Yara.

When a musician arrives at Yara's studio stuck, she doesn't push. In her story she asks if they've eaten, goes to the kitchen, makes coffee, and only afterward do they go back to listening to what they have; if it isn't working, that's fine, coffee first. That care runs deep: at sixteen she mixed her first track for Caio, an MC from the neighborhood, and within six months five other kids were asking her for the same thing. That's how she became the mãe-do-corte. The mug carries her serene face, the face of someone who knows that rushing never fixes a take.

Two or three times a year, Yara leaves the studio and takes to the water. She hires a boat with a boatman — never without one — and heads up the igarapés of the Rio Negro with a recorder, to spend one to three days with families who take her in. She records lullabies, work songs, water against the hull; she pays in cash whatever they ask, before recording. She comes back with voices that were about to be lost. This mug is for the coffee that comes before all of that; her whole story is told separately, and she's part of a family of creatures you can see in the rest of the collection.