style:
bossa nova
booking area:
Poland
available:
all year 2011 on request
(please contact us)
contact:
Beata Bęben
booking@concerts.pl
ph./fax +48.91.4237712
mobile: +48.503.173959

Cantuária’s albums, always critics’ favorites, have featured collaborations with some of the starrier names in left-field commercial music: Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Brian Eno, Bill Frisell, and Arto Lindsay. Though artists such as Anderson, Frisell and Lindsay have a common touch, there is always an awkwardness to their music: they don’t worry about ugly sounds. They are prepared to confront their sophisticated audiences as well as delight them. Cantuária, by contrast, rarely produces anything that is not beautiful. He might express enthusiastic interest in DJ Spooky and the scratchy rhythms of laptop blip-hop, trade vocals with David Byrne or duet with Marc Ribot, but the end-result is always tuneful, light, fleet and musical. Compare his version of ‘O Nome Dela’ (co-written with Arto Lindsay) with the version on Lindsay’s own album Prize. The song has a fabulous tune, a great hook and simple affecting words. Each version has its merits, and demonstrates a different aspect of Cantuária’s chord playing, but it’s the Brazilian’s earlier version (on Sol Na Cara) that haunts the mind and grips the heart.

To get an idea on Cantuária’s soundworld, it is worth going back to his superb 1996 album Sol Na Cara, an album that both predicated and helped influence a new, supercooled world of neo-Brazilian music. This is the field now filled so successfully by artists such as Bebel Gilberto, Moreno Veloso and Celso Fonseca. A significant collaborator on this album was Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Yellow Magic Orchestra founder whose combination of classical keyboard chops with synthesizer squiggles added some unexpected stylistic touches to a genre that had drifted out of joint with the times.

Since then, Sakamoto has become ever more absorbed by Brazilian music, frequently playing piano in an all-acoustic group with Paula and Jaques Morelenbaum. Cantuária, similarly, has reduced his dependence upon electronics, apart from a few effects on the guitar – perhaps influenced by Bill Frisell, with whom Cantuária plays in the Intercontinental Quartet. One of the outstanding tracks on Frisell’s latest album, The Intercontinentals (Nonesuch) is Gilberto Gil’s song, ‘Procissao’, sung by Cantuária over a busy mesh of stringed instruments and percussion. This song, with its infectious, Beatles-like chorus, is part of the repertoire of Cantuária’s own band, who performed it at Tonic, New York, last March. A rough recording from the tiny club reveals a more obviously Brazilian reading. Cantuária’s demeanor can appear to be as shy and retiring as Frisell’s, but there’s a assertive side, heard in songs such as ‘Sanfona’ (from the Verve album Tucuma) and ‘Normal’, on the most recent album Vinicius.