Jazmín from Beauty Way by Poranguí

How do we make everything that we touch more beautiful than we found it?

According to Diné (Navajo) teachings, to Walk in Beauty (Hózhó Naashá) is to live in balance and harmony with the unfolding beauty of all life. Walking the Beauty Way together, we weave ourselves more deeply into the entwined fabric of universal consciousness, becoming more connected with ourselves, with each other, and with the Earth. On Beauty Way, Poranguí is on a mission. The album weaves together diverse Afro-latin rhythmic forms with ballads, folk songs, and ceremonial music, blending world instruments from didgeridoo to kalimba with multilingual vocals. The powerful lyrics in Beauty Way meld with this sonic fusion informed by Poranguí’s pan-american heritage to issue an invocation and a call to collective action.

Vocals take the center stage in this album of reverence, healing, and community. Expressing the sanctity of the Earth and the artist’s concern for its future, in the focus track, “Walk in Beauty,” (track 3) Poranguí invites us to “help me love this sacred home” to “walk in beauty, talk in beauty, live in beauty, be the prayer the world needs now.”

Against a backdrop of Afro-Brazilian percussion and Pre-Columbian flute, the chorus of “These Hands” (track 2) reminds us of the power in our hands as “stewards of beauty,” charged with the sacred responsibility of “cleansing the rivers and healing the land.” In the vibey bossa nova “AnceStars” (track 8) Poranguí asks, “How do we make everything that we touch more beautiful than we found it?” then responds by making love to our ears with a rich samba accompanied by masterful Turkish flute from guest musician Eric Zang. Drawing from his years studying in Salvador, Bahia, “sKin” (track 4) unleashes a fire of samba-reggae batucada fused with cumbia. Joined by Alixa Garcia of Climbing PoeTree rapping in Spanish, Poranguí calls on us all “to move as one” united by “the skin of the drum,” the sKin that makes us all Kin.

Beauty Way manifests the expansive cultural hybridity of Poranguí’s birthright as a Latinx man and adopted Sundancer, born in Brazil and raised between South and North America. It is the artist’s first solo studio album since the instrumental Ayahuasca (original motion picture soundtrack, 2016). It follows his live solo album Poranguí (2019), which features his signature live-looping performances with voice, didgeridoo, African percussion, Native American flutes, berimbau, and other world instruments, a perennial favorite on the festival circuit. Beauty Way also builds on the artist’s earlier studio releases including Terra Sagrada (with Zang, 2011) and his recent collaborations with Liquid Bloom, such as The Kuya Sessions (2021 - 2023).

Hózhóogo naasháa doo. May we all walk in beauty.

Copy by Dr. Edward Shanken, UCSC

Reared among the three cultures of Brazil, Mexico and the U.S., Poranguí was steeped in various traditional forms of music, healing and ceremony since birth. Weaving ancestral songs & indigenous rhythms from around the world as a one-man orchestra, Poranguí bridges the healing properties of sound and movement to foster our individual and collective well being.

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