• Track Listing

When an artist and his work break through the frontiers of his home territory and achieve wide international acclaim, people tend to talk about the benefits - of which there are many - while generally ignoring at least one prejudice: the distorted and unjust musical generalization of a na-tion. In the case of Brazil, this has happened before. In the 1960s, the record Getz/Gilberto - which brought the Brazilian artists João Gilberto, Tom Jobim and Astrud Gilberto together with the North American saxophonist Stan Getz - sold millions of copies, won Grammies and stayed on the Bill-board charts for almost 100 weeks. The consequences? Brazil became The Country of Bossa No-va, as if the country transformed into a commercial label, a sort of picture postcard of a single musical style. That phenomenon was no novelty. Years earlier, Carmen Miranda hypnotized Hollywood and, be-cause of this, not only Brazil but all of South America was reduced to one single thing: the reduc-tionist stereotype of cheerful, festive, carnivalesque, naïve and simplistic Samba. As if it were possible to translate into just one musical genre a country of continental dimensions which has produced countless styles such as forró, choro, maracatu, samba, baião, waltz, maxixe, toada, embolada, catira, ijexá, pagode, jongo, repente, etc., all of them created for the most varied instrumental formations and also in the form of song. With the intension of revealing to the world a submerged part of this musical iceberg called Brazil, the duo formed by Daphne Oltheten (violin) and Henrique Gomide (piano) have plunged into the works of composers still little known around the world. Part of the beauty gathered by the violinist and pianist are the 12 tracks on this album which couldn't be christened with any other name than Brasis - Portuguese for Brazils.