Nossa Música

While he’s perhaps best known as one of the wave of ‘nova bossa’ musicians to emerge from Brazil in the mid-noughties, Celso Fonseca’s songwriting and performance has always balanced the impeccably stylised with a slyly experimental side, no matter where his music lands. He’d been writing and performing since the eighties, for one thing, and on Nossa Música he honours that history by revisiting an early co-write (with Ronald Bastos), “Sei De Cor.” Fonseca is an expressive singer, but not cloyingly so, and his guitar playing is beautifully understated, a finger’s-tip brush of gentle skin against the instrument’s softly vibrating strings. Nossa Música strips away layers that Fonseca often swaddles his songs with – no string sections; no beats; no electronics – it’s just his voice, a light croon with just a touch of husk, and his elegant, gently striding guitar.