“I don’t listen to much of today’s music; it’s all made to be thrown away.”
That was Dori Caymmi’s contrast of today’s pop sounds in comparison to the 1 ½ hours of timeless Brazilian music that he and his band delivered at the cozy Edye theatre Saturday night. Along with his team of Mike Shapiro/dr, Jerry Watts/b, Charles Yutaka de Rosario/key and Scott Mayo/fl-ss-bs, Caymmi took the audience on a journey through all thing Brazilian, either in composition, arrangement or mood.
His deep and earthy voice along with his patient strumming agonizingly glowed with reflective handlings of “Brazilia” and “Desainado” as Mayo provided a dreamy flute over the gentle pulse. The assertive lilt on “Obsession” had Caymmi’s warm voice meld with Mayo’s lively soprano to create a churning current that gently subsided like the evening tide, while “Corcovado” had Rosario’s piano flow like a moonlit breeze.
Caymmi took famous movie themes and puree’d them through the samba blender, with Mayo’s baritone delivering a funky bossa on “Pink Panther” while “Bye Bye Blackbird” bounced like a rubber ball and “Something’s Coming” skipped like a 9 year old girl on her way home from school. Caymmi’s own “Harbor” featured his vocals like a fisherman singing out to God in an almost liturgical fashion, while his droplets of guitar strumming and Mayo’s soprano coalesced to create a gentle foamy crash of a wave. His closing encore, a tribute to the Amazon, mixed string-like keyboards and flute along with the fervently passionate pulse from the rhythm team that had Caymmi display the dirt under his nails like a farmer as he sang like a man who works the river for a living and knows every nuance and tributary. The mix of the sublime and visceral as well as melodic made for a wondrous exaltation of all thing beautifully Brazilian.
Upcoming shows include Fred Hersch doing a rare solo performance Apr 15