Ideal

With a classical and jazz background, Catherine Bent, a Berklee professor of music, has harnessed her virtuoso cello playing to a passion for Brazilian choro, the love-child of European social dance music and indigenous African-influenced rhythms that flourished in the inter-war decades. Bent's ‘tribute to Brazil and its traditions’ was recorded with local musicians in Rio, where she immersed herself in the genre over several summers. She composed all ten numbers, including her first ever choro, ‘Fazendo As Malas’. Her more recent compositions push the stylistic boundaries, such as ‘Som Do Seilerei’, with its free-jazz break halfway through, or the multi-layered ‘Insegurança Na Gafiera’, which runs a gamut of instrumental fusions over the course of its nine minutes.

A combination of cello with brass and woodwind, driven by the sway of samba-esque percussion, gives the album its signature sound. Most delightfully in ‘Mãos Abertas’, Catherine Bent's bowed intro merges with the familiar lilt of a bossa nova acoustic guitar before a plucked cello ushers in the brass. Ideal is a graceful and pointedly personal album, and you don't have to be a great cello aficionado to appreciate what its creator describes as ‘a dance between structure and freedom.’