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    João Donato, Innovative Brazilian Musician, Is Dead at 88

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    A prolific pianist, composer and arranger who began recording in the 1950s, he was a pioneer of bossa nova but didn’t confine himself to any genre.João Donato, a Brazilian composer, musician and producer who was a pioneer of bossa nova and who went on to cross-pollinate music across the Americas, died on Monday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 88.His death, in a hospital, was announced on his Instagram page. Brazilian news media reported that the cause was pneumonia.Mr. Donato was in the coterie of Rio de Janeiro musicians — among them Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto and the guitarist Luiz Bonfá — who developed the subtle swing and harmonic sophistication of bossa nova in the mid-1950s.But Mr. Donato didn’t confine himself to any genre. In a recording career that extended from the 1950s into the current decade, he released some three dozen albums as a leader and collaborated with a wide range of artists on many more. Although he was best known as a keyboardist, he was also a singer, accordionist and trombonist.As a pianist, Mr. Donato was known for his blend of a frisky, restlessly syncopated, harmonically intricate left hand with relaxed, sure-footed right-hand melodies. As a composer, producer and arranger, he constantly — and playfully — fused and stretched idioms and production styles. He once said he had a “sweet tooth for funky ideas.”Mr. Donato played MPB (as Brazilian popular music is widely known; the letters stand for “música popular brasileira”), jazz, funk, salsa, American pop and pan-American hybrids that were entirely his own. He worked with generations of Brazilian musicians, including the singer and movie star Carmen Miranda; the singers Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and Marisa Monte; and the rapper Marcelo D2.He also recorded with Eddie Palmieri, Michael Franks, Mongo Santamaría and Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest. Throughout his life, he sought new grooves.The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said on Twitter: “João Donato saw music in everything. He innovated, he passed through samba, bossa nova, jazz, forró, and in the mixture of rhythm built something unique. He kept creating and innovating until the end.”Mr. Donato’s debut album, released in 1956, was produced by Antonio Carlos Jobim, another innovator of bossa nova.João Donato de Oliveira Neto was born on Aug. 17, 1934, in Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre. He began playing accordion and writing songs as a child. In 1945, he moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro, where he began performing professionally in his teens.Mr. Donato began leading his own groups in the early 1950s while also working as a sideman. He played accordion on Luiz Bonfá’s first album, released in 1955, as part of a studio band that also included Antonio Carlos Jobim. Mr. Jobim produced Mr. Donato’s debut album, “Chá Dançante” (1956), and Mr. Donato wrote songs with João Gilberto, including “Minha Saudade,” which became a Brazilian standard.But by the end of the 1950s, Mr. Donato’s preferred style had grown so complex that audiences complained that they couldn’t dance to it, and he had difficulty finding work in Brazil. He accepted a job backing Carmen Miranda at a Lake Tahoe resort, and relocated to the United States.As the 1960s began, he was welcomed by Latin and jazz musicians. He recorded with Cal Tjader, Astrud Gilberto (who died in June), Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaría and Eddie Palmieri. (He played trombone in Mr. Palmieri’s La Perfecta, a brassy salsa band Mr. Palmieri called a “trombanga.”)The vibraphonist Dave Pike recorded an entire album of Mr. Donato’s compositions, “Bossa Nova Carnival,” in 1962, and the saxophonist Bud Shank put Mr. Donato in charge of his 1965 album, “Bud Shank & His Brazilian Friends.” “This is João Donato’s baby,” Mr. Shank wrote in the liner notes. “I’ve turned all the problems over to him and I just relax and play.”On his own albums for U.S. labels, Mr. Donato drew on jazz and Caribbean influences as well as Brazilian ones. His pivotal 1970 album, “A Bad Donato,” was a radical turn toward funk, merging Brazilian-rooted melodies and rhythms with electric keyboards and wah-wah guitars. The keyboardist and arranger Eumir Deodato, who worked with Mr. Donato on that album, went