Listen to this week’s playlist on YouTube and Spotify
Few musicians have shaped modern Brazilian music as profoundly as Joao Donato. Renowned for dissolving musical boundaries, Donato seamlessly blended samba, jazz, Afro-Cuban rhythms, bolero, funk, and bossa nova into a singular personal language that was harmonically rich yet invitingly direct. On “Here is Donato”,” acclaimed trombonist and composer Ryan Keberle and his Sao Paulo-based band Collectiv do Brazil celebrate the music of Donato, drawing on the improvisational openness of modern jazz and the melodic richness of musica popular brasileira.
In 2003, vocalist Allan Harris first met Ike Joseph, a songwriter from Charleston, West Virginia, who was in his eighties at the time. From the first melody, Harris was captivated by the warmth, wit, romance and effortless swing of Joseph’s songs and knew he wanted to record them, which they did that year. Sadly, not long after the recording was completed, Ike passed away and the masters were put aside. Twenty years later, Allan’s wife rediscovered the recordings and they knew it was finally time to release them on the new CD, “Swingin’ Love Songs.”
Also this week, harmonicist Hendrik Meurkens and pianist Steve Sandberg offer up “Just Born,” a meeting of two composers whose musical paths have been remarkably different, yet who share a love of lyrical beauty, harmonic sophistication, and emotional directness; Rahsaan Barber reaches a magnificent degree of creative energy—fresh, thoughtful, raw and refined—on “Eternal,” an album featuring the Nashville-born, Chapel Hill-based saxophonist with a new collaborator, New Orleans guitarist Ted Ludwig; and Steve Johns’ new release, “Extrasensory,” finds the drummer and composer in full bloom on his third release as a leader.