Luciana Souza
“In describing her choice of material for Tide, Luciana Souza says “geography and language have played a big part in my life. Feeling uprooted and disoriented, but also aspiring to being centered and calm – a real dichotomy of feelings, but somehow thriving in the memories and in the unknown. Poetry and music have carried me around, as has love.”
Luciana Souza has moved around. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, transplanted to Boston to study, followed by a decade immersed in the Jazz scene in New York City, and now a few years on the West Coast, in Los Angeles, Souza knows well that the only modicum of peace in the face of all of the movement is to appreciate the feeling of “saudade” that accompanies it.
Tide is Luciana’s second collaboration with her husband, Larry Klein. They chose to open the record with the anthem of Brazilians living abroad longing to go back. “Eu Quero um Samba” describes an expatriate Brazilian so homesick that the samba is calling his name. Her honest, simple, yet dexterous rendition of the song is an example of Souza’s acutely rhythmic and percussive signature, along with an agile sense of syncopation. Along with this, like all great jazz singers, she makes it all sound relaxed and conversational. This song begins what could be described as a song cycle concerning the simultaneous pull back towards where one has come from, in towards where one presently sits, and forward towards where one feels they are going.
The several songs that follow are original compositions of Luciana in collaboration with Larry Klein and David Batteau, and in some cases, musical adaptations that she and Larry Klein did of texts by the poet e.e.cummings. The songs sequentially explore the power of nostalgia, impermanence, and love. “Fire and Wood’s” lyric emanates from images taken from Souza’s youth in a large Brazilian city, and “Our Gilded Home” speaks of the difficulty of change and growth, both internal and in relationships.
”Love – Poem 65,” the first cummings poem, is a meditation on one of the only things one can aspire to manifest continuously through life. In “Once Again,” Souza sings of the failing to live up to the standards we try to hold ourselves to, the Sisyphean undulations of trying to approach the human relationship from the highest place within oneself. “Tide,” the other e.e.cummings adaptation, speaks to the ever-present vicissitudes of love and life.