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Jazz Articles about Mauricio Zottarelli

About Mauricio Zottarelli

Album Review

Carlos Henrique Pereira: Northern Readings

Read "Northern Readings" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
June 7, 2026

Brazilian composer, pianist, and guitarist Carlos Henrique Pereira's release Northern Readings is a quietly remarkable recording that unfolds less like a collection of tracks than a carefully stitched memoir in sound. Grounded in the heritage of Brazil's Minas Gerais State, the album brings together a complementary blend of traditions, with the patience and honesty Pereira shows in allowing them to converse naturally. The ensemble itself sets the tone. Pereira alternates between piano and a nylon-stringed acoustic guitar. He is joined ...

Album Review

Jon Gold: Things Are Looking Up

Read "Things Are Looking Up" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
May 8, 2026

On Things Are Looking Up, California-bred pianist and composer Jon Gold uses a dozen able musicians in groups of various sizes from duo to quintet to add color and spice to his generally harmonic and accessible post-bop themes. Four of these themes are tributes to those who have influenced Gold musically or personally, and the album opens with one: a quintet reading of the “For Rudy van Gelder," with sometimes strident solos by tenor saxophonist Kevon Scott and ...

Album Review

Sergio Pereira: Bossa+

by Edward Blanco
August 20, 2024

New York-based Brazilian guitarist/composer and vocalist Sergio Pereira unveils an album of light Brazilian music on Bossa+, continuing his exploration of bossa nova, samba, choro and other Brazilian styles, melding them with an ambient classical jazz sound that is well beyond the familiar traditional music. Proud of his cultural heritage and the impact of music on his life, of the album Pereira states that “Bossa + is an album that reflects the music and sounds that come from my life ...

Album Review

Ivan Lins: My Heart Speaks

Read "My Heart Speaks" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
October 4, 2023

Ivan Lins is a Brazilian music legend and multiple Latin Grammy Award winner who has consistently delivered a unique blend of bossa nova, jazz and pop throughout his career. In this first release in over ten years, entitled My Heart Speaks, Lins performs rare gems from his catalogue backed by the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra along with guest appearances from vocalists Dianne Reeves, Jane Monheit and newcomer Tawanda, as well as trumpeter Randy Brecker. The eleven songs ...

Album Review

Luiz Millan: Brazilian Match

Read "Brazilian Match" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
September 20, 2023

Brazilian Match is a tour-de-force of classic and contemporary Brazilian music written by and featuring singer-songwriter Luiz Millan. Millan's fifth album is a leader is his first for Jazz Station Records and Brazilian jazz impresario Arnaldo DeSouteiro, whose storied history includes working with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Eumir Deodato, Dom Um Romão, João Donato, and other legends, and who called Millan “a composer's composer." “A great melodist who also happens to be a great poet, a fabulous storyteller; a ...

Liner Notes

Nilson Matta's Brazilian Voyage: Copacabana

by Howard Mandel
July 26, 2023

Everyone wants to go to Brazil, and one of the easiest, most pleasant ways of doing so is to listen to bassist Nilson Matta's Brazilian Voyage. The third album organized by Matta, a native of Sao Paolo who moved to Rio in 1970 and the U.S. in 1985, conjures the vistas and moods of a country that is idealized as a source of breezy airs and pulsing rhythms. That Brazil in fact even more than in myth generates ...

Album Review

Shiri Zorn: Into Another Land

Read "Into Another Land" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
October 20, 2022

Into Another Land braids together the voices of percussionist Mauricio Zottarelli, guitarist George Muscatello and vocalist Shiri Zorn into music that has a much heavier impact than its light and bright, floating and breezy sound. Zorn studied music in her native Israel, steeping herself in the magic of Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae, and then in London before moving to Albany, New York in 2010, where she met and has since been working with Muscatello. When ...