Milton
Milton Almeida Nascimento
Born July 14, 1939 | Soure, Pará
Died 2019 | Belém do Pará
Technician and Owner | Alvi Azul
BIOGRAPHY
Milton Almeida Nascimento (1939-2019) spent the first years of his life in Soure, a rural town in the Amazon delta. After his father’s untimely death, Milton moved with his family to the capital city Belém, where his mother got a job reading meters for the electric company, Parelétrica.
Although most houses in Milton’s neighborhood in Belém had electricity, the supply couldn’t meet the demand. Milton proudly recalled how, as a child, he discovered how to turn flashlight bulbs and old batteries into string lights that outshone the dim electric lamp in the living room.
Milton also began experimenting with audio from a young age, inventing improvements to family appliances:
We had a radio. A big radio. Store-bought. I turned that into a speaker — I made a little box out of wood, the kind you find in apple crates nowadays, and mounted the speaker inside. I didn’t have money to buy wire, so I ran little telephone wires from it and connected it to the record-player, the kind that played 78 rpm carnaúba [shellac] records with RCA Victor needles. When the needle wore down, I’d sharpen it on the concrete because I couldn’t afford new ones. That thing used to chew up the record, you’d see little shreds coming off! The name of the record-player was Paillard, a famous brand in those days. Heavy. The front looks like the front of a train. Once word got around, people came and hired me to play birthdays. I’d put my rig on a handcart and off I went. I was probably between 10 and 12 years old.
When Milton was 15, he completed a correspondence course for radio technicians through the São Paulo-based Instituto Monitor. Over the next decade, he honed his skills repairing radios for the Army, maintaining the sound system and number board at a gaming hall (jogo do bicho), and building a traveling carnival illusion that transformed a woman into an ape using light and mirrors.
During the 1950s, an acquaintance left Milton in charge of a simple, single-channel sound system he’d inherited from his father. Milton made a series of improvements — including developing a proto-mixing board that allowed it to toggle between two record-players. He eventually relaunched the sound with the name “Alvi Azul,” the team colors of his favorite local soccer club, Payssandu.
Alvi Azul in the 1960s | PHOTO COURTESY JUNIOR ALMEIDA
As the new and improved Alvi Azul grew in popularity, Milton developed a reputation as a technicians’ technician. He attracted a clientele of other sound system owners for whom he did repairs or built equipment to specification.
In his off hours, he dreamed up new inventions:
I came up with a lot of things. Signs, for example. No one used signs in those days. You’d pass by the club, and wouldn’t know who was playing. I made a sound projector with flashlight bulbs that lit up in a circle with the words “Tonight We’re Here: Super Classic Alvi Azul.” The day of the event, I’d send a guy to hang it in front of the club, and he’d tell the groundskeeper, “After dark, stick this wire here,” and people would see, “Look, today Alvi Azul is playing here.”
During the 1980s, Milton found himself at the forefront of a new paradigm in sound system design, one in which the equipment itself was becoming part of the show. A new aparelhagem — or, roughly translated, “a bunch of gear” — might feature walls of color televisions, tape decks, and EQ sliders.
Furacão Azul, one of the final upgrades to Alvi Azul before being retired I c.1990 I PHOTO: O LIBERAL
This new generation of transistor-powered sound systems were not only growing in size, but also in wattage and decibels.
Municipal authorities increasingly cracked down on loud parties, and Milton and his peers formed a professional association known as APASEPA (Associação de Proprietários de Aparelhagens Sonoras do Estado do Pará) to protect their interests and impose standards on newcomers.
By the 2000s, Milton had largely retired from building sound systems, although he continued to repair equipment until suffering a stroke in 2018. Milton passed away the following year, surrounded by his children, who maintain the family business and their father’s legacy.
Milton in his "retirement," repairing equipment at his workbench | 2008 | PHOTO: DARIEN LAMEN
