Możdżer+

Nobody expected percussion to have a great deal of melody in it. Enter

Naná Vasconcelos

Juvenal de Holanda Vasconcelos (Naná Vasconcelos) was born in Recife in 1944. He is a Garrincha of the Brazilian Latin Jazz percussion. He plays a variety of instruments (initially in the 1960s specializing in a single-string musical bow called berimbau), and has a unique voice packed with expressiveness. Among the musicians who had the pleasure of performing and recording with him regularly are Pat Metheny (Vasconcelos is the one to be held accountable for a Brazilian sound of his – many say best – albums between 1980 and 1983), Don Cherry (together with Collin Walcott they formed Codona, a trio playing the fusion of music from four continents), Egberto Gismonti (with whom he recorded the brilliant 1976 album Dança Das Cabeças), and Gato Barbieri. A concert Vasconcelos and Barbieri gave at the 1971 Montreux Festival marked the beginning of an infatuation of the European jazz audiences with Naná. He has worked with a number of fantastic musicians to date, including B.B. King, Jean-Luc Ponty, Jan Garbarek and Talking Heads. His music can be heard in the films of Susan Seidelman and Jim Jarmusch, as well as on Paul Simon’s album Rhythm of the Saints. Having said that, it is important to remember that Vasconcelos has never become a studio musician.

He first performed with Leszek Możdżer in 2005 during the Polônia Carioca festival at the Rio de Janeiro’s legendary Central do Brasil bus station. A year later both artists repeated the extraordinary concert in Warsaw at the Polish edition of the festival. In March 2010 they teamed up again, this time performing at the 46^th Jazz nad Odrą festival.