Review Corner (UK)
This fascinating CD is nominally classical with jazz influences, but you could call it world because of the rhythm, which leans towards the Latin. It’s a quiet and reflective album.
The percussion plays varying roles in the music, coming to the fore in places and drop-ping back in others. There’s a sense of fun about much of the album — it’s probably en-grossing to watch live — and in more than one place the percussion puts us in mind of the Jungle Book, with a playful, but not too intrusive, tribal feel to it. The jazz side is a mix of easy listening and the freer sound of more upbeat jazz: Barbara Thomp-son/Paraphernalia’s Wilde Tales is one comparison we thought of.
But it’s neither of those of course, and its classical leanings give it intensity; as the PR says, it’s classical “with the seductive and ingenious and multi-layered music of Brazil”.
Producer Lars Hannibal writes in the sleeve that he wanted to combine Brazilian rhythm with Western classical and jazz, which never normally include those rhythms, though he points out that Chopin was popular in the Brazil and was incorporated into the indigenous sounds, so the harmonic origin for bossa nova was Chopin.
The musicians are Michala Petri, recorder; Marilyn Mazur, percussion; Daniel Murray, guitar, and the three play the music of Antonio Jobim, Ernesto Nazareth, Egberto Gis-monti and Heitor Villa-Lobos among others, as well as incorporating some of the regional sounds of Brazil.
It is slightly introspective, but the record company website implores: “Please don’t stream it! You’ll miss the full intimacy of the masterful engineering … set up a pitcher of caipirinhas, close your eyes, and imagine yourself beneath an amber moon…”
It’s out on Our Recordings: 6.220618. Buy direct from them. You can try here: Jerobear, August 10, 2917 (Weekly newspaper editor in Cheshire, England.)
https://reviewcorner.org/2017/08/10/brazilian-landscapes/