Cellist Yo-Yo Ma Falls in Love with Brazilian Music

"Doesn't it sweep you off your feet?" the acclaimed musician says.

Ma first heard the wistful melodies as a teen-ager in New York, tuning in late at night on a transistor radio to a station that played the beguiling sounds from South America.

"I didn't know exactly the names or anything but it was like a magnet," he told Reuters in an interview.

A few decades later and after musical travels that have taken him from the Appalachian Mountains to the Silk Road, Ma has paid homage to the country's riches with his latest recording, "Obrigado Brazil" ("Thank you Brazil").

The charming work features classical pieces by Heitor Villa-Lobos, gentle bossa novas by Antonio Carlos Jobim and lively choros by Pixinguinha among others.

His fellow players include Brazilian guitar great Oscar Castro-Neves, Cuban-born clarinetist Paquito D'Rivera and singer-guitarist Rosa Passos, who almost steals the show.

With its blend of African, European and Indian strains, Brazilian music has long held an allure for foreign artists -- from jazzer Stan Getz, who brought the bossa nova craze to the United States in the early 1960s, to Paul Simon and the followers of today's techno-lounge scene.

"One of things that I love about it is not only its incredibly richness. In every age and every era it seems to be reinvent itself and yet it remains quintessentially Brazilian," Ma said, his charisma and enthusiasm evident even at the end of a phone line between New York and Sao Paulo.

This project evolved from an earlier foray into Latin American music, his 1997 recording of Argentine tangos. The musicians he worked with then, including Castro-Neves and the guitar-playing Assad brothers and arranger Jorge Calandrelli, reawakened his dormant passion for Brazil.

"I started listening more and more then I became totally smitten," the 48-year-old Ma said. "And now six years later we have this recording because of friends who said, 'Listen to this.' They would just show me things and point the way."

The essence of Brazilian music, he said, was "the feeling you get that it's the fine line between being in the conscious and the unconscious.

"There's a very thin line when you can draw from all your conscious thoughts but still be part of a dream-like state."

MUSIC TO CRY TO

Selecting the songs and pieces meant making several research trips to Brazil. Deciding what to leave out was hard.

Ma decided against including Villa-Lobos' best-known work, the "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5." There were still more than 2,000 other pieces to choose from in the Villa-Lobos library in Rio de Janeiro. "Alma Brasileira" and "A Lenda do Caboclo" are featured on the CD.

It also highlights the work of Pixinguinha (1898-1973), master of the choro ("crying") song form that mixed European salon music and African rhythms and preceded samba.

"He had an incredible output and is respected by absolutely everybody in Brazil and it's a core component of Brazilian music," said Ma.

The Jobim songs, including the standard "Chega de Saudade," are sung by Rosa Passos.

"I didn't know her, never heard of her name. I just heard her voice and thought, 'My gosh this is so magical,"' Ma said.

He wrote to her hoping she might agree to work with him and got a reply back a few days later via her brother-in-law -- who by coincidence lived near Ma's hometown of Cambridge, Mass.

The musicians play in various groupings, featuring piano, guitar, flute, clarinet, percussion and, of course, cello.

It's not an instrument readily associated with Brazilian music although Villa-Lobos was a cellist, playing in cafes in choro bands in Rio before being discovered as a composer.

"I'm trying to think how can I get into that same feel in those light syncopated rhythms that are so essential to Brazilian music," said the Harvard-educated Ma. "It's a cello but it's going toward other things."

The ensemble has played concerts in the United States and is heading for dates in Japan and elsewhere in Asia in November. Ma is also anxious to bring the show to Brazil, although no firm plans have been set yet.

In December, he's scheduled to play a special concert series with the Iraqi National Orchestra, which is coming to the United States on a post-war cultural exchange.

For a man who is as happy exploring Celtic fiddle music as playing Bach and Brahms, he was an obvious choice.

"One of the things that I love about my work is the fact that when travel I see things that I didn't before and I meet people who show me things that I didn't know.