND HEMP
Not to mention other memories - such as booze, beer and hemp on the beach ("I wrote a great song," said old França. "It goes like this: 'uma cerveja/antes do almoço/é muito bom/pra ficar pensando melhor'" Sitting on the yard of the fly-infested bar I replied: "Man, you've written some cool songs, but this one's not so good!), weekends in a heart-disease afflicted, pre-Mangue Recife, drinking cheap Gin and listening to Dexy's Midnight Runners' Celtic soul, the Bezerra da Silva look, with a tartan cap among beer-bottles at the fishmonger's, plans to steal my ancient maid's multicolored skirts to go dancing maracatu, KZF's show at the Misty club, a traditional gay haunt that got invaded by the festive hosts from the suburbs during the First Recife Hip Hop Festival, parties in Old Recife, Sunrise, the 7th floor apartment in Edifício Capibaribe, on the banks of the river, right on Rua Aurora, where the pantry always held lots of powdered guaraná, whole-wheat bread, booze and hemp, the occasional presence of Fred Zero Quatro, a scholarly student of Caryl Chessman and mangroves, the discovery of Josué de Castro and Mestre Salu, the jolt given to manguetown, unclogging its veins, Mangue conquering São Paulo, Brazil, European tours...

And I recall a night in February 1997 when randomness called game-end, no chance for a further coin-toss. No ability to draw any more lines of music, trips, painfully broken friendships. One of the conclusions of good ol' Barnsley's Chaos Game: randomness is but an instrument. In a way, the image to be drawn was already determined from the first trace.

* h.d. mabuse, 29 (right) rolls dice as a DJ in certain hot Pernambuco nights and is editor of Manguetronic (www.manguetronic.com.br), the first virtual Internet radio station in Brazil, and of mangueBit (www.manguebit.org.br)

"It was the most important movement since tropicalismo. I don't think anyone really has successors, but Chico has followers, as it is hard not to be influenced by his music"
PEDRO LUÍS, musician

"Well, now there's Mangue!"
In that bus, dragging tired workers and pretty dark brunettes, was born the search for the perfect beat. In his short passage through this parts, finished on the way to Olinda on Carnival Sunday, February 2nd, 1997 (Yemanja Day).Chico lived the nice restlessness of not leaving music alone. Everything had to be refurbished. The perfect beat was a never-ending attempt.
The "killer p.j.'s"

"Conformity is poison for musicracy - music for and by all. We have to seek out new beats, a new way of doing old things, not with an aim to making a new wave, but with one ever-present concern: it must be fun, as it's not worth the trouble otherwise. It's only good if it's fun taken seriously," Science preached, in early 1994, in conversation fired by authentic Jamaican rum (one of the authors of this story, Sá, had just arrived from Kingston and Montego Bay with a big load of the drink). In the same night, in a kitchenette on Rua Frei Caneca 812, Bela Vista, rocked by the first time we played the Da Lama ao Caos Album, we were all surprised - Lúcio Maia and Jorge Du Peixe were also there - by a hammering on the door. While "Rios, Pontes & Overdrive" shook the building to the core, we opened the door. On the threshold, finger on the trigger, an austere gentleman in his pajamas - the ever-present neighbor from downstairs - threatened all of us with his Colt.

"Either stop the music or I'll shoot me some bums!" he yelled, backed by morality and reason. To make things even better he insinuated that an orgy might be going on among us, macho Northeastern Brazilians:

"What are four grown men doing together this time of the night?" he asked.
Even with all the rum I head dancing around in my mind, I started on chapter after chapter of constitutional rights and other civil liberties that assisted citizens inside their homes. Nothing could calm down "killer p.j.'s" as Chico called him from that day on.
The police even came and everything! I'm not sure how many squad cars were there, and all because we were listening, for the first time, to an album that would change the face of Brazilian pop music. In the same building, a few days before, someone had fired a shot from the window of an apartment and killed a crack-addicted teenage girl. Motive: the kid was fiddling with the shooter's car and, he said, was going to steal his stereo.
Big shit.

