On her new recording, “The Book of Longing,” Luciana Souza marries poetry and Jazz in an idiom all her own with spare accompaniment and her uniquely atmospheric vocals to haunting effect. Souza will be performing her lyrical new songs along with some of her more Brazilian-inflected tunes at UCLA’s Royce Hall on December 1 and at New York City’s Jazz Standard, December 14-16.
Recently I sat down with Souza to talk about the new recording and the path she has carved as a vocalist and an interpreter of culture generally and poetry in particular – the lyrics on the record are poems by Leonard Cohen, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti (as well as a few of her own). And how this new recording represents her maturation not just as an artist but as a person. “I’m not making apologies anymore –which is a good thing,” Souza told me.
Souza was born in Brazil. Her parents were both musicians, songwriters who also wrote commercial jingles and had their own studio. She grew up around and among many of Brazil’s great jazz artists and is the god daughter of legendarily creative Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal.
At 18, Souza traveled to the US to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston. And although Souza has now lived in the United States for more years than she lived in Brazil, she still thinks of herself as Brazilian. “I’m still Brazilian when I speak, when I cook, the way I look. Everything about me is rice and beans and nothing else,” She said. “I feel like I celebrate Brazil more and I love Brazil more from being far from it than I would if I were there. Especially now a days when things are so turbulent there, politically and otherwise.”
Souza recalled that when she was in Boston, her mother would send her books. Among them were two books set in Brazil, one in Portuguese, called “My life as a child,” and the other in English called, “The Diary of Helena Morley” and after reading both she discovered they were the same book by American poet Elizabeth Bishop (who lived for a decade in Brazil). After that she began to read Bishop’s poetry. “She was the one really who, beyond any Brazilian poet, she showed me that the poet sees the world differently “
Souza is no stranger, as an artist, to seeing things differently. Her last album 2015’s “Speaking in Tongues” was an artistically ambitious effort. Souza had developed her own vocalizations that pushed beyond mere scat-singing to present as its own language. Having seen some of the songs performed live, it was avant-garde and breath-taking. Souza seemed to be forging a path to the future. However, it may have been a bridge too far for some audiences or rather just one language among many they wanted to hear from her. The late fashion designer Sonia Rykiel said it this way, “the problem is that they want you to be different – just not too.”
We discussed how sometimes being a foreigner gives one a greater appreciation of language and its musicality. “I have a reverence for the language and I have a reverence for any language, but I love English,” Souza told me. “I love singing in English.”
When it came time to make this album what spoke loudest to Souza was poetry. Over the years, Souza had set several poets’ works to music, including poems by Elizabeth Bishop, e.e. cummings and Gary Snyder. After “Speaking in Tongues” she’d been particularly (almost obsessively) interested in adapting several of Leonard Cohen’s poems. She had approached him but he told her that “someone else was working on those poems.” She waited three months and tried again. He said “No” again. She waited and asked again. This time he said, she could do a demo of one poem. Souza sent him the recording. “He listened, “ Souza recalled, and said, ‘Beautiful, go ahead.”
Cohen died in 2016. Souza remained fixated on the Cohen poems that she wanted to adapt. She approached Adam, Leonard’s son who, after listening to demos, granted his approval. She adapted four poems, which appear on the album Night Song, Paris, The Book, A Life, The accompaniment is spare: Each instrument follows its own clear path. The poems, by contrast, do not remain poems. Instead they become songs sent out into the world (perhaps they are “the thing with feathers”).
That was the start of “The Book of Longing.” Initially, Souza thought she would build the album like a performance, with songs of different tempos and put the Cohen songs among them. ”I’m old fashioned,” she said. “I still think that like a book the whole story needs to be told in chapters.” However, her husband, producer/musician Larry Klein, kept suggesting she find more poems. She did, writing music for poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (Alms), Emily Dickinson (We grow accustomed to the Dark), and Christina Rosetti (Remember). And then Klein said, “I think you need to be on this record.”
The album opens with her song, “These things,” that sets the tone for the album. There is a rich timber to her voice that Souza uses in her phrasing as she intones the cantatory phrase repeated in the song, “these are the books we read.” And, in effect, Souza has made a record of the poems she reads.
