For Concert Guitarist, ‘Samba Runs in Your Blood’ : Music: Propelled by the rhythms of his native Brazil, Laurindo Almeida successfully combines classical and jazz.

Laurindo Almeida, intent on a memory that seems to be floating just out of sight, carefully cradles his guitar while playing the familiar strains of a Chopin Etude.

“The first musical sound I heard was my mother playing the piano,” the 72-year-old recalled during a recent interview at his home in the hills above Sherman Oaks. “She played little things, like the Chopin, and she played them very well. In those days, there was no TV, no radio in Brazil. The piano was the only instrument I heard.”

Almeida has come a long way from his birthplace in the coastal city of Santos near Sao Paulo, Brazil. From his living room, with a commanding view of the San Fernando Valley and the San Gabriel Mountains as a backdrop, the longtime American citizen explained how the land of his birth has affected his career.

“You come from Brazil, the samba runs in your blood,” he said. “You can finish playing a bop piece and still feel that rhythm.” Successfully combining jazz and classical music, Almeida has established himself as one of America’s principal concert guitarists. His performance last week at Yorba Linda’s Forum Theater with his wife of almost 20 years, vocal soprano Deltra Eamon, was a pleasant combination of classical music, show tunes and jazz numbers--with the rhythms of Brazil serving as an ever-present touchstone.

“What I do is an amalgam. It’s a brilliant marriage, like all this has been,” he said, gesturing toward his wife and around the room. “It doesn’t bother me at all to be thought of as a jazz guitar player rather than a classical player. I’m both, taking from classical and jazz and adding a measure of jazz samba.”

Almeida’s career has been a long string of successes since his first American job with the Stan Kenton Orchestra in 1947. He made landmark, Brazilian-influenced recordings with alto saxophonist Bud Shank in the ‘50s, played chamber jazz with the Modern Jazz Quartet and was a founding member of the L.A. Four with Shank, Ray Brown and Shelly Manne in the ‘70s. He was the dominant Hollywood studio guitarist during the ‘50s and ‘60s, playing for hundreds of films ranging from “A Star Is Born” with Judy Garland to “The Godfather.”

“I just got a list from the union of all the films that I’ve played in, and there were names on that list that I didn’t even know that I had done,” he confessed. “When they bring the music into the studio, they don’t always put on the titles and sometimes you don’t even know what film you are playing for.”

The story of how Almeida first picked up the guitar shows the kind of mettle that helped carry him out of Brazil and into America. His father had forbidden him to play the guitar; maybe that’s what made the proposition so attractive to the 7-year-old boy. “When my mother turned her back, I grabbed my father’s guitar and would go into the back yard and see what I could do. Then I would bring the guitar back and carefully hang it back on the wall.

“I would play the Chopin that I heard from my mother, other little pieces. It wasn’t written, I just kept it up here,” he said, pointing to his head.

Almeida was playing for radio station orchestras in Sao Paulo by the time he was 14. In 1936, he traveled to Europe, playing aboard ship for spending cash. In Paris, he met and was duly impressed by Django Reinhardt. He returned to Brazil, only to find himself homesick for a place he had never been.

“I think I must have been born in America,” he said, “because I missed it and had never been there. Isn’t that funny?” Actually, it was America’s music that had stolen Almeida’s heart. “I learned about it from jazz charts and recordings. I was an avid collector of Fats Waller. I just love his music. Of course, I had a lot of things recorded in this country: Mantovani with the big, big orchestra, David Rose. . . .” Almeida was enjoying success as a composer and soon accumulated enough in royalties to make the move to the United States.

But Brazil continued to figure into his music.

In 1953, he did his series of landmark recordings with sax man Shank (now out of print) that preceded Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s “Jazz Samba” by almost 10 years. “We were playing bossa nova before the word bossa nova was invented,” Almeida said.

“I’ve been trying to introduce Brazilian composers to this country ever since I’ve been here,” he said, “so (on) every album that I do there’s someone you haven’t heard yet.” Supporting this contention, he named a host of Brazilian composers such as Radames Gnattali, Pixinguinha and Ernesto Nazareth, whose works he has recorded.

His own compositions include an Oscar winner (his score to the short film “The Magic Pear Tree”). His “Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra,” recorded with the Los Angeles Orchestra de Camera, is available on the Concord Concerto label. He has arranged untold numbers of classical pieces for guitar--providing some, like Claude Debussy’s well-known “Claire de Lune” with a samba beat.

“I love to write and also transcribe,” he said. “I do most of my transcriptions when I travel on the plane. As soon as the plane takes off, I open my little table and start writing. Most of my catalogue was done on the plane.”

He still practices four or five hours a day, and does five hundred sets of hand exercises before going to bed each night. “Guitar playing is like physical work,” he said. “You have to practice. You have to keep your hands and muscles moving.”

Guitarists Laurindo Almeida, Sharon Isbin and Larry Coryell play Friday at 8 p.m. at South Coast Community Church, 5120 Bonita Canyon Road, Irvine. Tickets: $12. Information: (714) 856-5000 or (714) 856-6379.