Emilio Santiago and Dori Caymmi....

Standing shoulder to shoulder on the stage of Birdland on Wednesday evening, Emilio Santiago and Dori Caymmi, two luminaries of Brazilian bossa nova, engaged in an intimate musical dialogue between the smooth and the rough.
Smoothness was embodied by Mr. Santiago, nicknamed the Nat King Cole of Brazil, who has recorded since the mid-1970s and was making his debut at the club. Because his voice is richer and deeper than Cole’s, the comparison applies only to the extent that both are polished balladeers. Mr. Santiago’s singing has a muscular samba side.
Mr. Caymmi, who played the guitar in addition to singing, stood for roughness, but of a sensitive sort. Whether from emotion, or some innate vocal tic, his singing voice trembles, conveying the sense of a wise patriarch barely holding back a torrent of feeling. Usually, Mr. Caymmi’s vocals slid in behind Mr. Santiago’s as a murmuring commentary emanating from a deeper place, as if the unconscious mind were quietly announcing itself in the background.

The two men are appearing together through Saturday at Birdland as part of the BossaBrasil Festival, an indication that the legacy of Antonio Carlos Jobim is as secure as ever. Jobim songs like “Dindi” and “Corcovado,” which Mr. Santiago performed in the concert’s first section, accompanied by Sergio Brandão on bass, Celso Alberti on drums and Cidinho Teixeira on piano, offer as seamless a blend of melody and steady pop-jazz rhythm as any national music has produced.
The mystical apprehension of nature in these songs lends their romanticism and sadness a cosmic dimension; passion is both transient and the swiftest available connection to the universe, to God, if you will: an ultimate sign of life. In that context Mr. Caymmi’s singing, simultaneously manly and fragile, expresses an appropriate humility and wonder.

As the concert continued, the band was augmented by Hendrik Meurkens, an excellent harmonica player. The music alternated between ballads and medium-hard sambas, with the emphasis on the soft and dreamy. The set included a rendition of “My Foolish Heart,” sung in English by Mr. Santiago, and culminated with the inevitable “Girl From Ipanema.”
In Mr. Santiago’s brisk, joyous interpretation, the narrator wasn’t an adolescent boy pining after a poster girl on the Copacabana, but a vigorous man celebrating the abundance of life, the pleasure of beauty and the intensity of desire.

BossaBrasil continues through Saturday at Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, Clinton; (212) 581-3080, birdlandjazz.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/arts/music/24braz.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss