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Artist
Brazilian Trio
12+ albums
brazilianjazz
about
The three New York based men from Brazil that make up Brazilian Trio – pianist Helio Alves, bassist Nilson Matta and drummer Duduka Da Fonseca -- each boasts an impressive résumé of making music with the finest artists from both their native and adopted countries. Their collective experience of playing jazz and Brazilian music for many years, as sidemen and leaders of their own bands, leaves them uniquely qualified as important musicians in the field of samba jazz, an exciting brand of music that is reaching a growing number listeners in the United States, Brazil and all over the world. Helio Alves, the youngest member of the band, born to a pair of pianist parents in Sao Paulo in 1966, came to the United States at the age of eighteen to study jazz at Berklee College in Boston. Encouraged by trumpeter Claudio Roditi, he moved to New York in 1993 and later made a name for himself playing with the Brazilian brass man and Santi Debriano’s Circle Chant, as well as with Joyce, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim. Alves has performed with bossa nova icons Oscar Castro Neves and Rosa Passos, jazz greats Joe Henderson and Paquito d’Rivera and on the cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s Grammy Award winning compact disc Obrigado Brazil. The pianist remains a much in demand sideman, while also leading his own imposing trio. The band’s bassist Nilson Matta was born in São Paulo and moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1970, before migrating to New York in 1985. Best known these days as the “man in the middle” of T