How sound is born
Chico could make music from rocks and was capable of listening to the melody of pneumatic drills - the poor man's scooter, in bigoted São Paulo slang. On leaving edificio Capibaribe, where he lived with friends h. d. mabuse and occasional dweller, Mangue leader and co-founder Fred Zero Quatro, Science eked tunes out of beer bottles stuck on his fingers. During such outings after the precious beverage arose the motto "casco caos, casco caos," which surfaced again in the track "Coco Dub (Afrociberdelia)," in CSNZ's first album.
Beer before lunch and chaos were dear to the Mangue boys (afterwards, due to a homonymous song by mundo livre s/a, the media changed its name to mangueBit; further on, they started talking about Manguebeat, a ix-up that is yet to be explained). In charge of the theoretical aspect of such chaos was h. d. mabuse, a friend of Chico's and one of the movement's mentors, a serious student of mathematician Michael Barnsley's Theorem of Collage, very popular in the 1970s. To understand this whole mess, read the special statement to TRIP taken at Dr. mabuse's office.

"In 93 there was this fun whorehouse that catered to sailors coming to Recife. In between songs by Reginaldo Rossi and Pinduca, some of Chico's tapes were played. Gringos and hookers came in without paying and freaked out on his music. A water bucket on the upper floor was for women to wash their pussies"
FELIX FARFAN, artist

"Manguebeat can't be called a movement. Chico Science died much too soon and didn't leave a real oeuvre behind. He left a heritage, a proposition that is being carried on - precisely when Brazilian popular music is undergoing a shallow, difficult period"
ZUZA HOMEM DE MELLO, music critic and producer

"Chico Science plunged the international world into the Mangue muck, but everything is still the same. It's nothing. It's a consumer industry"
JOSÉ RAMOS TINHORÃO, MPB critic

"It's simple: Manguebeat was the most important event in Brazilian pop music in the past ten years. The movement had - and has - impressive aesthetic strength. I'm a Chico Science fan and consider the soundtrack he wrote for Baile Perfumado one of the best in recent Brazilian film-industry history."
WALTER SALLES JR., filmmaker

the reporters that sign this saga, Miss Soledad (a beautiful gipsy from the Andaluzia-Recife bridge), Godard-addict Luciana Araújo, DJ Dolores and his Monica-samba, all at the Copo Sujo ("Dirty Glass") bar, a place that is part of the sentimental landscape of Mangue, Manguebit, Manguebeat or whatever you call this beach-based revolution.

Blood from the 'hood
A historian attempting to retrace Chico Science's artistic path from his albums collection should, in fact, go even further into the past and dive into the childhood of Francisco de Assis', born in Recife, the youngest of four children by Mr. Francisco, a brave community leader and former city-councilman, and dona Rita França (as spirited as the artist who took fun seriously, Chico's mother kept in her home, until 1997, the Chickencoop of Fame. She bred chickens named after Nação Zumbi members, friends, and her son's girlfriends, which only enhanced the humorous story).
Chico finished high-school, always in Recife's public education system. He worked, until forming Nação Zumbi, as an archivist at Emprel, the Recife municipal data processing company. Before that, he had worked at the Recife Radiology Clinic as general services assistant. "After turning 18, get a job, pull your own" - those were his father's orders.

The music from Rio Doce, a poor - though decent - neighborhood of project housing in peripheral Olinda, is the first influence on the boy. By music, for the present purposes, we mean everything from the chants of street vendors, through popular ring dances, to the maracatu that peeks out during Carnival. Albums came years later, in his teens when, among so many discoveries, he found his first love (may we be excused by muses Sladjena, Roisiflora - the ecological codename of glorious Maria Eduarda Belém, Renata Pinheiro - la crème of Recife arts - and Charlene): American black music.

This is when the first heroes begin to garnish walls and closets. James Brown's funk becomes a passion an opens way for an obsession: Chico starts the search that will move a sizable portion of his albums collection and drive future musical efforts. Chico goes after the Grail of modern pop, the perfect, final beat. "Looking for a perfect beat," the classic by Afrika Baambata's, who created hip hop from a merger of Brown and Kraftwerk, might well be Science's personal motto.
When the 80's were about half done, hip hop joined funk in the restrictive gallery of musical cults. Chico dives headfirst into this newborn culture, getting involved in graffiti, dance-like contortionism, and poetry sung to marked rhythms. Like Baambata, he becomes a part of his first "nation," Coletivo Hip Hop, on the Pernambuco's pioneers in the genre. AS any orthodox rapper, he goes onstage in Adidas and emulating L.L.Cool Jay.

