Luciana Souza Trio: Active imaginations

On stage at University of Richmond’s Modlin Center last night, Luciana Souza introduced her colleagues as “two of the most creative and soulful musicians I know.” As creative and soulful as guitarist Romero Lubambo and percussionist Cyro Baptista are, they’re made whole by Souza, the dynamic vocalist, improviser, lyricist (in Portuguese and English), and storyteller whose tone is sweet and presence is captivating.

February 9, 2010; 10:05 AM • by Dean Christesen

Photo by Eleonora Alberto

Luciana Souza Trio featuring Romero Lubambo, guitar, and Cyro Baptista, percussion
Camp Concert Hall, Modlin Center for the Arts
Monday, February 8, 2010

In just over 90 minutes, the trio — either as a whole or in solo or duo form — played a varied program that always came back to the samba. Quick paced tunes full of syncopations and soul showed off Souza’s lightning fast rhythmic singing and perfectly executed leap- and skip-filled melodies. Lubambo made his way with ease, melding bass line and choppy commentary into a final product that was never without momentum. And Baptista was a playful and gyrating character behind his percussion set-up and “made himself at home” mess of shakers, cocopods, and more scattered at his feet.

The set began like Souza’s latest album, Tide, which also includes Lubambo and Baptista among others. “Adeus America & Eu Quero Um Samba” demonstrated the heavy sense of groove that each member individually embodies and that is multiplied when all three come together. Baptista’s off-the-wall tendencies with his broomstick-like striking apparatuses and collection of drums, cymbals, cowbells, and woodblocks, could barely be contained. His color commentary while contributing to the groove always animated the already exuberant music.

In the first half of the set, the trio covered other songs from the album: the poppy and richly orchestrated (despite the stripped down instrumentation) “Fire and Wood”; the dark and raga-tinged “Chuva”; “Sorriu Para Mim,” the samba in which a fast unison passage brought the packed house to cheers and applause; and “Tide,” an E.E. Cummings poem set to music. Prefacing the latter, Souza explained that she’s drawn to Cummings’s “oddness of syntax,” which she said illustrates the “shape of love.” Seated at the piano, her and her colleagues’ bare-bones arrangement accentuated the melody’s urgency.

A piece in the middle took on many forms and many themes. Pausing in the middle of the song, Souza informed us that we “have to imagine” this detailed scene in arid northeastern Brazil. Going on with musical interludes to describe a man who goes crazy riding a horse for fifteen days, Souza and the band continued psychedelically until it came to a dramatic close.

Following a few percussion-less duets with Souza and Lubambo, Baptista showed us his stuff. All of it. Equipped with a delay effect in his microphone, he sang and played with nearly every one of his instruments, including mouth harps, squeeze toys that simulated sounds of the rainforest, and the single-stringed struck (not bowed) berimbau. Needless to say (see “playful and gyrating character” above), there was laughter from the audience practically throughout his sparsely textured yet entertaining solo.

The trio is incredibly capable of sounding like way more than three people. Each a master of their instrument and each intimately comfortable with one another, they’re brothers and sister in music, full of soul and saudade.

Visit Luciana Souza, Romero Lubambo, and Cyro Baptista on the web.