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R Y A N    K E B E R L E’S
C O L L E C T I V   D O   B R A S I L

Brazil’s musical ocean is vast and deep, yielding the most sumptuous of treasures to those who devotedly seek its riches. Few American jazz artists have delved as effectively and gleaned more bountifully than New York trombonist Ryan Keberle, whose third album with the São Paulo–based Collectiv do Brasil Choro das Águas celebrates the genius of Ivan Lins on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The album is the latest dispatch from a revelatory sojourn into the heart of MPB (the post–bossa nova movement known as música popular brasileira). 

With drummer Paulinho Vicente, pianist/arranger Felipe Silveira, and bassist Felipe Brisola, Collectiv do Brasil is a prolific unit featuring some of São Paulo’s most sought after accompanists. Reimagining songs by definitive MPB composers as modern jazz vehicles, Keberle and the trio have fashioned a joyously fervent Brazilian jazz realm in which the kindred musical traditions resonate together in particularly evocative frequencies. 

“They had this desire to play jazz with an American, and I had a desire to play Brazilian music,” Keberle says. “That’s what led us to put this band together. It’s really rare to find musicians fluent in both of those languages.”

Choro das Águas follows the model established by the project’s acclaimed 2022 debut Sonhos da Esquina, a ravishing celebration of Milton Nascimento, Toninho Horta, and the landmark Minas Gerais–centered Clube da Esquina collective. They followed up with 2023’s Considerando, an exhilarating plunge into the songbook of the beloved and pervasively influential composer, guitarist, and vocalist Edu Lobo (which happened to coincide with his 80th birthday). Lins was an obvious next step.

Among the post-bossa generation, Lins stands alone among his peers when it comes to crafting songs irresistible to artists drawn to sumptuous jazz harmonies. The only Brazilian musician to ever win an “album of the year” Latin Grammy (for 2004’s Cantando Histórias), he’s been a pop star at home since the early 1970s. A major contributor to the jazz repertoire, Lins has written several bona fide standards recorded hundreds of jazz artists and beyond, from Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Quincy Jones, and Dianne Reeves to Patti Austin, Sting, and Chaka Khan. 

Still, upon hearing Choro das Águas, Lins emailed a mutual friend with evident approval, writing “Ouvi o disco todo. Muito bom mesmo!!!! Tocam muito. E têm estilo próprio. Jazz de 1a linha!!! Adorei!!!” (I listened to the entire album. Very good indeed!!!! They play a lot. And they have their own style. First class jazz!!! I loved it!!!)

In preparing to record Choro das Águas Keberle listened to every album released by Lins, including several never reissued on CD that are only available via YouTube. He ended up focusing on the 1970s, specifically “his first three or four albums,” Keberle says. “Like Milton Nascimento’s early stuff, one of the things I’m drawn to is the way Lins drew just as much from rock, folk, and pop music as MPB and jazz. There’s a youthful energy to it and they knew they were onto something radically new and beautiful.”

Choro das Águas opens with the samba-powered “Rei do Carnaval,” the first of three pieces from Lins’s fourth album, Modo Livre (1974). Keberle’s arrangement kicks off the project with a blast of beauty, hugging the perfectly crafted song and making the most of the exquisite bridge. Bassist Felipe Brisola’s first contribution to the band’s ever-expanding book is also from Modo Livre, “Essa Maré,” a party song turned into a consummate jazz tune designed for blowing. And Silveira’s sensuous setting for Lins’s “Tens” turns into an epic journey wedded to Lyle Mays’s “Long Life,” a medley that returns to the Modo Livre tune for a graceful conclusion. 

Keberle devised an open section for collective improvisation on “Noites Sertanejas,” a piece largely unknown in the U.S. from 1979’s A Noite. With an assist from Silveira, Keberle unwound the tightly structured piece “to come up with my own solo sections. We did several versions, and every time the free improvised passage in the middle was very different.” 

Long before he started playing with Collectiv do Brasil, Keberle paid tribute to Lins’s harmonic vocabulary with his powerfully swinging tune “Quintessence,” which he’s recorded several times before (most recently with his octet on the opening track of the 2024 Posi-Tone album Bright Moments). “Choro das Águas,” a Silveira arrangement, is Keberle’s favorite Lins tune, and the pianist reimagined the album’s title track as an anthem, complete with ecstatic background vocals and handclaps, and a coda that takes it into unexpected emotional terrain. 

