Jazz artist produces smiles all around

Modernist poet Wallace Stevens ran an insurance company, and novelist Franz Kafka toiled for much of his life as bureaucrat, so why shouldn't Guinga, Brazil's greatest living composer, spend his days filling cavities and reminding his patients to floss?

A guitar virtuoso with a soft, melancholy voice, Guinga (pronounced Gheen-gha) was for decades more of a cult figure than a star, revered by fellow musicians for his sophisticated melodies and broad stylistic palette. While largely supporting himself with his Rio de Janeiro dental practice, he has created a vast, luxuriant body of music, combining his deep knowledge of jazz with Brazilian genres such as samba, choro, frevo, coco, baião and modinha.

''In any country that has a strong tradition, there's one or two musicians in a generation who distill the essence of the national spirit," says San Francisco Bay Area saxophonist Harvey Wainapel, who has performed with many leading Brazilian musicians, including Guinga. ''We had Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and later Thelonious Monk. In Brazil, they had Villa-Lobos, Jobim, and I would put Guinga at that stature. I don't know if he's as popular as Jobim, but he's got time. He's only 54."

Still largely unknown in the United States, Guinga made his North American debut last year with fingerstyle guitar masters Pierre Bensusan, Andrew York, and Brian Gore, a tour documented on the Favored Nations Acoustic album ''An Evening With International Guitar Night," which includes several tracks recorded at Merrimack College in Andover. Guinga makes his Boston-area debut as a headliner at Scullers tomorrow as part of his first solo US tour with his Brazilian quartet, featuring clarinet master Paulo Sergio Santos, trumpeter Jesse Sadoc, and guitarist Lula Galvao, best known as a member of singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso's band.

Christened with the imposing name Carlos Althier de Souza Lemos Escobar, Guinga goes by a single moniker. He first made a splash as a 17-year-old upstart at TV Globo's Second International Song Festival in 1967. Working as an accompanist for singers Beth Carvalho and João Nogueira, he formed a successful songwriting partnership with lyricist Paulo Cesar Pinheiro, producing tunes recorded by beloved Brazilian singers such as Elis Regina, Nelson Gonçalves, and Miúcha.

But rather than subject himself to the vicissitudes of a sideman's life, Guinga adhered to his father's insistence that he graduate from dental school and in 1975 opened a practice with his wife, Fatima, also a dentist. It was the same year that he scored his first major hit, when samba queen Clara Nunes recorded ''Valsa de Realejo."

''I knew there wasn't going to be a lot of money in it, and I didn't want to find myself playing music I didn't believe in to make a living," says Guinga, speaking in Portuguese from his home in Rio. ''I actually don't like dentistry very much, but I thought it would afford me the economic resources so I could concentrate on writing music I really cared about."

It was only in the early 1990s that Guinga started recording under his own name, when the Brazilian star Ivan Lins created the record label Velas to document Guinga's music. While he had accumulated a huge trove of compositions, Guinga decided to record only new pieces. His first album, 1991's ''Simples e Absurdo," attracted tremendous attention. It also marked the start of his collaboration with the brilliant lyricist Aldir Blanc, who wrote more than a dozen standards in the 1970s during his storied partnership with João Bosco.

''It's a very solitary process for both of us," Guinga says. ''Aldir lives in another part of Rio, so I record the music on a cassette and I send it over to his house. We have a little discussion about a theme I might prefer, and usually Aldir takes a theme completely contrary to the one that I suggested."

With each subsequent release, Guinga's stature has grown. To American ears, his tunes can feel uncannily familiar, as if Gershwin, Arlen, or Porter had been born in Rio.

One of Guinga's earliest champions in the United States was the Northern California-based Brazilian vocalist Claudia Villela, who met Guinga in the early '90s on a trip to visit her family in Rio.

She notes that Guinga's personality is much like his music: earthy, emotionally complex, and intellectually rigorous. He's an avid soccer player who's at home swapping stories at the corner bar, but he's also a driven artist who spends several hours a day composing at his clinic.

''There's always a piece of all these Brazilian entities in his music, the intellectual and the malandro," Vilella says, using the Brazilian term for a streetwise tough guy. ''He's developed a language that can get to the core of the Brazilian soul. He combines lyricism, poetry, and humor. His music is very expressive and moving, and melancholic too."

A version of this story appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.