on to have a worldwide Brazilian funk hit with his version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001).”Mr. Donato’s album “A Bad Donato,” released in 1970, merged Brazilian-rooted melodies and rhythms with electric keyboards and wah-wah guitars. Mr. Donato returned to Brazil in 1973. There, a friend persuaded him to record songs with lyrics rather than solely instrumentals, including his own modest but earnest vocals. His tuneful, easygoing 1973 album, “Quem É Quem,” was not an immediate hit, but it has been widely praised over the years; in 2007, Brazilian Rolling Stone placed it among the 100 greatest Brazilian albums.Mr. Donato’s new lyricists included two of the leading figures in the determinedly eclectic Brazilian cultural movement known as tropicália: Caetano Veloso, who put Portuguese lyrics to “O Sapo” (“The Frog”) to turn it into “A Rã,” and Gilberto Gil, who supplied lyrics for many of the songs on Mr. Donato’s 1975 album, “Lugar Comum.” Mr. Donato also wrote songs with lyrics by his younger brother, Lysias Ênio Oliveira.For the next two decades, Mr. Donato recorded almost entirely as a sideman. The singer Gal Costa recorded “A Rã” for her 1974 album, “Cantar,” and hired Mr. Donato as an arranger and bandleader for that album and her subsequent tour.Mr. Donato also recorded extensively with important Brazilian musicians like Jorge Ben, João Bosco, Chico Buarque and Martinho da Vila. He continued to perform his own music and released a live album, “Leilíadas,” in 1986. But he didn’t return to making his own studio albums until “Coisas Tao Simples” (“Such Simple Things”), released in 1994, even as he continued to do session work with songwriters including Bebel Gilberto and Marisa Monte.The albums Mr. Donato made after resuming his solo career were unpredictable and diverse. Some returned to his bossa nova-jazz fusions; some featured singers, including Wanda Sá, Paula Morelenbaum, Maria Tita and Joyce. Others had titles reflecting Mr. Donato’s fondness for musical hybrids, like “Bluchanga” (2017) and “Sambolero” (2010), which won a Latin Grammy Award for best Latin jazz album. He also received a Latin Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2010.In 2017, Mr. Donato made an album of synthesizer-centered funk, “Sintetizamor,” with his son, João Donato, known professionally as Donatinho, who survives him. Other survivors include his wife, Ivone Belém, and his daughters, Jodel and Joana Donato. He lived in Rio de Janeiro.In 2021, Mr. Donato collaborated with Jazz Is Dead, the Los Angeles-based project of Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge, on the album “Jazz Is Dead 7.” In 2022 he released “Serotonina,” an easygoing pop-jazz album featuring his electric piano and clavinet.On Twitter, Mr. Veloso summed up Mr. Donato’s music admiringly. It was, he wrote, “the highest achievement of extreme complexity in extreme simplicity.”Ana Ionova More

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      Astrud Gilberto: 6 Essential Songs

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      The Brazilian singer radiated quiet poise and subtle undercurrents.Astrud Gilberto, who died on Monday at 83, brought the first, alluring taste of Brazilian bossa nova to countless listeners worldwide. Her collaborations — with Stan Getz, Gil Evans, Stanley Turrentine and others — also helped cement the connections of bossa nova and jazz.Her voice was disarmingly modest, sometimes hitting notes a little flat and often barely above a whisper; the effect was intimate and seemingly weightless. When she sang in English, her Brazilian accent gave her an endearing hint of awkwardness and approachability, even as her phrasing stayed supple, while the translated lyrics invited a wider audience to hear great Brazilian songwriters like Antonio Carlos Jobim. Her early recordings are her most radiant ones, steeped in the pensive, nostalgic longing that Brazilians call saudade.Here are six indelible Astrud Gilberto performances.Stan Getz featuring Astrud Gilberto: “The Girl From Ipanema” (1963)This was the bossa nova that seduced the world: a purposeful crossover collaboration by the American saxophonist Stan Getz, Jobim, Astrud Gilberto and her then-husband, the definitive bossa nova guitarist and singer João Gilberto. Its full version opened with João Gilberto singing the Portuguese lyrics, but the world-conquering single cuts quickly to Astrud Gilberto’s breathy voice in English, with Jobim on piano trickling just a few perfect notes to answer her.The New Stan Getz Quartet featuring Astrud Gilberto: “It Might as Well Be Spring” (1964)Gilberto doesn’t exactly sound “as jumpy as a puppet on a string” in this live performance of the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard with the Stan Getz Quartet. Instead, she’s poised and sure-footed, musing about the possibility of romance as Getz’s saxophone scurries and spirals around her.