Pianist Antonio Adolfo brings jazz, swing and Brazilian style to the refined authorial basket of the album 'Balaios'

Antonio Adolfo launches the album 'Balaios' on July 17th, with new recordings of nine original songs released between 1965 and 2018
Alexandre Moreira / Disclosure
♫ ALBUM REVIEW
Title: Balaios
Artist: Antonio Adolfo
Quote: ★ ★ ★ ★
♬ At 79 years old, Rio de Janeiro pianist and composer Antonio Adolfo has maintained an average of one album per year, generally releasing conceptual albums.
Encouraged by the excellent reception of the previous album "Carnaval - The songs were so beautiful" (2025), in which he redesigned the harmonies of sambas, marches and frevos with a revelry spirit, Adolfo presents on July 17th "Balaios", a more varied album in which he revisits nine songs from the original songbook he has been composing since the 1960s. These are songs released between 1965 and 2018.
The title "Balaios" refers to the baskets constructed by hand - with natural fibers such as vines and straw - and carried on their heads by the Brazilian people with food and various goods.
From a philosophical perspective, the baskets carry ancestry and resilience - and it is in this sense that Adolfo accommodates in "Balaios" the swing and soul of jazz between sambas, baião, waltzes, ballads and samba-funk. Jazz is the filter through which the composer passes his original work full of Brazilianness throughout the album's nine tracks, also published in physical CD format.
In "Balaios", Antonio Adolfo (piano, arrangements and musical direction) is the leader of the nonet formed by the instrumentalist with musicians André Dantas (percussion), Danilo Sinna (alto sax), Jessé Sadoc (trumpet and flugelhorn), Jorge Helder (bass), Lula Galvão (guitar and guitar), Marcelo Martins (tenor sax and flute), Rafael Barata (drums and percussion) and Rafael Rocha (trombone).
In tune and in harmony, especially because the musicians are already recurrent in Antonio Adolfo's discography, the group already shows what they came for in "3D blues" (1965), the song that opens the album "Balaios" with a vibrant mix of swing and samba-jazz with a touch of baião.
Five of the nine songs brought together by Antonio Adolfo in "Balaios" are signed solely by the composer. However, even though "Balaios" is an entirely instrumental album, the other four also bear the signature of Tibério Gaspar (11 September 1943 - 15 February 2017), Adolfo's fundamental lyricist partner, especially in the period from 1967 to 1970.
This is the case of "Claudia", the theme from the soundtrack of the film "Ascension and Fall of a Flirt" (1970), re-presented on the album "Balaios" with refined lightness in recording that highlights the strong influence of bossa nova in Adolfo's music, complete with the guitar playing of Californian musician Thomas Rotella. This is also the case with "Vision / Visão" (1968), a song presented in almost simultaneous recordings by singers Agostinho dos Santos (1932 - 1973) and Taiguara (1945 - 1996).
The theme of Adolfo's solitary plowing, "San Expedito / Santo Expedito" (1995) features the spare breath of Marcelo Martins' tenor sax in a recording that reiterates the fusion of jazz and Brazilian swing that underpins the album "Balaios".
Song that carries the name of the album in the title, "Sambalaio" (1989) mixes samba and samba-funk in a recording packed with winds and percussion within the broad box of Latin jazz.
This label also covers the reinterpretation of "Até que come o amor" (1980) - re-presented with the English title "Love will come" because the album "Balaios" also targets the North American public and market, usually more receptive to the sound of Antonio Adolfo - in a recording in which the pianist sets the northeastern gangs in a jazz atmosphere.
Adolfo's last partnership with Tibério Gaspar, the jazz-waltz "Meu canto / My chant" (2018) puts "Balaios" in a momentarily more serene tone in a recording made with the help of saxophonist Leo Gandelman.
Adolfo's partnership with the same Tibério Gaspar who became a finalist at the II International Song Festival (FIC) in 1967, "Caminhada" became "Journey to the interior" in a recording that reiterates Antonio Adolfo's ability to stylize baião with jazz harmonies.


With an onomatopoeic title created to evoke the sound of bass and drums in samba-funk, the theme "Zah toom toom" (1978) ends the album with the groove of the carioca genre in a recording characterized by Adolfo as samba-jazz pop. And all of this - samba, jazz, swing, swing, baião, samba-funk - is accommodated naturally by the pianist in the basket of "Balaios", a title consistent with Antônio Adolfo's journey in almost 80 years of life governed by music.
Cover of the album 'Balaios', by Antonio Adolfo
Disclosure

Source: G1

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