João Donato JID007 (JAZZ IS DEAD)

Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad

Released June 4, 2021

DownBeat Four-and-a-Half-Star Review

YouTube:

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lZ-6eJhRD4ki6sA-B-MgY7zC5d9Ave7ys

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/album/4KaODKoIdtQLihCbx0p6nN?si=-F-J9SmiRkioEu4hckhlBg

About:

Where’s João Donato? It’s a frequently asked question, referring simultaneously to the physical location and the musical moment he inhabits. A sampling of some of his more descriptive song titles suggests Donato’s comfort with musical hybrids: “Bluchanga,” “Sambolero,” and “Sambongo,” to name just a few. Lacking a name for his style of music, Donato’s is a distinct sound, immediately recognizable from the first few bars of any of his compositions. He was funky back when “funk” was a bad word (listen to either of his 1960s Brazilian LPs for proof). His compositions are deceptively simple, while his arrangements are harmonically complex, resulting in songs that are seemingly childlike, yet reveal their intricate details upon repeat listening.
João Donato was born in 1934 and spent his early years completely landlocked in the Amazon wilderness of Acre, a state that borders Peru and Bolivia. By eight, he was playing accordion and even wrote his first song, “Indio Perdido,” which he would later re-record as “Lugar Comum” thirty-three years later with lyrics courtesy of tropialist pop star, Gilberto Gil. Donato’s family moved to Rio de Janeiro when he was sixteen and he started hanging out with other jazz-obsessed teenagers in the suburbs of Rio. By 1958, at the age of twenty-four, Donato was one of the most respected musicians in Rio, but what he wanted to play was not what local audiences wanted to hear, so he spent the next 15 years bouncing between Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. Upon his return in 1973, he’d been forgotten by the general public, but had become a legend to a younger generation of musicians, including: Marcos Valle, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa & Gilberto Gil.
João Donato deserves a place among the legends of Brazilian music, alongside Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, Dorival Caymmi, Ary Barroso, and select few others, yet his erratic career and experimentation with different music genres make him a challenge to classify. Asked how he would describe his own work, he says, “It’s my style of music, the way I think about [music]. I don’t even think about it, it’s just the way I do things. I don’t know if it even has a name.” Donato has finally received long overdue accolades for his contributions to date. A archetypal “musician’s musician,” Donato’s stepped out of the shadows more in the past couple dates, recording at an unprecedented rate and collaborating with a variety of musicians, from Brazil and beyond, old and young. Still going strong over eighty years old, the late praise and recognition is in good company for a musician whom Claus Ogerman offered to arrange an album, whom Antonio Carlos Jobim called a genius, and whom no less than João Gilberto claims invented the bossa nova beat. 

Track Listing:

1. Não Negue Seu Coracão (João Donato / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Loren Oden / Adrian Younge) 03:10

2. Aquarius (Bring Her Back Home to Me) (João Donato / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Loren Oden / Adrian Younge) 03:14

3. Desejo De Amor

(João Donato / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Loren Oden / Adrian Younge) 03:28

4. Forever More (João Donato / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Loren Oden / Adrian Younge) 03:03

5. Sua Beleza e Beleza (João Donato / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Loren Oden / Adrian Younge) 03:00

6. Liaisons (João Donato / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Loren Oden / Adrian Younge) 03:01

7. Adrian, Ali and Gregory (João Donato / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Loren Oden / Adrian Younge) 02:23

8. Vermelho Quente (João Donato / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Loren Oden / Adrian Younge) 02:20

9. Conexão (João Donato / Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Loren Oden / Adrian Younge) 03:06

Personnel:

Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad: Hammond B-3, electric bass, synthesizer, electric guitar, flutes, alto and sopranino saxophones, percussion

João Donato: Fender Rhodes, piano

Loren Oden: vocals

Greg Paul: drums

Produced, Recorded and Mixed by Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad at Linear Labs Studios, Los Angeles, CA.

Mastered by Dave Cooley for Elysian Masters

Executive Produced by Andrew Lojero. Associate Produced by Adam Block

Graphic Design by Julian Montague

Photography by The Artform Studio

Review:

Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad continue their Jazz is Dead project — collaborating with jazz legends to make new material with the same instruments those legends used to make their classic albums — with its usual charming pace in its seventh installment alongside pianist João Donato. Like the other albums that preceded this, Younge and Muhammad work with their esteemed collaborator with reverence, but also exuding the confidence as artists themselves to make music as equals, to make a vibe this bold. There is rarely a moment where this album isn’t overwhelmingly pleasant, wrapping the listener in sound that captures the purity of the original moment as well invigorating the present one. Their tack on “Aquarius” is so perfectly in the pocket, it could set up shop there. “Sua Beleza e Beleza” keeps escalating and plateauing with such brilliance, it ends leaving the listener wanting so much more but maybe the dance floor just can’t take it, Greg Paul’s drums providing a boom-bap with panache. This had to be the easiest-going session, so much so that João Donato’s composition “Adrian, Ali & Gregory” had to be encapsulated in a chill this definitive. This mood had to be conveyed, had to be recreated as Donato pictured it and shared for the masses. The same could be said for the rest of this album, each song just as vibrant as the last, a true album best heard uninterrupted like the legendary scions that came before.

Anthony Dean-Harris (DownBeat)