Mistura e Manda

Album review

Paulo Moura, an internationally awarded musician in several different styles of classical and popular music, exceeds his own standards in this release. Surrounded by an all-star team (Rafael Rabello, Zé Da Velha, Joel Nascimento, Maurício Carrilho, João Pedro Borges, and many others), he doesn't try to sound pretentiously "jazzy." Even if Brazilian music lovers generally resent the use of the expression "Brazilian jazz," one can't help thinking of this music as a kind of jazz music (understood as a dialectical process where one pole is African tradition and the other is the European one, realized in a definite and circumscribed historic-geographic section of the New World, be it the U.S., Cuba, or Brazil, in which improvisation is fully required). The Brazilian vehicle for improvisations here is the choro genre, a longtime companion for Moura. His interpretations (and the band's playing as well) stick to the truest Brazilian musical tradition, with its lyricism, its happiness, and sinuous, slippery grace, never resorting to American jazz clichés. It implies (here) in a deeply tonal treatment, where revolutionary approaches such as polytonality or atonality are banned, which can be perceived either as a drawback or a fortunate conception, depending on the standpoint of the listener.

© Alvaro Neder /TiVo