Poetry being sung may call to mind Jack Kerouac riffing while a jazz combo plays, or Allen Ginsberg on his concertina, or an evening of Blake’s Song of Innocence. However, what they all have in common is these were performances by poets seeking to express or extend the meaning of their works with musical accompaniment. Here, we have a musician interpreting the poems in song and music. The result is, in some ways, even more poetic. There is a precision to Souza’s work that belies her jazz setting.
Beyond that, it is no surprise that Leonard Cohen’s poems would make brilliant song lyrics but Souza makes the listener feel as if they were already songs. (Not unlike the famous saying attributed to Michelangelo’s that “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.’). That is what listening to the album is like – the poems transport us as songs and the original songs feel like they must have once been poems. This alchemy occurs because Souza’s voice so colors the work, at times languidly laying impossibly far back on the beat, and at other times lifting the spirit and taking you to those places the poems hoped to reach. There is a clarity in her phrasing and in the crystalline recording that makes the poems’ words stand out – such as when she sings in “Night Song” Cohen’s deeply atmospheric words from his poem ‘Nightingale’: I built my house beside the wood so I could hear you singing. And it was sweet, and it was good and love was all beginning” or Cohen’s more ironic lines such as “I’m living on pills, for which I thank God.”
There is a wistful quality to her singing on this album – the sound of time passing. On songs like “Daybreak,” which is one of her own compositions or “Alms,” a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, there is a seeming simplicity in her singing that draws us in, even as the music surrounding it becomes more textured. When Souza breaks into her abstract vocalizations it seems to lift the whole song, and take us away, as if on a flying carpet.
As for the music, Souza’s notion was to keep it simple. “I’ve written a lot of very complex music in the past, but with this music, my focus was to make the music as simple as possible and repetitive and poem-like. I really wanted songs, [and] real melodies….”
Souza enlisted Brazilian guitarist Chico Pinheiro and bassist Scott Colley, who both have experience in playing in Jazz duets and trios. Souza and Colley have played together many times; Pinheiro was a more recent collaborator. They tried out the material at a New York City performance and receiving a positive response, Souza decided to go into the studio to record.
Larry Klein, the Grammy Award winning producer and musician was there at every step of the record’s conception and production. Beyond the fact that they are married, Klein is the right producer for an artist making jazz vocal records, just as Souza is the right artist for Klein to produce, given that he has great success producing singer-songwriters.
As Souza explained, as a producer Klein brings a great subtlety to what he does. He recommends, he suggests, it all seems very casual. However, he has such knowledge from having produced records with everyone from Herbie Hancock, to Madeline Peyroux to Joni Mitchell, that he knows exactly what he is doing. This is all the more true when he starts mixing the music. It is a conversation – As Souza explained, Klein makes suggestions but doesn’t hold you to them if you disagree. And, in the end, their collaboration works, much as their marriage does, because it comes from a place of respect. They met when they were already adults, already artists, already professionals. They knew each other’s work. They waited two years after being married to work on a project together (Souza’s 2004 “The New Bossa Nova”). Their collaboration continues to this day. And for this album, Souza recorded the songs live, but Klein would make suggestions as to what to add, how to mix, yielding a very personal intimate recording.
“This is the book,” Souza sings on one of the songs, and on a profound level, Souza is a translator. An interpreter of Jazz and of poetry. She has reached a place, and an age, she said where she no longer feels a need as an artist, or a as a woman, to make apologies. “I’m no Leonard Cohen and I have no illusion that I am or ever will be,” Souza said. But her adaptations – translations if you will – , in her words, “Pair up nicely.” In making this record, Souza was resolved to make the songs and music that best represent her.
Souza’s performances in Los Angeles and New York, she says, are “Invitations to my whole world.” Celebrations of poetry as well as the Brazilian rhythms, narration, instrumentals that reflect the words and music she worships and the transcendental interpretations she has now created in song on “The Book of Longing.”
Luciana Souza’s new album is, “The Book of Longing.” She will be performing on December 1rst at UCLA’s Royce Hall. For tickets, go to Caps.UCLA.edu. And in New York on December 16 and 17 at the Jazz Standard. For tickets go to Ticketweb.com.
Copyright © 2018 Tom Teicholz
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