The movement has mostly happened in Brazil; here it's all uphill. You still can't find “Coisas," Santos's best album, on iTunes, and the CD sells for $70 on Amazon.
Santos was not the usual jazz composer, and didn't leave the usual trail. He spent most of his working life writing scores for film, television and radio. (Born in Brazil's northeast, he moved to Los Angeles from Rio de Janeiro in 1967, and joined Henry Mancini's team of songwriters, eventually becoming a teacher.) He used traditional Brazilian ingredients to model his futurist art, and made plainly commercial music more complex than it probably needed to be. But he wasn't a bandleader and didn't tour. Nor was he much of a public personality; instead he became an eminence among a well-informed minority.
Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, has been an admirer, and last week the Moacir Santos movement achieved an American victory: two nights of his music in the Rose Theater, at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The shows, titled “A Journey to Brazil," were led by the guitarist Mario Adnet and the saxophonist Z Nogueira, who both worked with Santos in his final decade and helped transcribe and publish his music.
They were joined by a mostly Brazilian jazz orchestra full of musicians familiar with the work. Friday's program ran through 40 years of Santos, from the light and rapid choros of the 1940s, to the percussive, chamberlike miniatures of “Coisas" (1965), to orchestral fantasias and more casual bossa-jazz. (The second program was on Saturday.)
