Album Review: WANDERLUST, ABC Jazz 518 650-2, reviewed by Tony Magee

My offering for this month is for establishments whose menus are designed to challenge their diners just a little and therefore whose musical selections might also match, whist at the same time being perfectly accessible and highly rewarding.

The album is the debut by Australian modern jazz sextet Wanderlust, however since this release the band has followed through with three more.

Starting with the lively and driving Bronte Café, the selection continues with the ethereal and hypnotic Dakar, which demonstrates influences of music from all over the world, as indeed do all the tracks. This is a world music album. There are seven more excellent tracks.

Instruments include trumpet and flugelhorn (both played by Miroslav Bukovsky, who wrote seven of the nine compositions on the album), alto sax, clarinet, trombone, didgeridoo, double bass, drums and percussion, keyboards, guitar and voice.

One of the most impressionable things about Wanderlust is the extremely high quality of playing and the beautiful freedom and space within the ensemble playing, whilst still retaining complete tightness and direction.

Wait till about 9pm, put this album on, starting with track two, and see what happens.

First published in Restaurant and Catering Magazine, April 2001

Obituary: Luiz Bonfá

Photo: Edivaldo Ferreira November 25, 1991 / Agência O Globo

By Alex Bellos

In the United States, the bossa nova tunes of the guitarist Luiz Bonfá, who has died aged 78, were recorded by Frank Sinatra, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson and Elvis Presley, yet he never achieved equivalent success in his Brazilian homeland.

His best-known works were Orpheus's Samba and Morning Of Carnival, which became jazz classics - the latter was the world's most played bossa nova until Antonio Carlos Jobim's Girl From Ipanema in 1963. For Jobim himself, Bonfá's guitar was "a little orchestra". Those two tunes had been written for Black Orpheus, the 1959 Cannes Palme D'Or winner, which brought Rio de Janeiro's carnival to an international audience, and turned Bonfá into an ambassador for suave Brazilian jazz in the northern hemisphere.

Living in the US in the 1960s, he recorded with, among others, Quincy Jones, George Benson and Sinatra (on My Way). He was also recorded by Nana Mouskouri, Julio Iglesias and Placido Domingo.

Bonfá started playing the guitar as a child in the Rio de Janeiro suburbs; as a seven-year-old, he was a regular performer at family parties. In his teens, he studied classical guitar. By the 1940s, he was a member of the Quitandinha Serenaders, one of the most popular groups of the era. One of the most technically proficient players of his generation, his refined interpretations of samba were the base for bossa nova's launch in the late 1950s.

Bonfá returned to Rio in the 1970s, where he was respected and liked, but he never achieved the domestic success of other bossa nova stars, like Joao Gilberto and Baden Powell. Many of his records were never even released in Brazil.

In recent years, his productivity slowed. His last major release, The Bonfá Magic, was recorded in 1991. In 1997, he recorded an album, Almost In Love, with the Brazilian singer Ithamara Koorax, only available over the internet.

He is survived by his third wife, and a son.

Luiz Bonfá, musician, born October 17 1922; died January 12 2001.

First published at The Guardian Australia, April 7, 2001