Rediscovering the Guitarist Carlos Barbosa-Lima

courtesy of Jazz Promo Services

This morning, after listening to the latest release of performances by Brazilian guitarist and arranger Carlos Barbosa-Lima on the ZOHO Music label, I discovered that this had not been my first encounter with him. Back when I was writing for Examiner.com, I had the opportunity to use my “pulpit” to discuss the music of composer Leo Brouwer. In 2013 ZOHO released an album of compositions scored for solo guitar, two guitars, and guitar and string quartet. The title of the album was Beatlerianas, a seven-movement suite of Brouwer’s arrangements of favorite Beatles songs for guitar and string quartet with a clearly playful nod to Heitor Villa-Lobos. A little less than a decade later, I find myself embarrassed to discover how long it has been since I listened to another album of Barbosa-Lima.

The object of my discovery is Manisero, Barbosa-Lima’s latest duo encounter on the ZOHO label, this time with German classical guitarist Johannes Tonio Kreusch. This marked Barbosa-Lima’s first album to be recorded in Munich in order to work with Kreusch, and the thirteen tracks on the album were recorded between 2019 and 2021. On four of the tracks the duo expands to a trio with the addition of Kreusch’s brother, the pianist Cornelius Claudio Kreusch.

The album title is the Spanish word for peanut, and it serves to introduce the first track. Written in 1927 by the Cuban composer Moisés Simon, “El Manisero” is better known in this country as “The Peanut Vendor.” Its Wikipedia page asserts: “Together with ‘Guantanamera’, it is arguably the most famous piece of music created by a Cuban musician.” It was whistled by Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, and Judy Garland sang a fragment of it in A Star is Born. The tune seems to have prodigious staying power, having shown up in an instrumental version of Gonzalo Rubalcaba’s Supernova album in 2001.

Brouwer is not one of the contributing composers on this new album; but there are three arrangements of the music of Alberto Ginastera, which Barbosa-Lima created as a thank-you gesture after the composer had written his Opus 47 guitar sonata for him in 1976. Two of the arrangements are taken from the Opus 15 Suite de Danzas Criollas, scored for solo piano; and the final arrangement is “Gato,” (cat), one of the five songs in the Opus 10 collection Canciones Populares Argentinas. Barbosa-Lima then continues his skills as an arranger with “Sentimental Melody,” the third movement of the symphonic poem “Floresta do Amazonas” (forest of the Amazon) composed by Villa-Lobos.

When I first encountered this new Manisero album, my initial reaction was to classify it in my collection of jazz recordings. However, as was the case on the Beatlerianas album, all of the tracks are through-composed. As a result I see no reason why I cannot assign someone like Simon to the same “classical” category occupied by Ginastera; and I would certainly enjoy encountering “El Manisero” at a guitar recital!