I ENJOY PLAYING GUITAR, and I have a wide range of musical interests, so I have come across Raphael Rabello from time to time over the years.
Rabello worked as a session musician in Brazil. I quite like choro – which is a Brazilian genre. Choro means weeping or crying, but it’s not sad really, it’s actually pretty fast, uplifting and happy. In Brazil, adding the ending -inho makes everything smaller, so Chorinho is a small Choro, so a small cry. However, the terms are interchangeable. It’s a 3-part rondo form and great fun! Raphael specialised in Choro/Chorinho, but he could play anything.
His reputation grew abroad, and he moved to the USA and even gave lessons in California.
Although not an actual ‘hero’ of mine, I’ve been a huge fan of his playing for years. I’m posting this partly for a reason that will become clear later, but partially because of all the tweets, facebook posts, DMs and more regarding the tragic lives of musicians. I seem to have struck a chord (sorry about the pun) with my last post – on Alexei Zimanov having all his fingers chopped off. I’ve been inundated with similar tales!
I referred in that Zimanov post about Chet Baker‘s falling out of a window and about Jaco Pastorius being beaten to death in the most savage and brutal way possible by a doorman/bouncer, and this has lead to many quite extraordinary tales, including what happened to Raphael Rabello…
In 1989, all was going really well for Raphael, when he got into a car crash.
He was taken to hospital with his right arm broken in several places. Bad news for a guitar player.
The operation was tricky, but he managed to be able to play after a while. What he hadn’t realised was that he got infected during the operation.
He was given a blood transfusion that infected him with HIV.
He was given AIDS as he saw it.
But it didn’t kill him.
Instead, it affected his mental health, and he began taking drugs, he gave up hope. Eventually he was addicted to both drugs and alcohol. He spiralled out of control and stopped breathing on 27 April 1995.
It’s not what happens, it’s how you deal with it. He could still play, his arm would heal. HIV is really bad luck, but it is possible to live with it. He’s playing in the above embedded video, with a healed arm and HIV positive.
But it’s trite of me, of us all for ignoring the personal mental health aspect. This wonderful, talented man, with a wonderful career simply couldn’t deal with it. How he dealt with it, didn’t work.
You could say that what killed Raphael was his mental health.
In these lockdown -and- COVID-19 pandemic times, I think we’ll hear a lot more about mental health.
I wish everyone the best for these strange times. I hope we all survive and prosper.
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davedevine 