“João Donato saw music in everything,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wrote when the pianist passed away in July 2023 at the age of 88.  “He innovated, he passed through samba, bossa nova, jazz, forro and in the mixture of rhythm built something unique.”

Raised in the Northern Brazilian city of Rio Branco in the landlocked Amazonian state of Acre, Donato was already playing accordion proficiently by the age of eight. By the time his family moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1950 when he was sixteen, Donato had switched to piano and was soon fronting his own band playing jazz infused samba, while meeting other future icons of Brazilian music. 

Amongst these jazz obsessed teenagers was another new arrival to Rio, João Gilberto. The guitarist later commented that Donato’s rhythmic playing  inspired the syncopations he used as he became known as the “pope of bossa nova”. And it was as one of the founders of this nascent movement alongside Gilberto and others like Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim that Donato came to prominence. The 1965 album “New Sound of Brazil” arranged by Claus Ogerman, who had worked on Antonio Carlos Jobim’s US debut, cemented his reputation. 

Through his association with saxophonist and flautist Bud Shank, Donato helped ignite the Bossa Nova global explosion while living in the US. The result was the 1965 album “Bud Shank & His Brazilian Friends” that ranks beside the better known “Getz/Gilberto” record as a milestone in pan US/Brazilian music of the era. 

Other US based artists Donato recorded with during this time included Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, and Cal Tjader, with the pianist appearing on two of the vibraphonists best known sessions “Solar Heat” from 1968 and “The Prophet” from 1969. 

By the late sixties though, the modernist who revelled in pushing the boundaries of Brazilian music became restless again. Inspired by the sounds of the era – from psychedelic rock and post bop to James Brown funk, he recorded “A Bad Donato” for Bob Krasnow’s Blue Thumb imprint at A&M Studio in Los Angeles 1970. 

Sandwiched between albums by Love and Gabor Szabo, it would be Donato’s most progressive work yet, with Krasnow giving him free rein to make the record he wanted. “At the time, music was very raw, noisier,” Donato recalled in the liner notes to the 2004 re-issue. “The Beatles were happening, shouting out their lyrics, and Jimi Hendrix … who shouted with his guitar. And I made the noisiest record I can ever remember making.”

“A Bad Donato” was firmly in time with the era, inspired by Donato’s experimentation with psychedelics and producer Emil Richards’ interest in astrology. The vibraphonist and percussionist’s resume included sessions with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Charles Mingus. He had also been a member of psych rock band The Zodiac whose 1967 album “Cosmic Sounds” for Elektra, complete with spoken word passages about star signs, has become something of a cult classic. By the time of “A Bad Donato”, Richards immersion in astrology saw him insisting on tracks on the album being recorded around certain moon phases, much like Arthur Russell many years later.

The Eumir Deodato arranged album featured Donato on Fender Rhodes alongside a heavyweight line up of Brazilian players including guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves and drummer Dom Um Romão alongside US players such as Bud Shank and reeds man Ernie Watts. Best known for the jazz funk dancers “The Frog” (first recorded by Sérgio Mendes in 1967 and given lyrics by Caetano Veloso in “A rã” from the Gal Costa 1974 album “Canta”) and “Almas Irmãs’” “A Bad Donato” has been a constant source of inspiration for DJs like Gilles Peterson and Colin Curtis. 

It would prove both a pivotal album for Donato and Brazilian fusion more generally. It led to Donato becoming musical director for Gal Costa and recording three albums of progressive Brazilian music including Quem É Quem that are now considered classics. 

This timely reissue, pressed on 180-gram vinyl at Third Man in Detroit, was one of the 2024 highlights of the Verve by Request series.  

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Andy Thomas is a London based writer who has contributed regularly to Straight No Chaser, Wax Poetics, We Jazz, Red Bull Music Academy, and Bandcamp Daily. He has also written liner notes for Strut, Soul Jazz and Brownswood Recordings.

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