Bossa nova

Now, I know you speak Portuguese today and you speak Spanish, but did you grow up, were your parents like Portuguese, from Portuguese descent or Brazilian descent, or did you just learn it as a thing to do when you were growing up?

portuguese i learned it when i got i got i didn't speak any portuguese when i got to brazil my my my mom's ukrainian and my dad's italian so uh yeah i have no i have no spanish or portuguese roots yes uh it was like a calling but the thing is i didn't start in brazil i always loved like bossa nova and the music and i knew i wanted to go to brazil And I remember I was in Chile.

I was playing music in the street there.

This was 2014.

And I was singing Bossa Nova, and someone at some point was like, why are you here? Why don't you go to Brazil? So I took that as a sign.

It was during the World Cup in 2014 when it was in Brazil.

So I got into Rio de Janeiro in 2014 during the World Cup without speaking any Portuguese, just Spanish and Spanish.

Because in samba, I don't know if you know the music samba.

Yeah, I would say so, but there's also such a big Brazilian music scene and just Brazilian music history in general.

There's Bossa Nova, there's all the cool 70s stuff and whatnot.

that it was pretty evenly split and I feel like my parents listened to a lot more Brazilian music so that was what I listened to the most growing up I think but yeah a ton of like American music obviously because it's everywhere so yeah I like music and my parents are like go learn go do music lessons because I think I was doing a lot all the time and they wanted me to do that somewhere else instead

of being

Classic.

Yeah, so there is this classic scene from C-Lab in which Marco and Debbie sing Aguas de Março by Tom Jobim and Elisa Regina, a classic Bossa Nova standard.

And they do like this really cute lip sync with the canned animation from the original C-Lab 2020 series.

And when the song wraps, Marco, who is a Latino in the story, says, you speak very good Portuguese.

And I'm a big fan of jazz history, even when I'm not wearing my teacher hat when I'm doing concerts with my trio or solo, I always like to weave jazz history into the pieces to kind of give people that broader context and a way to connect to the music more.

So with this book, every song is in a different jazz style kind of a sub genre if you will and i give a little tiny little two or three or four sentence intro at the beginning so for instance there's one that is based off of kind of the the jazz of the 1960s the more modal quasi-spiritual jazz like john coltrane There's one that is based on Bossa Nova, the trend that came out in the late fifties and throughout the sixties.

There's a bebop tune.

There's a stride piano tune.

Sure.

But I am planning to see if we can have, because I have a song that didn't end on the album, which is sort of a Bossa Nova song.

Oh, cool.

And it's kind of done and everything.

Welcome in.

Another amazing piece here, which is part of our Tone Poets reissues for August of 2026, is Ike Quebec's Bossa Nova Sol Samba.

You'll have to cut me a little bit of slack here on some pronunciations.

I'll do my best.

Episode 135.

Let's do it.

The insinuating, infectiously relaxing bossa nova has become a pervasive phenomenon within the past year.

Essentially, the new wrinkle, one way of translating the term, is a more resilient, more elasticized samba with jazz... add mixtures.

It was a really beautiful exploration of all the energies that you get from the South Asian diaspora.

We started off with Granatic and jazz fused together in this absolutely beautiful track that Sanjeev said reminded him of Bossa Nova, but in a good way.

And then I just progressed through the energy and started to slowly lift it up.

I think we had like half an hour of just like really nice mellow tracks.