The magical sounds of Brazil
Jovino Santos Neto's travels to the country's northeast resulted in a new CD
Brazil's northeastern hinterlands hold a mythic place in the nation's imagination as a hardscrabble frontier and a repository of folkways long faded in the more prosperous south.
In 2007, pianist/composer Jovino Santos Neto, a Rio de Janeiro native, set out to explore the sights, tastes, and rhythms of the region, a road trip that resulted in his coruscating album on Adventure Music, "Alma do Nordeste" (Soul of the Northeast). Powered by festive grooves such as xote, forró, and baião, Santos Neto's startlingly fresh Brazilian jazz is in many ways a journey into the past, both his own and Brazil's.
"My grandparents were from northeast, and I grew up hearing the accent," says Santos Neto, 54, who performs at Ryles on Wednesday with a quartet featuring drummer Mark Walker, Peruvian-born bassist Oscar Stagnaro, and Brazilian saxophonist Felipe Salles.
He notes that the Portuguese spoken in the region was long thought of as a bastardization, but the pronunciation and vocabulary is actually closer to the tongue spoken by 16th-century settlers than the Portuguese of the south is.
"Things remained very pristine in the northeast," Santos Neto says, speaking by phone from his office at Seattle's Cornish College of the Arts. "There's a sense of traveling back in time to almost a different planet. More than the music, I went to experience the vegetation, the mountains, the markets, the food."
He was already deeply connected to a supremely fertile source of the northeastern sound. Santos Neto spent his formative years as a musician, from 1977 to 1992, performing and recording with Hermeto Pascoal, one of Brazil's most revered and influential composers (Miles Davis called Pascoal "the most complete musician I've ever met").
Affectionately known in Brazil as "O Bruxo" (The Sorcerer), Pascoal, who grew up in a rural town in the state of Alagoas, inducted Santos Neto into a spectacularly complex musical realm where folkloric styles like frevo, samba, xaxado, and forró live side by side with jazz, rock, and new music.
"My whole musical upbringing was with Hermeto, who's from the northeast, and an encyclopedia of Brazilian styles," Santos Neto says. "He presented it all in a very clear way, showing us differences in phrasing. It's one thing to learn through a master, but I hadn't been to the region and breathed in the air to get the intangible part, the seasoning."
A Seattle resident since 1993, Santos Neto moved to Washington to study at Cornish, and by the following year had been hired as a professor in the music program. An esteemed composer who writes for jazz and classical contexts, he's released a series of gorgeous Brazilian jazz albums on Adventure, including 2003's "Serenata" with mandolin master Mike Marshall, the first non-Pascoal album ever devoted to O Bruxo's music.
The idea for the northeastern road trip came from an out-of-print travel book by C. Nery Camello published in 1936. Using his grandfather's autographed copy as a template, Santos Neto and his wife drove through the states of Pernambuco, Alagoas, and Paraiba, following Camello's footsteps from the coast to the interior.
"I think he called himself a folklorist," Santos Neto says. "It was more like a travelogue, and that's what I felt my project was. I didn't go with scientific impartiality. Some places were amazing, some were horrible."
Santos Neto turned all of those experiences into a series of brilliant-hued musical snapshots capturing the region's unforgiving landscape and the people's perseverance, mysticism, and earthy humor.
"Jovino's music is wild, fresh, and innovative," says bassist Stagnaro, a longtime Berklee professor who performs widely with jazz greats such as Paquito D'Rivera. "It's very challenging of course, very complex, but Jovino's music is easy to relate to because he has a gift for writing beautiful, flowing melodies." 