Antonio Adolfo: Balaios

Antonio Adolfo draws a parallel between balaios, the baskets that African Brazilian women have carried on their heads for centuries, and musical albums. "Each piece is placed carefully inside, shaped by the moment in which it was born, yet carried into the present with renewed meaning," he says. He speaks of Balaios as a gathering of "what he has cultivated over time—ideas, memories, and melodies." The project, a retrospective of sorts, has a particular focus on the composer-pianist's long association with lyricist Tibério Gaspar (1943-2017), culling songs from the sizeable Adolfo-Gaspar songbook and giving them present-day jazz settings.

Like other Adolfo big-band recordings, Balaios is an instrumental release. But to feel the full force of a song like "Vision" ("Visão"), the soulful seventh track, consider Gaspar's lyric. "Visão" was published in 1968, nearly a decade into the Bossa Nova revolution (1959-) and four years into the military dictatorship (1964-1985), during a season of mass protests and retaliations from the regime. With a drum roll ("um rufo de tambor"), the lyric speaks of the death of love ("falece o amor"), tanks, cannons, crowds dispersing, the earth becoming a sea of blood and pain ("a terra é mar de sangue e dor"). The award-winning and often-censored songwriter Taiguara sang it on his O Vencedor de Festivais (Odeon, 1968).

You do not need the words to appreciate the Adolfo big band's updated performance of tunes like "Visão." Jorge Helder's bass creeps tellingly, the chromatic background lines portend, and Rafael Rocha's trombone and Adolfo's piano express an ethos that is wistful yet resolute. But without the lyric you might mistake it for a love song.

To be sure, Adolfo and Gaspar wrote apolitical songs during the same period, like "Journey to the Interior" ("Caminhada," 1967), which speaks of love as "a rolling wave, longing to die gently in the embrace of the sea wall" ("uma onda a rolar, querendo mansa morrer no colo do quebra-mar"). The arrangement here retains the essential triangle and 3-3-2 baião beat that characterized Adolfo e a Brazuca's mid-century original (Antonio Adolfo e a Brazuca, Odeon, 1971), with a further jazz expansion of the harmonic palette and a buoyant flute solo from Marcelo Martins.

And "Claudia" (1969), that girl "no centro de Copacabana" with her Bossa Nova dreaminess, so smoothly portrayed by a choir of jazz singers in the Brazuca arrangement. In Balaios, she reappears in the timbre of Martins' alto flute amid the section, and in Jesse Sadoc's trumpet and Thom Rotella's guitar solos. "My Chant" ("Meu Canto," 2018), the fourth Adolfo-Gaspar composition on the album and their final collaboration before Gaspar's death, is a saudade-filled waltz that commemorates a partnership that lasted half a century.

Not to give short shrift to the handful of compositions penned solely by Adolfo, which are played beautifully here. The rhythm section shines brightly on tunes like "Sambalaio" (1989), an artfully titled samba-funk offering that is illuminated by Rafael Barata's driving drums, Andre Siqueira popping percussion, Helder's robust bass, Lula Galvão's guitar and Adolfo's piano. Adolfo's horn lines on the arrangement are spirited yet subtle, and rendered superbly by the section, while Danilo Sinna and Rocha make strong individual statements on alto saxophone and trombone.  

Balaios marks yet another milestone in Adolfo's singular time-and-trend-traversing career.