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Players
Leonardo
Cioglia ;
Fundamental
Storyteller
Bassist Leonardo Cioglia celebrated
his 38th birthday last November
on the narrow bandstand of
Manhattan’s compact The Bar
Next Door. Veteran drum master
Duduka Da Fonseca sat on
Cioglia’s right. To the bassist’s left
was young guitar hero Mike
Moreno. Various friends and fans
packed the room, and as the second
set progressed, Cioglia called upon
a few of them—saxophonists
Marcus Strickland and David
Binney, and vocalist Maucha
Adnet—to sit in.
Three nights later at the Zinc
Bar, Cioglia convened Moreno,
saxophonist John Ellis, harmonica
player Gregoire Maret and drummer
Adam Cruz to celebrate
another milestone—the release of
his self-produced debut, Contos
(Quizamba). On the disc, a worldclass
sextet performs 10 Cioglia
originals marked by strong
melodies, up–to-the-minute harmony
and a melange of pan-
American rhythms. As often happens in New
York, the Zinc Bar unit navigated the repertoire
with strong collective cohesion and individual
derring-do.
“I write the compositions to stand alone
regardless of the instrumentation,” said Cioglia,
best known as a samba jazz first-caller, and
increasingly visible by dint of regular work with
Da Fonseca’s quintet and trumpeter Claudio
Roditi. “It’s great to play other people’s music,
but to write original music is fundamental as a
form of expression.”
The album’s title (contos is the Portuguese
word for “stories”) signifies Cioglia’s intention
to pay homage to his maternal grandparents,
recently deceased, who were both in their
nineties in the early ’00s when he thought of
the project.
“My grandfather was a tropeiro, a Brazilian
cowboy from Minas Gerais who built his life
from the bottom up,” Cioglia said. “My grandmother
was his first cousin. She married him
when she was 15, and they had 16 children. He
had so many tales to tell, so many interesting
things to say about life. I wanted to give them an
album that depicted my vision of them. Of
course, they would have related more to a sound
from their region. Now, my grandparents are so
much of who I am and how I see Brazil, and
I’ve studied that music. But I don’t live it. The
music I’ve chosen to live is jazz, and jazz incorporates
elements from everywhere.”
Cioglia can similarly find the sources of his
jazz sensibility within his lineage. His Italian
paternal grandfather played viola in an orchestra,
and his father, an engineer who had studied philosophy
and was at one point a Catholic priest,
played violin seriously. After singing in a children’s
choir until his voice changed, Cioglia—
who attended an American school in Brasilia,
his home town—took up electric bass and
played punk rock. Jazz entered the picture when
he heard Charles Mingus’ Pithecanthropus
Erectus and Jaco Pastorius in Weather Report,
and in 1993, after a year as an exchange student
in a British Columbia high school with a good
jazz program, and a subsequent eight months
back home during which he focused on the historic
Brazilian canon, he enrolled in Berklee
College of Music, where he immersed himself in
the codes of hardcore jazz.
“I realized quickly that I could study bebop
forever, but ultimately I’m a kid from Brasilia,”
Cioglia said. “I wasn’t born in Rio in a favela
[slum]. I needed to research more of my country’s
music to find myself within that.”
During Cioglia’s remaining years in
Boston, he engaged in serious research on “all
kinds of Brazilian music so I could pick what
stuck with me” and formed a band—the young
Anat Cohen was a member—with which he
could “take all this research and play instrumental
music with it.” He took a position with
an Internet startup, which brought him to New
York in 1999. When it folded in 2001, Cioglia
decided to refocus on music. He found smallvenue
band gigs, supplementing them with
lucrative deejay jobs. After one such event,
Brazilian guitarist Guillerme Monteiro introduced
Cioglia to Da Fonseca, launching the
sequence of events by which Cioglia joined
New York’s mix of informed musical
hybridizers.
“I’m less a soloist than a band bass player—I
like putting together a project and playing a bass
part,” Cioglia said. “I could record three or four
albums, not only original music, but my arrangements
of standards—for example, composers
from Minas Gerais or the music of Chico
Buarque. Hopefully people will think, ‘Wow,
this guy is connected with roots, but he’s also
connected to his present and calls upon musicians
who are always thinking ahead.’”
—Ted Panken
JACK VARTOOGIAN/FRONTROWPHOTOS
22 DOWNBEAT March 2010