“There’s so much to admire about her: an impeccable control over a light gauge voice, a precise sense pitch, a mastery of the complexity and freshness in bossa nova rhythm.” - Ben Ratliff

Brazilian Music Profile: Rosa Passos

In her native Brazil, Rosa Passos is known and loved as “a feminine João Gilberto.” For a singer/songwriter who carries the soulful cool of bossa nova into a new age, there can be no higher compliment. Mingling the classics of Gilberto, Jobim, Barroso and other masters of Brazilian song with her own enchanting works, Passos sings in a sweet, warm, totally-in-tune voice that the Los Angeles Times has hailed as “sounding a bit like the legendary Elis Regina but with the rhythmic articulation of Ella Fitzgerald.”

That voice and that style, which Brazilian fans have known for years, are pleasures international audiences are now getting to know a little better. Rosa Passos signed to record for Sony Classical/Odyssey in 2004, and her label debut Amorosa features songs included on João Gilberto’s classic 1977 album Amoroso, along with other titles closely associated with him, as well as a Gershwin favorite (“’S Wonderful”), the sensuous Spanish classic “Besame Mucho” and her own tribute to Gilberto, “Essa é pr’o João.”

The release of Amorosa come in the wake of two powerful collaborations Passos enjoyed with cellist Yo-Yo Ma for the label, on the double-Grammy-winning Obrigado Brazil and its sequel Yo-Yo Ma Obrigado Brazil Live in Concert. (Jazz clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera and percussionist Cyro Baptista, who also appeared on these recordings, join a gallery of stellar Brazilian jazz musicians as Passos’s guest artists on Amorosa.) Following the release of Obrigado Brazil, the singer/songwriter joined Ma and the other musicians from the recording on a critically acclaimed world tour.

“Perhaps best of all, singer/guitarist Rosa Passos’s sweet-voiced renderings of Jobim were marvelous updatings of classic bossa nova, superbly demonstrating the subtle interplay between the voice and guitar this is the foundation of this enduringly appealing genre,” the Los Angeles Times wrote, when the Obrigado Brazil tour played the Hollywood Bowl.

Rosa Passos grew up surrounded by music in the city of Salvador, in the Brazilian state of Bahia. Inspired by João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim – the godfathers of bossa nova – she switched from piano to guitar and began writing her own material as a teenager. Passos’s songs (written with her longtime lyricist Fernando de Oliveira) appeared on her first recording in 1979. After taking several years off to devote herself to her husband and children, she returned to performing and recording in 1985, jump-starting a career that has been on the upswing ever since.

Especially since her American debut in 1996 (at the invitation of Oscar Castro Neves) with a sensational performance in a “Jazz at the Bowl” concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Rosa Passos has developed an ever-growing international following. Also in 1996, the singer/songwriter performed in Japan for the first time with saxophonist Sadao Watanabe, which led to successful appearances in Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, as well as Colombia, Cuba, Uruguay and the U.S. In the years since, Passos has toured Japan five times, collaborated with Ivan Lins and Chucho Valdez in a memorable Cubadisco show in Havana, and wowed a packed crowd at New York’s Lincoln Center for a Tribute to Elis Regina show. In 1999, she was invited to perform during the 50th anniversary celebration of German democracy, joining Paquito D’Rivera and the WDR Big Band for shows in Bonn and Cologne that featured her own songs and classic Brazilian tunes. The same year, she performed at the Jazz Festival Bern.

In Brazil, where she has built an impressive catalogue of recordings, Rosa Passos has been one of the stars of producer Almir Chediak’s “Words and Melody” project, a series of recordings honoring the legacies of the great Brazilian songwriters. Her discs of the songs of Jobim and Ary Barroso were instant hits, in Brazil and internationally, featuring distinctive, revelatory new interpretations of such worldwide hits as Barroso’s “Aquarela do Brasil” and Jobim’s “Desafinado,” “Samba de Uma Nota Só” (One Note Samba) and “Garota de Ipanema” (The Girl From Ipanema).

“Nobody plays bossa nova like Rosa Passos since the master João Gilberto,” El País proclaimed. All About Jazz wrote of Passos, “She has done what so many vocalists have attempted since the days of Astrud Gilberto, but failed to do: she’s made the bossa nova sexy again … Her voice, which is at once exotic and strangely familiar, is magnificent. Her interpretations of various bossa nova chestnuts are sublime. She takes these over-familiar songs and makes them sound brand new again.”