Diasporic? Afro-diasporic? Cosmopolitan? Postnational? Which framework best explains the contemporary Brazilian jazz made by musicians from various backgrounds in New York City? In SamBop NYC: Brazilian Jazz in New York City During the New Millennium, Marc Gidal adopts the term “transnational polymusicalities” to describe musicians, their music, and their commonalities within the scene (5). In doing so, the book intersects with the scholarship of Acácio Tadeu de Camargo Piedade, Eduardo Lis, Jason Stanyek, Natasha Pravaz, K.E. Goldschmitt, and others who have all written about Brazilian music in a transnational context.Footnote ¹ Gidal expands upon their work by engaging with more than 170 musicians of Brazilian jazz. His methodology includes artist interviews, music and educational publication analysis, and ethnographic observations during their live performances. This allows him to show how musicians in the New York Brazilian jazz scene frequently merge classical, jazz, rock, funk, Caribbean traditions, Brazilian genres, Japanese folk songs, Greek, Balkan, and Middle Eastern music together (77).

The story of Japanese pianist Miho Nobuzane provides a case in point. Nobuzane began playing bossa nova in Osaka and then, in the 1990s, moved to New York City where she further immersed herself in Brazilian music. In 2014, she released “Kawachi Ondo,” a song that attests to her polymusicality. Gidal shows how the recording combines festival music from Japan with Brazilian afoxé rhythms and improvisations provided by rhythm and blues, soul, and funk drummer Bernard Purdie. Nobuzane sings “calls of encouragement” in Japanese and employs jazz harmony to support the song’s traditional melody (101). As Gidal concludes, in this example, Nobuzane “combined multiple traditions with which she had gained competencies: Japanese festival music, afoxé, funk, and jazz, all in one” (101).

Luciana Souza offers another compelling example. Raised in São Paulo, Souza moved to the United States to study at the Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory of Music. Gidal analyzes a variety of sources to bolster his point: newspaper headlines written about her, mention of albums like Norte e Sul (North and South) (2003) that mix originals with Brazilian songs and songs from the United States, and personal interviews. He relies heavily on interviews throughout the book, and they prove productive here. “It’s impossible not to be a mixture or hybrid,” Souza told Gidal in 2021, a statement the author uses to show Souza’s commitment to polymusicality (128).

Music analysis is a core feature of Gidal’s study, and his discussion of Brazilian jazz drumming provides another example of polymusicality. On the one hand, Brazilian jazz drummers rely on the conventions of traditional and modern jazz drumming: ride cymbals maintain beat subdivisions, bass drum and hi-hats establish downbeats, and tom drums are used for fills. At the same time, Gidal looks at instructional books such as Brazilian Rhythms for Drumset and songs such as Dom Salvador’s “Gafieira” to show how Brazilian drummers like Duduka Da Fonseca differ from their jazz counterparts.Footnote ² Typically, the bass drum imitates samba’s surdo drums. The tamborim rhythms get moved to the hi-hat or ride cymbal. Such a mixture, Gidal notes, creates a situation where “drummers translate to the drum set the samba-school rhythms typical of particular percussion instruments in order to create samba-jazz grooves” (167).

Gidal also examines how musicians conceive of the differences between jazz swing and samba swing. Generally speaking, jazz swing relies on a triplet subdivision of the beat, while samba is based on a quadruplet subdivision of the beat. However, as Gidal notes, it would be more accurate to say musicians play between these “poles” in a myriad of ways. He provides several examples. Percussionist Scott Kettner teaches students to play with Brazilian swing by using syllables that accent and elongate the first and fourth sixteenth notes (169). Eliane Elias is another artist whose approach to rhythm Gidal discusses at length. He observes how she developed her polymusicality at a young age, playing bossa nova, samba jazz, rock, and pop as a young piano student in São Paulo. “I guess I could use the word chameleon…changing colors,” she remarked in a 2009 interview (75). Gidal shows this ability to blend in by conducting analyses of Elias’s renditions of “Desafinado,” “Dindi,” and “Little Paradise.” Building upon his extended discussion of Brazilian rhythm and time feel, Gidal shows how bossa nova, faster jazz samba, slow ballad, and jazz swing rhythms commingle and differ in each song (171).

Musicians such as Nobuzane, Souza, Da Fonseca, Kettner, and Elias devote time and energy to their polymusical study. Although they are cognizant of some of their inevitable shortcomings, they work to minimize their musical “accents.” Gidal shows how they aspire to such mastery in an interview with Israeli woodwindist Anat Cohen. Cohen explains that her ability to blend in is largely contingent upon her articulation. When she plays jazz swing, her articulation is very muted (“zzzah, zzah”). However, when playing Brazilian choro, the articulation is “tah.” Employing the wrong articulation, notes Cohen, is akin to mispronouncing certain words (93).

Gidal organizes the book around five chapters, most of which seamlessly mix musical analysis with ethnography and oral interview. The second chapter, “SamBop, Brazuca, and Transnational Polymusicalities,” introduces Gidal’s umbrella framework and theory. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on bossa nova and samba. In “‘Bossa Nova York’: Popularity, Singers, and Anxieties” and “Samba Jazz at Carnegie Hall: Genre Fusion in Instrumental Music,” Gidal highlights the anxieties musicians have toward playing bossa nova and the fusion between jazz and Brazilian music that characterizes samba jazz. In the fifth and final chapter, “From CDs to Covid-19: Professional Agency in Volatile Industries,” Gidal shows how musicians adapted to a global pandemic, navigating social structures and economic forces and exercising creative agency to accommodate changing business practices. As a result, the book primarily focuses on “cultural production rather than the finances, distribution, consumption, reception, or interpretation within music markets” (191).

There is one chapter that methodologically differs from the rest. In “‘Paying Dues’ and ‘Carrying Flags’: Demographic Diversity and Inequities among Musicians,” Gidal takes a more quantitative approach to his study. He interviews, observes, and classifies the national origins, gender categorizations, racialized identities, and instruments played by 173 Brazilian jazz musicians in New York City. He then publishes these findings in a series of tables, showing how such musicians are typically a privileged class of immigrant professionals: mostly white and predominantly male. Future studies could mimic that quantitative methodology and embrace Gidal’s invitation to study the finances, distribution, consumption, reception, and interpretation of Brazilian jazz within music markets. What is the average income of a Brazilian jazz musician in New York? How do they promote their music and what are their social media numbers? How much do they make on album sales, particularly when on tour? And how have the demographics of Brazilian jazz musicians changed after the policies and executive orders issued by President Donald Trump during his second term in office? These are just a few of the many questions that emerge after finishing the book.

SamBop NYC: Brazilian Jazz in New York City During the New Millennium is already a substantive study on the topic. Gidal’s definition of terms such as “diaspora,” “Afro-Atlantic,” “cosmopolitanism,” and “postnationalism” is alone worth the price of admission, particularly for graduate students needing succinct explanations of such difficult theories (84–86). But the author has gone beyond just publishing a monograph. Gidal also includes an online compendium, newyorkbrazilianjazz.com. The website provides links to personal websites, Discogs pages, and other related online materials pertaining to musicians engaged in New York’s Brazilian jazz scene during the 2000s and 2010s. For casual fans and academic scholars alike, it is a useful resource for appreciating this rich musical style.