But of course, if Science's records collection were so limited, so to speak, he wouldn't have become the ingenious creator that would later haunt Pernambuco and all the rest of Brazil. It's when he starts coming to a certain apartment in Graças, where his sister Goretti lived, right next to central Recife, that Chico's musical tastes and preferences would expand to previously uncharted territories. This apartment served as a general headquarters for several of the mangueboys-to-be who worked or loitered in town. It was where one could sit back for a while before going home or into the night. Through friends in common, Chico met mundo livre s/a's Fred Zero Quatro and lots more people with all sorts of backgrounds and tastes. An environment arose that is a part of any musical movement before explosion into the media. Something like a cultural hatchery.
This is where Mangue started to be built, both conceptually and musically: one might listen at once to Captain Beefheart and Public Enemy, Fellini and 808 State, Jorge Benjor and the Specials. Artists, broken filmmakers, the unemployed, journalists and civil servants lived there side-by-side. A portion of Nação Zumbi's characteristic sound comes out of this, of commingled records, listened to carefully in between a joint and a beer.

Baião-de-dois
In the Mangue age, Science's records collection was something else altogether. The search for the groove had been added to by the search for perfect melodies, a cult to The Who in the 1960s, the Byrds and others in that area. Another one of his traits arose in force: the ability to mix rhythm and melody like few before him! A man capable of forming a parallel band, Loustal, who played psychedelic covers of classics from the sixties while at the same time developing Nação Zumbi!
A final visit to his room and his collection shows a growing love of electronic music and Latin sounds. Drum'n'bass and jungle seemed to be the styles of choice. To think what the alchemist of rhythm might have accomplished with this beat is an unending source of sorrow. "I was usually asleep when Chico would arrive with friends to listen to music in the dark of the morning. They seemed so happy and to be having so much fun that the meetings never bothered me," says Goretti, her younger sibling's surrogate mother and safe haven.
But life goes on... in Chico's room in his sister's home treasures have been kept since the fateful evening of Sunday, February 2nd. The scientist might come back for an LP or a CD at any time and think up another spell. The perfect beat could be born any instant, now...
Thanks Goretti França, a nurse and competent professional, dedicated to public health in the slums of Recife, TRIP had access to the last set of CD's collected by Science in his case [see box]. With this collection he rocked - alternating between artist and DJ - part of Bloco Enquanto Isso's party at Palácio da Justiça, the day before his death, on February 1st, 1997, a Saturday. On that day he ran into old friends, after an extended absence from Pernambuco - he had been touring Europe - and kicked ass on the pickups, possibly inspired by the amusement park in his mind that beatnik poet Lawrence Ferlighetti talked about. The victors were the jungle passion, the black, suburban clash of which he was an integral part and that would be posthumously paid homage to in Goldie's Londoner passages.

The last scratch
His friends bet that when the Fiat Uno (Chico left without his Ford Galaxy because it would be hard to park it on the Carnival-packed streets) driven by the artist was climbing the bridge, he'd be playing La Speranza, by Willie Bobo, an addiction. But this is just the boys' intuition speaking. The night before, doubling as DJ in a party, he burned down the house with jungle to quiet down the Carnival barbarians. He'd just come from Paris with a pack full of new CDs and a renewed passion for Charlene, a nouvelle-vague brunette from a traditional Pernambuco family who had exchanged, while still a toddler, the Capibaribe for the Seine. At no time during the party did he pout - when upset, Chico was certain to do his elephant impression.
In a conversation with the reporters responsible for this story, he said with a wide-open smile - as if under the influence of a Druid (Asterix) brand pill, passed out generously in Recife by the Croatian the story began with - that he was unlucky in love. Charlene would arrive from Paris a few days later.
Recife, left bank of the Capibaribe, dawn of the 21st Century.

THANKS TO: ANA LUIZA BRANDÃO, BID, FRED JORDÃO, GIL VICENTE, H.D. MABUSE AND DIÁRIO DE PERNAMBUCO
COLLABORATORS: ANDRÉ TELLES, JULIANA OLIVEIRA, HENRIQUE SKUJIS AND RONALDO BRESSANE