Pianist Gilson Schachnik and Drummer Mauricio Zottarelli Offer A Muscular New Take on Brazilian Jazz on New CD MOZIK While pianist Gilson Schachnik and drummer Mauricio Zottarelli were both born in the state of Sao Paulo, it wasn't until they landed in Boston that Brazilian music seized their imagination. Reared on hard rock, European classical music, blues, funk and jazz, they independently found their way to Berklee College of Music, earning scholarships to study at the prestigious institution. After swimming in a sea of Brazilianness, moving to the United States provided a sudden, jarring perspective shift, and a reappraisal of their relationship to their musical birthright. Their captivating new album Mozik reflects their deep engagement with Brazilian rhythms and forms, filtered through their love of the early fusion of Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. The CD will be released October 28, 2011 on Mozik Records. A lot of non-Brazilian musicians who play Brazilian music are obsessed with being authentic, says Schachnik, who wrote most of the album's arrangements. That's not our goal at all. We're not trying to recreate bossa nova. We want to play with all the information that we've gathered over the years. I grew up listening to Return to Forever and Headhunters. Recorded in Boston with the support of a faculty grant from Berklee, the album features a fascinating international cast of US-based musicians, including Brazilian guitarist Gustavo Assis-Brasil, Russian flutist Yulia Musayelyan and Argentine bassist Fernando Huergo. The quintet navigates the intricate grooves with such precision and power it sounds like a working ensemble, though some of the musicians had never played together before. The album opens with Schachnik's Web's Samba, a tune that actually draws on several folkloric rhythms from the northeastern states of Bahia and Pernambuco, the heart of Afro-Brazilian culture. Zottarelli introduces the dramatic tune with a galloping afox beat, a rhythm drawn from Yoruba-inspired Candombl ceremonies. The tune, like the album itself, is dedicated to the memory of bassist Webster Roach, a beloved Boston musician who died suddenly in Nov. 2010. The album features three incisive Schachnik arrangements of Jobim standards. There's the brisk, up-tempo version of A Felicidade, the immortal theme from Marcel Camus's 1959 film Black Orpheus that turned bossa nova into an international phenomenon. Rather than mining the tune's potent undercurrent of melancholy, Musayelyan's muscular flute work turns it into a straight up celebration. The ravishing ballad O Amor em Paz (Once I Loved) is a showcase for Assis-Brasil, who renders the melody with such sorrow and tenderness it's like overhearing an intimate confession. And Desafinado gets a bracing postbop infusion, courtesy of Schachnik's extended harmonies. Seamlessly switching gears, the quintet digs into Herbie Hancock's modal masterpiece Eye of the Hurricane and adds a Rio de Janeiro lilt to Thelonious Monk's loving Pannonica. Yulia came in and blew us away, says Schachnik. Flute plays such an important role in Brazilian music, especially in bossa nova, arrangers use it a lot. But 'Eye of the Hurricane' is much more in your face fusion and I heard it as a tenor thing. But she came in and played exactly what the piece needed. They close the album with a thrilling version of Paulo Cesar Pinheiro and Mauro Duarte's Canto Das Trs Raas, a song indelibly linked to samba legend Clara Nunes. Zottarelli's percussion intro evokes the African roots of samba, while Musayelyan delivers the soaring melody with all the requisite soul. Whatever qualms Schachnik and Zottarelli once harbored about claiming Brazilian music as their own are washed away in this roots samba jazz celebration of Brazil's miscegenated culture. Zottarelli credits Schachnik with sparking his interest in that heritage. Growing up in the 1980s, he mostly experienced Brazilian music through pop music on the radio. But his father was childhood friends with Dom Salvador, the supremely hip Brazili
