by Chris McGowan
(published January 4, 2014 in The Huffington Post)
(published January 4, 2014 in The Huffington Post)
In 2013, Luciana Souza gained a place among the world’s top
contemporary jazz singers by earning not one but two Grammy nominations,
for The Book of Chet (for Best Jazz Vocal Album) and Duos
III (Best Latin Jazz Album). The 47-year-old Brazilian vocalist now
has a total of six Grammy nominations, a distinction that has gone largely
unrecognized in her native country. She has also appeared on Herbie Hancock’s
Grammy-winning River: The Joni Letters and works by Bobby
McFerrin, John Patitucci, Till Brönner and Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov,
to name a few, and performed with several symphony orchestras. Souza sings with
a quiet intensity and — in The Book of Chet and Duos
III — favors spare, stripped-down arrangements. Her voice is clear and
perfectly in tune, with a beautiful tone, and her phrasing is often daring,
even startling. She’s a vocalist who once said “each phrase for me has a
certain gestalt” and she invites you to savor both the notes and the spaces
between them. Souza is spectacular in a João Gilberto kind of way — you have to
listen attentively to appreciate all the nuances.
Souza’s artistic influences include Gilberto (who invented
bossa nova’s guitar beat and introduced a low-key vocal style) and singers like
Chet Baker, Carmen McRae and Joni Mitchell. She’s a child of bossa nova and
jazz in more ways than one. Souza was born in São Paulo to songwriter parents
(Walter Santos and Tereza Souza) who were part of the bossa nova scene in their
city and later founded Som da Gente, a small independent record label dedicated
to Brazilian jazz and instrumental music, which included the great composer and
multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal on its roster. At home she was surrounded
by the music of her parents and their musician friends. “Music was everything,
music was the bread maker, music was the dream, music was hopeful; it was
humor, it was the language that was spoken at the house. My father being a
guitar player, he never left his guitar; he was constantly playing. It was
happy, it was fun,” Souza recalls.
Walter wrote commercial jingles to pay the rent, and he
started using little Luciana in the recordings when she was just three years
old. She says, "I
think they detected early on that I could sing in tune and I was musical and I
had a facility for learning melodies and learning language. So they encouraged
me and the recording studio was like the living room to me. It was an extension
of everything we did. We sang at home, we sang in the studio. They would teach
me a melody, and I just loved it."
At age 18, Souza moved to Boston to attend the Berklee
School of Music. There, she developed her talents as a singer as well as her
abilities as an educator — she eventually joined Berklee’s faculty and after
that taught at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. Since 1992, she has
released 11 albums, and won her first four Grammy nominations with Brazilian
Duos (2003), North and South (2004), Duos II (2006)
and Tide (2010).
She has interpreted Brazilian standards,
recast songs by great American songwriters as bossa nova (The New Bossa Nova)
and boldly devoted entire albums to musical interpretations of poets (The
Poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Other Songs and Neruda).
Along with way she married bassist-producer Larry Klein, with whom she has a
young son; they moved to Los Angeles in 2006. He produced both The Book
of Chet and Duos III. Souza has now been living in the
U.S. for nearly thirty years, and is glad about her choice. “I came here — to
Berklee, to Boston, to New York, and L.A. — because this is the music I want to
make. I want to be in the environment, I want to be with the musicians, I want
to speak this language; I need to be here.” She adds, “As much as I miss
Brazil, I find that here I can really be myself.”
Her two recent Grammy-nominated albums reflect Souza’s musical
vision and her versatility. The Book of Chet is an homage to
jazz trumpeter-vocalist Chet Baker (1929-1988), who was a major influence on
many bossa nova musicians, and includes songs recorded by him such as “The
Thrill is Gone,” “Oh You Crazy Moon,” “The Very Thought Of You,” “You Go To My
Head” and “Forgetful.” The song choices were an attempt to capture the breadth
of his career, rather than to compile his biggest successes.
“I was obsessed with him when I was in graduate school at
the New England Conservatory,” Souza comments about Baker. She says: "And
then twenty years later I came across one of [his] biographies and then his
autobiography and Let’s Get Lost [the 1988 documentary about Baker].
And it came back to me — why did I love him so much? And I got all the records
out. His voice moves me so deeply...the way he sings...It’s so pure, so direct,
so unadorned. To me, there’s an incredible, quiet, calm sadness. He’s like a
kindred spirit, musically and vocally."
On The Book of Chet, “The Thrill Is Gone” (not
to be confused with the B.B. King song of the same name) is particularly
haunting, with Souza’s rather somber vocals over hypnotic repeating figures on
bass and guitar, while “The Very Thought of You,” with Souza’s luscious
rendering, is another of the album’s many high points.
Luciana Souza and her husband Larry Klein
The Book of Chet and Duos
III were released the same day and both were direct live recordings
with few instruments. However, while the former album is consistently
understated and introspective, with slow tempos that push the envelope, Duos
III ranges across a variety of genres, including bossa nova, baião,
some lively sambas (like “Tim Tim Por Tim Tim” and “Doralice,” both with
impressive scatting) and the wordless singing of “Dona Lu,” written for Souza
by Pereira.
On Duos III, the third in a series, Souza
performs duets with three renowned Brazilian guitarists — Romero Lubambo, Marco
Pereira and Toninho Horta — as she interprets Brazilian compositions, most of
them standards, from composers like Antonio Carlos Jobim (four selections),
Haroldo Barbosa, Dorival Caymmi, Gilberto Gil, Ivan Lins, Djavan, Dominguinhos
and Cartola, as well as Pereira and Horta.
Souza likes the combination of voice and guitar “because
it’s how I grew up and because of my dad doing that.” She adds: "The
guitar doesn’t sustain and the sound decays and dies; it allows for silence.
The guitar can be very percussive, very melodic, and very harmonic, obviously.
All these different possibilities in terms of orchestration can happen with
just one instrument. So it is my favorite instrument but also it comes from the
Brazilian tradition. A lot of these songs were written on guitar, we can do
them in the original keys, and it just colors the music in a certain way, gives
it the right color, the right timbre."
She adds, “and the people that I play with are very able and
agile and most of them really have this sensibility in terms of improvisation.”
Each of the three guitarists has a quite different approach, technically and
artistically. “You take the same exact guitar and give it to Romero or Marco or
Toninho, for example, and they sound completely different. Marco is almost an
intellectual with the guitar; he’s a romantic, so he brings that kind of heavy
heart, but is full of technique and thought” while “Romero is all fire, all
rhythm, completely improvisatory.”
Regarding Toninho Horta, she comments that in “the lineage
of Brazilian music, Toninho gets a chapter as a songwriter, as a lyricist, as a
guitarist. He’s innovative in every way. His sense of harmony is unlike that of
any other Brazilian — the most refined, advanced and modern thing in Brazilian
music that I know of.” She teams with Horta, known to many Americans for his
work with both Milton Nascimento and Pat Metheny, on four songs, including his
own “Pedro da Lua” and “Beijo Partido.”
Duos III and The
Book of Chet were recorded after a nearly three-year break while Souza
focused on being a new mother. “At this point in my life it was very important
to put out those two records because I hadn’t made a record [in a while] and it
just made sense to come out very quiet and very strong.” About her six total
Grammy nominations, Souza says, “It feels good. It talks about all the
possibilities for small artists. Only one [album] was done for a major record
label [Verve], and five others for independents. It’s sort of an homage to my
parents, because they were an independent record company.”
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