Vinicius Cantuaria, Tucuma (Verve) 9+
Despite this being only his second stateside solo release, Vinicius Cantuaria is no newcomer. He participated as a drummer in the tail-end of the 60s Bossa Nova craze, played second guitar with founding Tropicalist Caetano Veloso in the 70s (whose "Joia" he covers on this album), and is currently a member of Arto Lindsay's ace neo-Brazillian band. Rather than reconstruct Brazillian music as a postmodern mosaic on a cracked, art rock/techno-damaged mirror like Lindsay, Cantuaria revisits the spirit of the original bossa nova jazz of Stan Getz, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto Laurindo Almeida, Charlie Byrd and Luiz Bonfa who all, coincidentally, reccorded for his new label, Verve. But neither does he play the watered-down elevator music as many exotica fetishists envision bossa nova. This has gentle grace and beauty of the old, with the adventurous strangeness of the new, enriched by a diverse group of helpers including Sean Lennon, Laurie Anderson, Bill Frisell and produced by Lindsay. Before these smooth, musicianly love songs have a chance to relax into the buttery ooze of modernist schmaltz, they are rattled awake by the pre-millenium tension of genres clashing, samba notes crossing wires with opposing notes of a string section, and electronic cyber-critters gnawing away at the legs. The results are dizzying, hallucinatory and possibly even transcendent. Undoubtedly this album will be marketed as straight retro bossa nova. Which makes it possibly the most subversive album of the year.
