Brazilian Night Misfires at Bowl

There was an oddly uneven quality to the Hollywood Bowl’s “A Night in Brazil” on Wednesday. The first half of the program was devoted to yet another salute to Antonio Carlos Jobim, while the second shifted gears suddenly with the markedly un-Jobim-like music of Jorge Ben Jor.

Nothing wrong with that, in theory at least. Brazilian music is one of the most diversified cultural expressions in the world, and there is ample reason to hear and experience every aspect of it.

The devil, however, was in the details. The opening half rambled through performances featuring guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves, saxophonist Paul Winter, singer Flora Purim, percussionist Airto Moreira and pianist-singer Eliane Elias. Castro-Neves’ career traces to the bossa nova years of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and he plays the music’s intricate, rhythmic guitar style as well as anyone. But singing is not his forte, and his relatively subdued presentation--despite his excellent choice of material--failed to provide the evening with an opening spark. His duos with Winter, in which the saxophonist’s long tones dominated the melodies, misunderstood the essential interaction between rhythm, melody and harmony in the Jobim material.

Purim and her husband, Moreira, have generated plenty of musical fireworks over the last few decades. But not on this night. Purim has been best at rhythmic, jazz-tinged singing, and her efforts to sing a few of the Jobim melodies were uneven at best, verging on disaster in the frequent moments when her pitch went astray. Fortunately, Moreira brought the music into balance with one of his characteristically spirited vocal-percussion numbers.

The too-brief contributions from Elias were marred by muddy audio reproduction of her clean, eloquent piano lines. But her sensitive singing--with Castro-Neves’ guitar--of “Falando de Amor” was the subtle musical high point of the concert’s opening set.

Ben Jor, who once was known simply as Jorge Ben, has been a star in Brazil since the ‘60s; his career was revived in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s after his name change. But he is known in this country primarily as the composer of “Mas Que Nada,” the hit song by Brasil ’66.

His Bowl performance was a typical Ben Jor outing: strong, assertive singing, backed by a powerful, rock-styled backup band. But Ben Jor’s beyond-boundaries music suffered from a lack of connection with his Brazilian roots. Charismatic as his presentation may have been, it could not compare to last year’s magical “Night in Brazil” appearances by Gilberto Gil and Ivan Lins.