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João Bosco

Friday, May 5 • 8pm

“One of Rio de Janeiro's finest songwriters.”
—The New York Times

A living legend of Brazilian music, singer/composer João Bosco gained worldwide fame in the early ’70s, first as one of the late superstar Elis Regina’s favorite songwriters and later as a performer in his own right. As The New York Times wrote of one of his exceedingly rare U.S. concerts: “Mr. Bosco’s magnificent set [featured] intoxicating crosscurrents of rhythm, his vocal lines skimming and hopscotching across his guitar’s syncopated chords and bass lines.”

Stephen Cassidy

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Program Notes

A giant of Brazilian music, singer/guitarist/composer João Bosco brings his singular compositions and exhilarating live presence to the SFJAZZ stage for the first time this evening. Rooted in the sounds of Brazil (samba, bossa nova, and more), yet with a cosmopolitan appetite for musics from abroad (jazz, rock, other “world musics”), Bosco achieves the rare feat of making music that is simultaneously eclectic yet organic—a sound wholly his own.

Bosco gained worldwide fame in the early 1970s, first as one of the late superstar Elis Regina’s favorite songwriters and later as a performer in his own right. In his home country, he was also well-known for penning songs that ran afoul of Brazil’s former military dictatorship—sometimes for his anti-totalitarian politics, and sometimes, seemingly, for no reason at all. As Bosco himself once said, “Anything you composed or sang was censored. And there were no guidelines as to what you could or couldn’t do. Every piece of music I wrote meant spending hours in the censorship bureau, debating with them, sometimes over one word” (as quoted in the All Music Guide). Beyond the reach of the military regime, Bosco’s 1977 song “O Bebaido e a Equilibrista” (“The Drunkard and the Tightrope Walker”) became the theme song of Amnesty International.

As The New York Times wrote of the Bosco experience in concert: “He turned his songs into musicians’ playgrounds... Vamps were juggled between his rhythm section and his own syncopated guitar chords; his voice swooped down to his husky low register, into quasi-Arabic melismas and up to irrepressible yodeling and falsetto. He sang hushed, gentle bossa novas and acrobatic scatting, and in ‘Odilê Odilá,’ he and his band meshed rattles, gourds and lightly plucked guitars into rhythms that were at once breezy and profound.”

— Matthew Campbell