“Água de Beber” (1965)Jobim rejoined Gilberto as a collaborator on her luminous solo debut, “The Astrud Gilberto Album.” His voice shadows hers on their nonchalantly elegant version of his bossa nova standard “Água de Beber” (“Water to Drink”); as she sings about a love as essential as water, the song glows with mutual fondness.“The Shadow of Your Smile” (1965)A studio orchestra offers a hint of fanfare, then falls into an admiring hush behind Gilberto’s voice in this Oscar- and Grammy-winning song from the movie “The Sandpiper.” Written by Johnny Mandel and Paul Francis Webster, with strong bossa nova influences, the song’s arrangement ripples around Gilberto with little instrumental flourishes — strings, flutes, piano, vibraphone — but Gilberto’s voice maintains its serene wistfulness.“Berimbau” (1966)A berimbau, the one-stringed percussion instrument prized in Bahia, Brazil, twangs its way through this song by Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes. The brassy, slightly ominous arrangement by Gil Evans highlights the pinpoint syncopations of Gilberto’s vocal.“Maria Quiet” (1966)Gilberto sang most often about love as it arrives and disappears. But every so often she turned to other thoughts — like the feminist resentment in “Maria Quiet,” a brisk samba with lyrics (de Moraes translated by Norman Gimbel) about women’s endless work. Gilberto’s delivery is pointed, and quietly seething. More

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      Carlos Barbosa-Lima, 77, Dies; Expanded Classical Guitar’s Reach

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      A virtuoso since his teenage years, he performed concerts that ranged from classical repertory to Brazilian music to the Beatles and Broadway.Carlos Barbosa-Lima, who was a virtuoso on classical guitar while still a teenager in Brazil and then spent a lifetime expanding the instrument’s possibilities, bringing classical techniques and sensibilities to his arrangements of Gershwin, the Beatles and especially the music of his fellow Brazilian Antônio Carlos Jobim, died on Feb. 23 at a hospital in São Paulo. He was 77.The guitarist Larry Del Casale, who had performed with him for years, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Barbosa-Lima recorded some 50 albums and performed all over the world, at small recitals and on prestigious stages, including those of Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. A Barbosa-Lima concert might include a sonata by the Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti, “Manha de Carnaval” by the Brazilian composer Luiz Bonfá, “I Got Rhythm” and an encore of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” from the musical “Evita.”Mr. Barbosa-Lima was known for his delicate, intricate playing, which Mr. Del Casale said was made possible in part by the unusual strength and flexibility of the fingers of his left hand.“He had a very, very, very long left-hand stretch,” Mr. Del Casale said in a phone interview. “If you try to play some of his arrangements, you can’t do it, because people can’t make those kinds of reaches.”“He was able to bring out and give voice to the bass, the soprano and alto lines and the melody, and give them each a different volume, a different rhythm,” Mr. Del Casale added. “When you’re listening to it, you think it’s two guitars.”At one of Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s earliest New York performances, a 1973 recital at Town Hall in Manhattan, those skills impressed Allen Hughes, who, in his review for The New York Times, wrote that Mr. Barbosa-Lima had “made his points modestly and quietly, but with such authority that each work he played became an absorbing musical experience.”Some 24 years later, Punch Shaw, reviewing a performance in Texas for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was especially impressed with Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s handling of two Scarlatti sonatas.