terça feira trio

A sidewalk café in Ménilmontant, on a Tuesday…

It is one of those days when the timid Parisian sun caresses the district's cosmopolitan crowd, and when a soft breeze manages to outshine the rumbling of the métro. A day-after a concert for Fernando Cavaco, Sergio Krakowski and Ricardo Herz. The (re)union of Paris, Rio and Saõ Paulo, all sitting at the same table: such is the very urban sound of Terça Feira Trio.

Their music draws its timelessness from the repertoire of the choro. Yet in Paris the three guys have been feeding on jazz and music from the world over, scouring the city's scenes – on any day of the week, for that matter.

The daring and delicate cavaquinho challenges the melodies of the violin on a percussive tapestry neatly woven by the pandeiro's jingles. Audiences can but be swept away on this musical voyage, until – who knows – the ineffable is revealed.

The sound of Terça Feira Trio therefore slips into the interstices of traditional Brazilian rhythms and unfolds itself in the cross-cultural present. Between folk and erudite music, samba hues with shades of forró freely flirt with jazz.

Here is their reading of music. It links both sides of the Atlantic and it is in their image: modern, mischievous and virtuoso.

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Terça Feira Trio by David Linx:

“Terça Feira” means Tuesday – a day that pretty much heralds the middle of the week, a day that suggests and takes a glimpse ahead at the 5 days prior to the ineluctable return of Monday, which completes the cycle before Tuesday dawns again.

This is a day that softly unveils the reasons that set people's hearts aflutter to a frenzied, melancholy or joyous rhythm, in search of a few precious notes. It is also a bridge between what has just started and what is left to come, a moment of thought – suspended, as are the 11 tracks of this album immersed in urban folk sound and choro storytelling. The Terça Feira trio recreates the roots of the choro with their rendering of Pixinguinha's songs; they also make theirs the works of more current authors, such as Chico Buarque, the wonderful singer Mayra Andrade and Patrice Larose – not to mention the trio's violinist Ricardo Herz. Theirs is resolutely music for the world, yet it never falls into the world music routine.

The Terça Feira Trio is Fernando Cavaco, Ricardo Herz and Sergio Krakowski: three musicians blissfully at the top of their art, with a true desire to play together – technique and mastery totally serving their music. From the language of the heart, they have borrowed an alphabet that invites people, whether or not Brazilian, to share and communicate with them in perfect rhythmic counterpoint.

The list of guest musicians – all of them "non-Brazilians" and which I'm pleased to be part of alongside Vincent Segal, Gabriele Mirabassi and Steve Shehan – highlights the trio's choice of a different, unusual crossroads for a rereading of the choro, Brazil's first urban music.

There is no risk here of jeopardising Brazilian identity, for it is deeply rooted and its branches can therefore freely play with the wind or even storms – so long as they remain part of the wonderful musical mechanics engineered by this trio, where real and dream folklores rub shoulders and come face to face, fluidly and felicitously.

Music – and more generally art – is and will always be political when its rhythmical course bears witness to its time, as can be heard in the slower pieces on this album. Precision is decisive in telling a story. It speaks for itself while Terça Feira Trio is actually speaking about us.

David Linx