2 Jews Making Music
December 13, 2003

Who would have ever guessed that after almost 3 years of living in Rio and trying to play music here, I've wound up in a duo project with a Jewish guy from Israel?!! Life can be crazy at times. This lunatic's name is Yuval Ben Lior (not to be confused with Jorge Ben Jor) and he's from near Tel Aviv (you know, where all those fucking bombs go off everyday). He moved here about 3 years ago after marrying a Brazilian.

Pic from the session

Anyway, about 3 weeks ago Yuval calls me up cold, and says he got my number from some girl and he's looking for a pandeiro player for his personal project. He said he had some tunes, mostly in the samba/choro vein. I figured it would probably suck, since it's rare that an accomplished musician calls people could whom they've never even heard, but maybe would result in some paying gigs, so I went over to his place.

He starts to play the first tune and go, "Wait a minute, this shit is cool!". One after another he plays his original tunes ... more than 10 of them. Lots of variety, various grooves and influences (by no stretch of the imagination limited to samba/choro). I tease him everyday about how he doesn't know shit about Brazilian music, but yet he writes all of these cool tunes with this flavor.

He's a jazz guitarist who studied in L.A., but here in Rio he started to get into acoustic guitar and writing these tunes that tend to have some Brazilian accent. But I get to use all sorts of rhythms ... we've got samba, baiao, 6/8 waltz, tango, rock, fuck. It's really fun, interesting instrumental music. I guess this is true "world music" for lack of a better term ... an American, an Israeli playing music in Brasil, with a Brazilian istrumentation.

We just spent 3 or 4 days recording tunes for a demo in my apt. He splits for vacation in Israel for about a month next week, so we wanted to document what we've done so far. We're talking about looking for some gigs to play and trying to make a serious CD ... invite some special guests, etc.. We want to play the stuff for friends first and sort of "test" the stuff out on an audience.

Well, we'll see. At the very least we're having a lot of fun working on this stuff ... a great creative outlet. Yuval says I've put new life into the tunes and I'm thrilled to have this kind of material to sink my teeth into ... it gives me a LOT of creative options for the pandeiro, something I've really been wanting to find.

Stay tuned.

Posted by Scott at 09:55 PM