Jazz Vocalist Luciana Souza's Latest Album Sets Poetry to Music

Luciana Souza's new album, The Book of Longing, is the subject of an article recently published at Forbes. In his piece, Tom Teicholz speaks with Souza about her relationship to poetry and the ways that it helped her feel close to her native Brazil. "On her new recording, 'The Book of Longing,' Luciana Souza marries poetry and Jazz in an idiom all her own with spare accompaniment and her uniquely atmospheric vocals to haunting effect." From there:

Recently I sat down with Souza to talk about the new recording and the path she has carved as a vocalist and an interpreter of culture generally and poetry in particular – the lyrics on the record are poems by Leonard Cohen, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christina Rossetti (as well as a few of her own). And how this new recording represents her maturation not just as an artist but as a person. “I'm not making apologies anymore --which is a good thing,” Souza told me.

Souza was born in Brazil. Her parents were both musicians, songwriters who also wrote commercial jingles and had their own studio. She grew up around and among many of Brazil’s great jazz artists and is the god daughter of legendarily creative Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal.

At 18, Souza traveled to the US to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston. And although Souza has now lived in the United States for more years than she lived in Brazil, she still thinks of herself as Brazilian. “I’m still Brazilian when I speak, when I cook, the way I look. Everything about me is rice and beans and nothing else,” She said. “I feel like I celebrate Brazil more and I love Brazil more from being far from it than I would if I were there. Especially now a days when things are so turbulent there, politically and otherwise.”

Souza recalled that when she was in Boston, her mother would send her books. Among them were two books set in Brazil, one in Portuguese, called “My life as a child,” and the other in English called, “The Diary of Helena Morley” and after reading both she discovered they were the same book by American poet Elizabeth Bishop (who lived for a decade in Brazil). After that she began to read Bishop’s poetry. “She was the one really who, beyond any Brazilian poet, she showed me that the poet sees the world differently"

Learn more at Forbes.