João Bosco & Jaques Morelenbaum

• World Music

In Brazil, João Bosco is a national hero. The singer and guitarist has wowed his audience for more than 40 years with catchy melodies and clever rhythms. »João sounds like an orchestra,« says jazz guitarist Lee Ritenour about the old master of »Música Popular Brasileira« (Brazilian popular music), who combines influences from rock, jazz and Afro-Brazilian music in his music and for him somehow everything always happens at the same time. In the 1970s and 1980s, Bosco, alongside such greats as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, was one of the young, politically active musicians in Brazil who repeatedly defied the censorship of the military dictatorship once more with their encrypted songs.

With ideally matched cellist and arranger Jaques Morelenbaum, who became known to a broad public through his work with bossa nova icon Antonio Carlos Jobim, he is not only associated with a predilection for subtle arrangements, but also concern for Brazil’s nature, which literally threatens to go up in flames – a development which the indigenous people in particular have already come to feel with drastic consequences.

PERFORMERS

João Bosco vocals, guitar

Jaques Morelenbaum violoncello