Luis Barcelos at the Kennedy Center

[Amy Burcham]

OK, folks, this is some serious pleasure here!

Luis is a master improvisor with tone out the wazoo. An evening spent watching this performance yields wonderful lessons for all of us chorinho devotees. And we're in luck! He performed this evening with guitarist Caio Marcio dos Santos and drummer and percussionist Carlos Cesar Motta for the Kennedy Center Millenium Stage series, which is available here for archived viewing:

http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/videos/?id=M4395

Enjoy.

[Amy Burcham]

Looks like they are having some trouble with this upload - but that will probably be the link. Check back, worth watching.

[John Eubanks]

These are amazing players. Thank you Amy.

[Al Bergstein]

Oh, Jesus. This is fabulous...Great concert...I wonder what caused this to happen? Can we get the Brazilian embassy to sponsor this series of folks to head to the west coast????

[Doug Hoople]

Great stuff. Both of these guys are magicians, and this Kennedy Center performance only hints at what each of them can really do.

On Mike's Choro Tour to Rio in May of 2008, we got to spend about 4 or 5 hours at Semente, listening to Caio Marcio playing away, freed from playing rhythm by Zé Paulo Becker, and he spun endless and endlessly inventive lines through a whole (long) evening of choro. It was amazing to listen to the free flow of ideas, jazz-inflected but unmistakably choro, just falling from his fingers.

We were also lucky enough to be flies on the wall (quite literally) for an extended conversation between Mike and Luis, on the conference level of the Rio Sheraton overlooking the beach, in which the two of them compared notes, talked music and influences, showed each other how they did things. Luis (I believe he was 22 years old at the time) demonstrated mastery well beyond his years, and played a full range of melody, harmony, rhythm, bass freely intermixed.

We have years of pleasure waiting for us as these two great musicians find their way along new musical paths.