Luciana Souza, Trio Corrente Bring ‘Cometa’ to Vivid Life

By Allen Morrison I Apr. 23, 2024

Luciana Souza and Trio Corrente began their current U.S. tour with a performance at Boston’s Regattabar.
(Photo: Courtesy Sunnyside)

Luciana Souza is the most justly renowned Brazilian jazz singer working in the United States. Trio Corrente is Brazil’s most accomplished small jazz group. The long-hoped-for collaboration of the two produced a delightful and Grammy-nominated album last fall, Cometa (Sunnyside), which they brought to vivid life in their first U.S. tour, which began earlier this month at Boston’s Regattabar.

The tour has since taken them to Baltimore, Washington, D.C. (where they recorded an NPR Tiny Desk Concert), to Dizzy’s Club at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center; they were scheduled to play additional dates in St. Louis, Los Angeles and La Jolla.

I first encountered Trio Corrente — perhaps the most dazzling samba jazz group I had ever heard — in 2014 in the Brazilian seaside resort town of Paraty, southwest of Rio, while covering the MIMO music festival for this magazine. The São Paulo-based trio’s name means “current” (as in ocean); they are aptly named, for they ride intense streams of Brazilian rhythms, specializing in intricate arrangements that mix styles like choro and samba with Afro-Cuban and straightahead jazz feels. Each of them — Fabio Torres on piano, Paulo Paulelli on bass and Edu Ribeiro on drums — is a master.

Luciana’s mastery is long-established. The singer/composer has used her soulful alto over the years to create definitive collections of Brazilian sambas and bossa nova classics, to pay tribute to poets like Pablo Neruda and Leonard Cohen, and to introduce her own sparkling and subtle jazz compositions.

Introducing the trio at Regattabar, she said, “They have a language of their own, and I’m still learning it. At the core of (our) record is samba, which to Brazilians means more than music or dance — it means joy, community.”

On this occasion, drummer Ribeiro had a family emergency that kept him in Brazil. “He will join us in St. Louis,” Luciana said. “He has big shoes to fill. When Edu found out he couldn’t join us right away, he picked Mauricio Zottarelli to replace him.” Ribeiro, perhaps the most renowned Brazilian drummer of his generation, plays the complicated rhythms of this music with an unrivaled ease and a mathematical precision. Zottarelli is cut from the same cloth — one of the most impressive drummers to come out of Brazil since Ribeiro. “At our soundcheck this afternoon, I was nervous about it,” Souza told the Regattabar crowd. “The arrangements and the rhythms are so complicated. But when he nailed it, I said, ‘Really?? So it will be like that?’”

They delivered joy right from the start with “Você Já Foi à Bahia,” a sprightly classic by Dorival Caymmi, which also opens their album. The title means “Have You Ever Been to Bahia?” In three minutes or so, the audience was transported to that tropical state of samba, surf and caipirinhas. Souza delivered the melody with lyricism and good humor while the band, led by pianist Torres, accented the offbeats with single-note stabs but without sacrificing a scintilla of the song’s swing. This pointillistic attack is a big part of the trio’s playful and distinctive approach. No one has more fun playing samba jazz, and within Trio Corrente, no one had a bigger or more infectious smile than the stand-in, Zottarelli.

On “Rumo Dos Ventos” by the samba composer Paulinho da Viola, Torres soloed in a style that he practically owns, a unique combination of samba and baroque counterpoint that makes the most of his classical training. They continued with the Ary Barroso classic “Pra Machucar Meu Coração.” As on the album, Torres and the trio played a harmonically canny, percussive single-note counterpoint to the soaring lyrical melody, familiar to American listeners from Getz/Gilberto. They also played deft originals by each member, including Luciana’s own samba, “Bem Que Te Avisei,” which featured Paulelli on mouth percussion (something he does while accompanying himself with startling alacrity on bass).

For the closer, they chose Dorival Caymmi’s merrily percolating “Requebre Que Eu Dou Um Doce,” a song that, Luciana noted with a wink, might no longer be politically correct, with its lyric about a man who offers to provide a sweet treat if only the lady will dance for him. It was a samba full of charm, the music fully realizing the spirit of the dance, even as Souza and the band navigated the trickiest contrapuntal moves.

The singer outdid herself in the encore: the familiar “Corcovado,” but utterly transformed by Souza into a vocal fantasia in which she superimposed her own formidable musical intelligence on Jobim’s indelible melody, accompanied by Torres’ meditation on the implications of the composer’s harmonies. It was the evening’s tour de force. The group improv at the end brought an element of blues into it, far afield from Jobim’s original. Yet I have to think Brazil’s greatest maestro would have dug the sensitive, swinging and exploratory approach they brought to one of the greatest bossas ever, as well as the other Brazilian treasures they explored. DB