Brazil's modern music maestro.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: MUSIC - Moacir Santos - Biography

When composer and arranger Moacir Santos died last August in Pasadena, California, at the age of eighty, Brazil lost one of its most influential musicians of the past century. Noted for his innovative mixing of Afro-Brazilian rhythms and modern jazz elements, Santos had influenced several generations of Brazil's best musicians and had made his mark on the international film and jazz music worlds as well. He created an expansive body of works for large instrumental ensembles that tantalized jazz artists and fans around the world, employing a potent combination of visceral and sophisticated influences that transcended such common stylistic references as bossa, samba, and choro.

Santos's fertile imagination found ways to combine classical, jazz, folkloric, and other contemporary and traditional idioms in a wholly unique manner. He melded poly-rhythms, intricate orchestrations, and improvisational elements in a mariner that was his alone. "Moacir is so different because he is a source himself--he made his own school," explains Mario Adnet, the Rio de Janerio-born composer, singer, and guitarist who has emerged in recent years as Santos's most ardent devotee. He and a close friend, saxophonist Ze Nogueira, have been on a decade-long mission to generate new interest in Santos and restore him to his rightful place in the pantheon of Brazilian music greats.

Thanks to their efforts and the involvement of many of Brazil's leading jazz instrumentalists, Santos's music is once again being widely heard and appreciated. Choros & Alegria, an album released this year, is the duo's latest Santos tribute, recorded in Brazil with an all-star roster of the country's best jazz artists and special guest Wynton Marsalis. It follows the widely acclaimed 2001 double-CD project Ouro Negro, which launched Santos's current renaissance. The DVD version of Ouro Negro is a superbly filmed and engineered live concert in Sao Paulo featuring nineteen Santos masterworks and the eager involvement of guest vocalists Djavan, Ed Motta, Joao Bosco, and Adnet's sister Muiza. Thanks to the involvement of Jobim Music, the project of the late Antonio Carlos Jobim's son Paulo, and a bevy of corporate sponsors in Brazil, three exquisitely designed songbooks, including one that features complete scores of ten of the arranger's classics from the 1960s, are making Santos's music readily available to musicians around the world for the first time.

Moacir Jose dos Santos was born in 1924 in...