Rosa Passos

Sometimes, the wait can make discovery even sweeter. Though Rosa Passos released her debut album in Brazil in 1979, and is heralded as “a female equivalent of…João Gilberto,” it was not until recently that her work began to receive the attention and acclaim it so richly deserves.

Passos was a pianist from age three, but it was not until hearing Joao Gilberto and Dorival Caymmi when she was 11 that her musical passion became clear. Their magical combination of singing and self-accompaniment on guitar in the bossa nova style overwhelmed her, and the native of Brazil’s Bahia state started on her path to becoming a supreme triple threat as a singer, guitarist, and composer.

In 1972, her song “Mutilados” won first prize in the prestigious Globo Network Festival Univesitario. She would go on to record her own numbers over the course of several albums released since 1988. But the 21st Century has brought much wider exposure for Passos among the North American audience. In addition to making her SFJAZZ Spring Season debut this evening, she can be heard on a trio of wonderful recordings from the past few years.

Passos was a special guest on Yo-Yo Ma’s Obrigado Brazil and Obrigado Brazil: Live in Concert albums (Sony Classical, 2003 and 2004). A year earlier, a project with bassist Ron Carter and a few other instrumentalists, Entre Amigos/ Among Friends (Chesky Records), came out while Ma’s label re-released her classic 1988 tribute to Gilberto, Amorosa, in 2004. Rosa (Telarc 2006) is her first new album under solely her own name to be released stateside.

But recordings only tell half the story. As Gary Giddins said in The New Yorker, “Passos belongs to that dwindling tribe of performers who do their best work before an audience.”

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