Brazilian Pop: Sambas with a Twist

Two up-and-coming singers from São Paulo, Mariana Aydar and Jair Oliveira, made their New York solo debuts at Symphony Space at the World Music Institute’s two-night Brasil Fest, grounding themselves in samba before adding their own personal twists. “They said I sang the samba,” Mr. Oliveira sang in Portuguese in his concert on Saturday night. “But the samba sang me.”

Mr. Oliveira, who turns 34 on Tuesday, is the son of Jair Rodrigues, one of Brazil’s most celebrated samba singers. He became a child television star on the program “Balão Mggico” (“Magic Balloon”) and in its associated pop group, the Magic Balloon Gang, before he was 12. He went on to study music and production at the Berklee School of Music in Boston before returning to a career as songwriter, producer and singer in Brazil.

The music-school techniques showed in Mr. Oliveira’s most distinctive songs. His set on Saturday began with compositions that were full of musicianly convolutions, like the odd meter and gnarled jazz chords of “Contigo Sempre,” all packed into syncopated guitar patterns that he delivered with quick-fingered ease. In their harmonies some songs suggest a Brazilian answer to Steely Dan.

Mr. Oliveira sang about music, Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian culture, and, mostly, love, in a voice that hid virtuosity behind an amiable, conversational tone. He urged the audience to sing along on the chorus of “Bye Bye Saudade,” a bilingual new song. “It’s easy,” he coaxed, and it sounded that way until the audience members joined in, many of them unable to land the simple syllables “bye-bye-bye-bye” on the right syncopated off-beat.

Mr. Oliveira traded the varied, sometimes experimental production of his albums for a lean, almost old-fashioned pop samba band: his guitar along with bass, drums and electric piano (Marcelo Maita, who got a chance for jazz-tinged solos). And in those arrangements, unfortunately, many of Mr. Oliveira’s songs revealed conventional underpinnings: typical samba chord progressions and melodies. Though it was ebullient all the way through — especially when a second drummer, Turquinho Filho, sat in — Mr. Oliveira’s set moved from reinventing samba to simply reaffirming it.