For fans of Gilberto and Getz, you’ll like the new album from Gendel and Nascimento
To regular readers of TNLF, the names Sam Gendel and Fabiano do Nascimento might be familiar to you. We’ve featured both musicians on the blog various times over the past five years. Fabiano has shown up on a couple of mixtapes and we featured his album Tempo dos Mestres back in 2019. While Sam has also been a regular on the website with appearances on mixtapes as well as a couple album releases (Music for Saxofone & Bass [sic], Live on the Green).
Both experimental musicians have continuously pushed their discipline — Sam has stretched the possibilities of what kind of sound a saxophone can actually make, while Fabiano mixes traditional Portuguese guitar music with a more contemporary Brazilian perspective. In hindsight, it seems obvious that both musicians would be happy collaborators. So it just made sense when I heard about their new album, The Room.
One might expect that if you put two experimental musicians together, you get something even more experimental. But the math adds up a bit differently than expected for this collaboration. Nascimento and Gendel team up to push each other to make a more traditional acoustic album; something more familiar to classically trained jazz musicians that feels timeless in a lot of ways. Rather than exploring the boundaries of their respective instruments, this album is a straight forward celebration of their craft.
Across the 10-track album, Gendel’s softly whispering soprano sax complements Nascimento’s finger-picking harmonics. The saxophone can almost sound flute-like at times while Fabiano’s 7-string classical guitar pays homage to Brazilian folk rhythms and bossa-influenced melodies.
If you like the sort of classic Latin jazz delivered by the likes of Stan Getz and João Gilberto, you’re going to like this intimate new take on the genre. The Room is out now.
