Luciana Souza

The New Bossa Nova

(Verve)

For more than a decade now, Brazilian singer Luciana Souza has moved effortlessly between musical genres. In The New Bossa Nova, she addresses several of them all at once.

This is bossa nova – a style informed by jazz – re-interpreted as art song. It’s also an intriguing gambit to open a book of “new standards” for bossa nova. After all, the genre is 50 years old. Produced by Larry Klein (also Souza’s husband), The New Bossa Nova is sung entirely in English. The set list includes two originals – both written by Klein, one in collaboration with Souza, the other with Steely Dan’s Walter Becker – and a list of modern American pop songs such as Joni Mitchell’s “Down to You,” James Taylor’s “Never Die Young” (sung with the composer), and Leonard Cohen’s “Here It Is,” all treated, rhythmically and harmonically, in a bossa nova style. She even seems to approach Antonio Carlos Jobim’s masterpiece “Waters of March” as a foreign pop song, singing it in English.

The lyrics don’t get the treatment, however. Rather than the cool, conversational, and common-man (or woman) approach to so much of bossa nova singing, Souza chooses a different tack: a mix of full-out pop and art singing with a bossa nova lilt and an ear on the original. She has a warm, limpid voice, impeccable intonation, precise, clear diction, and limber phrasing. She can get a bit precious at times (she enunciates some of the lyrics in “Never Die Young” like a New Yorker magazine socialite handling the family porcelain), but the overall results brim with intelligence and musicianship. Souza might not quite make bossa nova “new” with this disc, but in both, style and substance, she’s making a contribution for the next 50 years.

- Fernando Gonzalez