Glasgow Jazz Festival, Marcos Valle, Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow
Rob Adams FOUR STARS
The audience took time to find their dancing shoes en masse on Saturday but once they did, they didn't want Marcos Valle to leave. The Brazilian bossa nova star is celebrating his fiftieth anniversary in sending beats to feets and setting hips to sway and he presented pretty much a greatest hits selection from his extensive canon.
Thus we were treated to a guitar-strumming troubadour version of his breakthrough classic, Summer Samba, sung with his trademark guttural charm, through to one of his most sampled and remixed tracks, the irresistibly insistent, celebratory Parabens.
By now Valle was seated behind the Fender Rhodes, his percussive attack piloting a band that looked and sounded familiar in different ways. Up there with Valle regulars, the marvellous Jesse Sadoc on trumpet and flugelhorn and Renato Massa, a drummer who can resemble an entire samba troupe in impact and musicality, was a Scotsman, Kevin Glasgow, more usually seen with Tommy Smith's Karma and doing a fine job as tour stand-in on six-string bass guitar.
Valle was also joined on vocals and percussion by his wife, Patricia Alvi, whose negotiation of the quick-fire lyrics of Crickets Sing for Anamaria in close partnership with Valle lent character and impetus to music that, no matter where and when you hear it, radiates sunshine and joy.
The Brazilians would have felt right at home earlier in the Rio Club's heat as Federation of the Disco Pimp pumped out the funk with brassy precision and partying verve while Swiss piano trio Vein presented a cooler, more cerebral but equally involving, tale-spinning form of industry in the City Halls' Recital Room.
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