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L\u00f4 Borges<\/a>, a legend of Brazilian popular music and one of the founders of the Clube da Esquina musical collective, died on Sunday, November 2. Borges\u2019 family confirmed<\/a> the news in a statement posted to his official social media pages. According to Folha de S.Paulo<\/em><\/a>, the musician had been hospitalized for a drug-related infection, and Borges\u2019 family wrote, in Portuguese, that he \u201cfought bravely for 17 days.\u201d Borges was 73 years old.<\/p>\n The sixth of 11 children, Salom\u00e3o Borges Filho was born in 1952, in Belo Horizonte, the capital and largest city in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. As teenagers, Borges and his older brother M\u00e1rcio became associated with a group of musicians who gathered at the corner of Rua Divin\u00f3polis and Rua Parais\u00f3polis in the neighborhood of Santa Tereza to smoke, hang out, make music. Their \u201ccorner club,\u201d as it came to be known, blended MPB\u2014m\u00fasica popular brasileira<\/em>, one of the dominant styles of Brazilian music during the 1960s\u2014with jazz, psychedelic rock, and the Beatles<\/a>\u2019 baroque pop.<\/p>\n Among those musicians was Milton Nascimento<\/a>, who was about 10 years older than Borges and had moved from the town of Tr\u00eas Pontas to Belo Horizonte in 1963. A rising international star following his performance at the inaugural MPB festival in 1965, Nascimento co-wrote two songs on his 1970 album Milton<\/em>, \u201cPara Lennon e McCartney\u201d and \u201cClube da Esquina,\u201d alongside the Borges brothers. L\u00f4 was planning to join the Brazilian army at 18, but Nascimento invited him to Rio de Janeiro to work on another project.<\/p>\n Despite arriving deep in the midst of Brazil\u2019s oppressive junta dictatorship, that album, 1972\u2019s Clube da Esquina<\/em><\/a>, became one of the most influential and acclaimed records in the country\u2019s musical history. Borges claimed writing credits on eight out of 21 tracks, including \u201cO Trem Azul,\u201d album opener \u201cTudo que Voc\u00ea Podia Ser,\u201d and \u201cPaisagem da Janela,\u201d a song whose recording was originally blocked by federal censors. \u201cWhen I would speak of those morbid things\/When I would speak of those sordid men,\u201d he sings, in Portuguese, in the chorus, \u201cWhen I would speak of this storm\/You didn\u2019t listen\/You don\u2019t want to believe\/But that\u2019s so normal.\u201d<\/p>\n The same year as Clube da Esquina<\/em>\u2019s release, Borges, still only 19, shared his self-titled solo debut, colloquially known as Disco do T\u00eanis<\/em> (\u201csneaker album\u201d). He reportedly became overwhelmed by his label\u2019s demand for new material, however, and went quiet for much of the 1970s. He eventually resurfaced at the tail end of the decade on several songs from Nascimento\u2019s Clube da Esquina 2<\/em> in 1978 and his own sophomore solo effort, A Via-L\u00e1ctea<\/em>, in 1979. He put out four more albums throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and had a late-career hit in 2003 with \u201cDois Rios<\/a>,\u201d a song he co-wrote for the Brazilian ska-punk band Skank.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n