Carlos Barbosa-Lima – Carioca

Zoho 200602

The 1960s were something of a heyday for Brazilian guitarists. Native luminaries like Luiz Bonfá, Laurindo Almeida and Bola Sete joined American interpreters like Charlie Byrd in further popularizing and propagating samba and bossa nova forms across the globe. Carlos Barbosa-Lima came a few years later, making his recording debut in 1967, but his longevity on the scene has done much to preserve Portuguese guitar music, both contemporary and classical.

Carioca finds him mining a rich vein that runs from early composers like Ernesto Nazareth to predictable picks like Jobim and Bonfá. Eighteen cuts spread out over an hour’s time allow his six-string acoustic plenty of opportunities to sing sweetly and beguile. Sprinklings of Segovia, a former teacher, surface in his lilting, highly lyrical picking style. Most of the songs register in the modest three minute range, just enough time to sketch a few dulcet variations on a melody before moving on to the next.

Roughly half of the tracks are rendered solo while the rest find him in the company of a small revolving pool of colleagues that includes double bassist Nilson Matta, percussionist Duduka Da Fonseca, mandolinist Marcílo Lopes and vocalist Danny Rivera. The mix makes for good variety, but nearly all of the pieces are mellow and low-key. Even up-tempo tunes like the trio rendering of the evergreen “Samba de Orfeu” with its percolating hand percussion rhythms, pulsing bass vamp and lush guitar fills don’t break much of a sweat.

The emphasis rests instead on mood and color with Barbosa-Lima toning down the more virtuosic aspects of his masterful technique in service of a laidback mien. Some tracks, like the saccharine “Romance” penned by Hawaiian guitarist Byron Yasui, indulge in this strategy to a fault, exchanging eloquence for sugary sentimental surfeit. Most avoid such solecisms, particularly the pieces that pair the guitarist with the delicate finger-picking of Lopes.

This is an apposite album for whiling away the winter hours, a bracer to bitter cold and whistling arctic wind and an album that will probably do quite well in moving off the shelves of Midwestern brick and mortars if my reaction is any sort of litmus. Barbosa-Lima’s adaptations of these tunes aren’t radically different from earlier more canonical versions. He wisely allows the music to mostly speak for itself and in so doing crafts a veracious program well worth revisiting.

~ Derek Taylor