|
 The sky was quite overcast at Manhattan's Madison Square Park on a Wednesday evening, but there was no rain as Luciana Souza took their small stage on the eve of her flight to Miami.
In Miami she would perform two dates, going on to Spain for the European leg of the tour in supp of her recently released album, the intimate, personal "Duos II" (Sunnyside).
Backed solely by the acoustic guitar of the fantastic Romero Lubambo, she began the performance with a personal take on one of her favorite songs, the Antonio Carlos Jobim/Newton Mendonça bossa nova classic "Chega de Saudade" (No More Blues), which included some incredible guitar improvisation followed by some scat by Souza.
A great moment came when they performed a song from the American Songbook, the cleverly selected Gershwin tune "But Not For Me".
In their rendition, they started off with a slow-tempo groove that quickly changed into a swingy, up-tempo beat that gave Lubambo some space to play some walking-bass notes, showcasing his East Coast-meets-Charlie Byrd guitar style.
When performing Djavan's gorgeous hit "Flor de Lis", she explained the audience what the lyrics were saying - the sad story of a jilted lover who sorrowfully compares the end of a love affair to the death of a once-lush flowery garden.
She took the tune's samba beat up a notch, giving it more of a jazzy feel, and the magic fingers of Romero Lubambo wowed the entire audience, who clapped enthusiastically after his improv solo.
In what was one of the highlights of her performance, she played a medley of Northeastern Brazilian songs in which she played triangle.
The audience was totally involved by Lubambo's technique, and I also noticed that at times Souza herself seemed to lose herself into the sound of the guitar.
"Sonnet 49" is one of the love poems included in Souza's "Neruda" album, which featured songs written after the legendary Chilean poet's love verses.
Souza performed this one by herself (she played an African thumb piano) in honor of a couple that was celebrating their upcoming wedding there.
The audience received it very well, remaining silent while listening to every note from Souza's beautifully trained voice.
Closing the show was a fun take on "The Girl from Ipanema"(everyone around me half-guessed she would play that one when she invited everyone to sing along to a song that "everyone knew"). She received a standing ovation as she exited the stage.
Souza is not very well known among Brazilians, who feel a bit resented that her sound is "too Americanized", so there were only a handful of her compatriots there. She does deserve a broader audience, and her new album and tour might just do that for her.
Concert Review:
Luciana Souza
Madison Square Park
July 13th, 2005
Ernest Barteldes is an ESL and Portuguese teacher. In addition to that, he is a freelance writer whose work has been published by The Greenwich Village Gazette, The Staten Island Advance, The Staten Island Register, The SI Muse, Brazzil magazine, The Villager, GLSSite, Entertainment Today and other publications. He lives in Staten Island, NY. He can be reached at ebarteldes@yahoo.com.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.