My Brazil Travels to Voices Cafe in Westport

Featuring seven-time Grammy winner Paul Winter and three “masterful” Brazilian musicians

Grammy-winning saxophonist and bandleader Paul Winter will be bringing his My Brazil quartet to Voices Café on Saturday, May 12 at 8:00pm.  Voices Café is located at The Unitarian Church in Westport, 10 Lyons Plains Road. Tickets are $35 and are available for purchase online at voicescafe.org or by calling David Vita at 203.227.7205 x 14.

This concert is a benefit for the KEYS (www.keysmusic.org - Kids Empowered by Your Support) program which provides one-to-one musical instrument lessons and group music instruction to underserved inner-city children in Bridgeport, CT who have no other access to this empowering life experience.  

“I’ll be collaborating with three masterful players of the Brazilian traditions: percussionist Vanderlei Pereira, bassist Gustavo Amarante, and Paul Meyers on guitar.  It’s a privilege for us to have the opportunity to create a new program for this performance in a special performance space,” Winter said.

Vanderlei Pereira is one of the most sought-after musicians on the contemporary Brazilian jazz scene combining a prodigious knowledge of Brazilian rhythms with dazzling technique and a distinctive touch.

Gustavo Amarante, a graduate of the Berklee College of Music, synthesizes his Brazilian upbringing in Belo Horizonte, Brazil with an array of diverse international musical experiences for performances that are known for their precision and innovation.

Winter has long regarded the celebrated Brazilian and jazz guitarist Paul Meyers North America’s greatest Brazilian guitarist. 

 “I’m creating a new program, which I’m calling ‘My Brazil,’ to embrace the gamut of Brazilian music, including songs by Carlos Lyra, Luiz Bonfa, and Antonio Carlos Jobim; Afro-samba music of Bahia, in Brazil’s northeast; carnival songs from Rio; and music of Brazil's great composer Heitor Villa-Lobos.”

Paul Winter has long considered Brazil his second musical home. He first visited Brazil in 1962, during a six-month tour of Latin America for the State Department with his college jazz sextet. It happened to be at the time when a new musical genre, called “New Touch,” or Bossa Nova, was blossoming in Brazil, and Paul and his jazz colleagues were mesmerized. They began recording an album in Rio during that tour, and finished it later that summer in New York. That October Columbia Records released Jazz Meets the Bossa Nova, which became a minor hit, and when The Paul Winter Sextet was invited by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy to play at the White House, two of these Bossa Nova songs were included in the program, which was the first-ever jazz concert program at the White House.

Paul returned to Brazil in the summer of 1964, and lived in Ipanema for most of the next year, recording albums with Carlos Lyra (The Sound of Ipanema) and with Luiz Bonfa, Roberto Menescal, and Luiz Eca (Rio). In Rio, Winter met another of the Bossa Nova pioneers — guitarist/composer Oscar Castro-Neves — who in the late ‘60s toured with the Paul Winter Consort, and became co-producer of many of the Consort’s albums over three decades.

The Paul Winter Consort has played more than 3,000 concerts, toured in 52 countries, and recorded 45 albums.

In the late ‘90s, Paul and Oscar revisited the golden era of Bossa Nova songs with their award-winning album Brazilian Days. 

In a review of Brazilian Days, Pulse Magazine wrote: “Winter’s Latin sound goes down smooth, seductive and sophisticated. Like a warm Rio breeze, he wraps his soprano saxophone around melodies by Jobim, Carlos Lyra, Rosa and other Brazilian composers.”

Winter has shared stages and worked with the likes of Miles Davis, Mickey Hart, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Pete Seeger, producers George Martin and Phil Ramone, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and the music of composer Charles Ives. His work has been honored with a Global 500 Award by the United Nations, the Joseph Wood Krutch Medal for service to animals from the United States Humane Society, and an honorary Doctorate of Music from the University of Hartford.

KEYS serves residents in one of the Northeast’s most impoverished cities.  Many live in very difficult circumstances and are all too familiar with poverty, crime and urban failure.  

KEYS was founded in 2004 when musician and music educator, Rob Silvan, volunteered to teach piano to four students in a hallway at Bridgeport’s Columbus School.   KEYS now operates in 22 Bridgeport schools provides music education to over 600 Bridgeport children every year.