Silveira brought “Saindo de Mim” into the project, but rather than opening it up with an arrangement the group played it as a through-composed tune without any solos as Keberle’s trombone croons the melody with consummate lyricism. They gleaned “Sai de Baixo” from Lins’s 1972 album, Quem Sou Eu and Silveira’s interpretation of the rock-powered pop masterpiece turns it into “a very sophisticated arrangement with jazz-informed harmony and space for improvisation,” Keberle says. 

Silveira’s sparkling piano work is featured on the 1981 samba “Lua Cirandeira,” the most recent piece included on the album, which closes with Keberle’s “Simple Sermon,” a delectable ballad that opens with a phrase reminiscent of “When I Fall in Love.” Originally written for his group Catharsis and included on the 2014 album Into the Zone, it’s another opportunity for Keberle to croon, although he brings a rueful sanctified message to the congregation. As Lins himself declared, “First class jazz!!!”

Keberle was introduced to Lins’s music via legendary Brazilian jazz singer Elis Regina’s anthology Fascinação, which includes her 1970 hit version of the song that introduced him to the Brazilian scene, “Madalena.” Smitten with the standard, which is so ubiquitous that Keberle’s been greeted with “not again” discontent when he’s called it at Brazilian jam sessions, he did a deep dive into the tune while creating a songwriting course for Hunter College. “It’s all jazz harmonies and the song moves through many keys without feeling like it,” he says.

If one is given to astrological musings, Keberle’s affinity for Lins might not be surprising, as they both came into the world on June 16. Born in 1980 in Bloomington, Indiana, Ryan Keberle grew up in Spokane, Washington in a household suffused with music. His father Dan Keberle is a trumpeter and director of jazz studies at Whitworth University. His mother Ann Winterer is a church choir director and piano teacher who started teaching Ryan at four. By fifth grade he turned his attention to the trombone, and by high school he was a standout player in jazz and orchestral settings. 

He continued to distinguish himself in college, graduating with top honors from the Manhattan School of Music in 1999, where he studied trombone with Steve Turre and composition with Michael Abene and Manny Albam. He was also selected as the artistic director for the New York Symphony’s first youth jazz orchestra, Jazz Band Classic. Recruited by Juilliard, he studied trombone with Wycliffe Gordon and composition with David Berger, becoming one of the first musicians to earn an artist diploma in Jazz Performance from Juilliard. An avid and well-traveled educator, he’s directed the jazz program at Hunter College since 2004 and has taught the jazz trombone students at Manhattan School of Music since 2002.

As a bandleader and recording artist, Keberle is known for thriving in unorthodox settings. He first gained widespread notice with two albums by the Ryan Keberle Double Quartet, featuring piano, bass, drums, two trombones, trumpet, French horn, and tuba (an eponymous 2007 CD and 2010’s Heavy Dreaming). He went on to form Catharsis, a pianoless acoustic quartet with trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, bassist Jorge Roeder, and drummer Eric Doob that later expanded to a quintet with guitarist Camila Meza on vocals. 

“I love not having a chordal instrument,” Keberle says. “It really raises the listener’s awareness of what’s going on. It might seem like if you remove piano or guitar that it makes the music harder to follow harmonically, but sometimes I think that clutter makes it difficult to listen to jazz. Remove those chords and it simplifies the sonic experience.”

He introduced a very different sound in 2016 with the chamber jazz combo Reverso with French pianist and composer Frank Woeste and French cellist Vincent Courtois. But it was as a member of the Maria Schneider Orchestra that he connected directly with Lins. He’d just joined the orchestra in 2006 when Schneider played concerts in Rio and São Paulo, where Lins was performing at the same festival.  

“He and Maria already knew each other and she had arranged a couple of his songs, ‘Começar de Novo’ and ‘Lembra de Mim,’” Keberle says. “He sat in with the band, which was amazing.”

Years later, Keberle connected with Rafael “Garga” Alterio, a respected São Paulo singer from the 1980s and ’90s who is one of Lins’s best friends. He’s recorded all three albums with the Collectiv do Brasil at Garga’s Gargolândia Studios, which is how Lins heard the music shortly after the sessions. No critic will provide a more succinct analysis of the album. As Lins noted, “Very good indeed!!!! They play a lot. And they have their own style.”   •


Ryan Keberle’S Collectiv do Brasil: Choro das Águas
(Alternate Side Records)
Street Date: July 18, 2025

Website: https://ryankeberle.com/collectiv-do-brasil/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ryankeberlemusic 
Instagram: @ryankeberle
Twitter: @ryankeberle
TikTok: @ryankeberle
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Media Contact:
Terri Hinte
510-234-8781
hudba@sbcglobal.net

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