Naná Vasconcelos / THE INCREDIBLE NANÁ WITH AGUSTÍN PEREYRA LUCENA

The vertiginous chain of feats that followed the recording of this album include several Grammy awards, a string of albums for the leading contemporary music label ECM, work with Don Cherry, Pat Metheny, Egberto Gismonti, Caetano Veloso and too many other top-class musicians to be listed here, several original soundtracks as well as being elected best percussionist by the critics poll of the prestigious jazz magazine Down Beat for seven consecutive years. Agustín Pereyra Lucena, then a young musician who had just released his debut album and received praise by the great Vinicius de Moraes, would pursue a life-long career in search of the perfect chord and became the de facto ambassador of Brazilian music in Argentina. Despite having several excellent albums under his belt, he rarely played outside of Argentina and therefore remained relatively unknown to the wider public, but his skills didn’t go unnoticed to visiting Brazilian musicians like Dori Caymmi, Toquinho or Ed Motta, some of whom he befriended or shared a stage with. The recording of this spontaneous, one-off affair remains a witness of what this relationship between two gifted musicians could have yielded had it lasted a bit longer.