“The delicate lacework of those pieces is difficult enough to create on the keyboard instrument for which it was composed,” he wrote. “Taking it so successfully to the guitar as Barbosa-Lima did, as both arranger and performer, was breathtaking.”Mr. Barbosa-Lima applied his arranging skills to contemporary composers as well, including Mr. Jobim, with whom he began working in the early 1980s when both were living in New York. Mr. Jobim, who died in 1994, was known for his contribution to the score of the 1959 movie “Black Orpheus” and for fueling the bossa nova craze of the 1960s with songs like “The Girl From Ipanema,” when Mr. Barbosa-Lima first proposed adapting some of his songs.“I thought, ‘Why not treat Jobim’s music as if the guitar were a little chamber orchestra?’” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1995.The result, in 1982, was the album “Carlos Barbosa-Lima Plays the Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim and George Gershwin,” which included Jobim works like “Desafinado” as well as “Summertime” and other Gershwin compositions. The record raised Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s profile in the United States considerably.“Day in, day out, we discussed rhythm, harmony, counterpoint and intention,” Mr. Jobim wrote in the liner notes, describing the making of the album. “I watched him with awe as he strove for perfection.”Another composer who experienced Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s skills as an arranger firsthand was Mason Williams, best known for the 1968 crossover hit “Classical Gas.” In 2016 Mr. Barbosa-Lima released “Carlos Barbosa-Lima Plays Mason Williams,” an album that included his two-guitar version of Mr. Williams’s hit, with Mr. Del Casale playing the second guitar part.“He knew where the essence of the composition lay and stayed true to all of that,” Mr. Williams said of the Barbosa-Lima “Classical Gas” on a 2016 episode of the YouTube series “Musicians’ Round Table,” “but he knew exactly where he could expound on aspects of it for his arrangement.”Though Mr. Barbosa-Lima often performed solo, he also arranged a number of works for two guitars, and since 2003 Mr. Del Casale had often been his onstage playing partner. The pieces they played could be challenging, but Mr. Del Casale said the maestro always had his back if he started going astray.“If you’re doing a duo with him, he’ll catch you and bring you back in,” he said. “He was that kind of player.”Antonio Carlos Ribeiro Barbosa-Lima was born on Dec. 17, 1944, in São Paulo to Manuel Carlos and Eclair Soares Ribeiro Barbosa-Lima.He started playing as a boy, by happenstance.“My father was trying to learn the guitar but couldn’t,” he told The Orlando Sentinel in 2006. “Instead, his teacher began giving me lessons.”The boy proved to be a prodigy. In 1957 he gave his first concert, and the next year he began releasing albums on the Chantecler label. (They were rereleased a few years ago by Zoho Music as “The Chantecler Sessions.”) Mr. Del Casales said Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s first record had a reputation among players because he did things on it that most adult professionals couldn’t.“People say ‘Don’t listen to that album, you’ll burn your guitar,’” he said.Mr. Barbosa-Lima first played in the United States in 1967. Not long after that, in Madrid, he met the Spanish classical guitar master Andrés Segovia. He was playing classical repertory at the time, and, Mr. Del Casale said, it was Segovia who advised him not to be afraid to follow his own instincts and apply his classical techniques to Brazilian music, jazz, pop or whatever else he wanted. After that, Mr. Del Casale said, “He took off his tuxedo, he put on a nice Hawaiian dress shirt, and that was it.”Mr. Barbosa-Lima taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the 1970s and at the Manhattan School of Music in the ’80s. He lived in Puerto Rico for a time, but since about 2000, Mr. Del Casale said, he had had no permanent address; he had basically been on the road full time.He is survived by a sister, Maria Christina Barbosa-Lima. A brother, Luiz, died in 1973.Mr. Barbosa-Lima’s last record, “Delicado,” a homage to Brazilian music made with Mr. Del Casale and others, was released in 2019. “This music is romantic, joyful, and surprisingly accessible given the complexity of some of the arrangements,” Glide magazine wrote in a review.Mr. Del Casale remained in awe of his mentor even as he played alongside him.“The palette of colors he got out of the instrument — he could paint a picture with that guitar,” he said.Mr. Barbosa-Lima once described his technique in a video interview. “I like the guitar to be with me, you know?” he said. “Not me against the guitar.” More