Choro & Samba with Ami Molinelli & friends – Friday, May 14 at 8 pm
ONLINE PROGRAM NOTES AVAILABLE HERE
Brian Moran, guitar & cavaco
Ricardo Peixoto, guitar
Harvey Wainapel, saxophone & clarinet
Claudia Villela, voice
Ami Molinelli, percussion
choro, samba, and pandeiro by Chicquinha Gonzaga, Dona Ivone Lara, and more.
Showcasing the intersection between Brazil’s first original music, Choro, and its most popular, Samba, the group features Pelo Telefone, the first official samba, and features historical references that are lesser known to Brazil’s musical history. This project aims to showcase a gender balance of choro and samba composers such as Chicquinha Gonzaga and Dona Ivone Lara as well as an original choro and a dance for three pandeiros. Ami Molinelli, a Bay Area percussionist, received a San Francisco Arts Commission grant to create a live show and this result is a live example of a video presentation to be released later this Spring.
Brian Moran Equally at home in both jazz and latin guitar styles, Brian Moran is one of the Bay Area’s more versatile and accomplished musicians. Since graduating from Berklee College of Music Brian has made the San Francisco Bay Area his home. He currently plays with Grupo Falso Baiano, Oakland Samba Revue, Jorge Alabe and Grupo Samba Rio, and as a leader and sideman in various other jazz, blues, and world music groups.
Ricardo Peixoto Born in Rio de Janeiro, guitarist, composer and arranger Ricardo Peixoto came to the US by way of a scholarship to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, and later settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. His fluid melodic sense and original harmonic approach place him among the top representatives of Brazilian guitar in the US today.
Saxophonist/clarinetist Harvey Wainapel has his feet firmly planted in two musical worlds. His jazz experience has led to performances and/or recordings with the likes of McCoy Tyner, Kenny Barron, Joe Henderson, and the Metropole Orchestra. He has toured internationally with Ray Charles, Joe Lovano, and Airto Moreira/Flora Purim.
Claudia Villela’s voice gets all the attention, and it’s easy to understand why. Her glorious five-octave instrument is one of the wonders of jazz, lithe and startlingly beautiful in every register. Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, she sings mostly in Portuguese, interpreting lyrics with keen emotional insight and supple rhythmic command. A supremely inventive scat singer, she has honed a vivid vocabulary of sounds that can evoke the hollow thump of a tabla drum, the muted trumpet of Miles Davis, the insistent twang of a berimbau, the ethereal call of a flute, or the distortion-laden Stratocaster licks of Jimi Hendrix.
Based in the Santa Cruz area since the mid-1980s, Villela has evolved into an expressive pianist and percussionist and an ingenious composer and lyricist with an astonishing body of original material, as well as a repertoire of jewels from the Brazilian songbook. Inspired by Brazilian songwriters, composers and multi-instrumentalists such as Egberto Gismonti, Hermeto Pascoal and Milton Nascimento, Villela draws on a vast range of Brazilian traditions, from samba and bossa nova to the carnival groove partido alto, and baião, a highly syncopated northeastern song form popularized by Luiz Gonzaga in the mid-1940s. In recent years, Villela’s international reputation as a performer and composer has continued to grow through appearances at the world’s most prestigious jazz festivals and clubs.