Luciana Souza: serving the song.

• Author: Holston, Mark
• Position: Music - Brazil

"I don't claim to be rescuing anyone from obscurity," says singer Luciana Souza of the composers whose work she's chosen for her new album, Brazilian Duos. "Yes, it was a conscious decision to include songs by such composers as Luiz Gonzaga and Antonio Maria, but my choice of repertoire comes from my desire to play music I identify with--a great melody, a lyric, an interesting harmony."

Such clarity of purpose and will to see uncommonly challenging projects through to their successful completion are traits of character many young artists can only dream of having to this pronounced degree. In the case of this talented young musician from Sao Paulo, Brazil, the desire to succeed comes naturally. It's a family characteristic nurtured long before bossa nova became a household term and tempered through decades of hard-won artistic triumphs.

Among the songs chosen for this recording are works by the singer's parents, Walter Santos and Tereza Souza, Brazil's only husband-and-wife songwriting team. In the 1960s, many of their tunes, including "Amanha" and "Samba So," became well-recorded bossa standards. Santos, an accomplished guitarist and composer, was a childhood friend of the bossa's most important interpreter--singer and guitarist Joao Gilberto. Both grew up in Juazeiro da Bahia, a small town in the state of Bahia, where among Santos's initial music inspiration were recordings of the North American vocal jazz group the Hi-Los, played on a radio station that was broadcast over speakers in the town's central plaza.

"My dad told me that he was crazy about the close harmonies the group sang," Luciana says today. Santos and Gilberto had a vocal group for a while, and Santos's personal style came to reflect the same penchant for a soft, understated manner of singing that his friend eventually made his--and bossa's--trademark. Leaving Bahia to seek fortune in Silo Paulo, Santos found in the Rio de Janeiro-born lyricist Tereza Souza the perfect mate and songwriting partner.

As their careers as composers and performers of popular music waned with the advent of changing styles in the 1970s, the couple turned to the lucrative business of writing and producing commercial jingles for radio and television. Their Sao Paulo recording studio, Nossoestudio (Our Studio), and record label, Som da Gente (Sound of the People; see Americas, July-August, 1990), became a mecca for many of Brazil's best instrumentalists in the 1980s. Surrounded day and night by...