Seu Jorge took the tall Royale stage with his band Almaz already humming, the four-piece generating a spacey groove with a quicksilver undercurrent, a Brazilian midfield coached by the Thin White Duke. Jorge blew a few laconic notes on his flute, eyebrows settling into the ludicrously lugubrious look that only passes when he gives way to dancing.
Almaz is a supergroup of sorts, comprising drummer Pupillo, guitarist Lucio Maia and Antonio Pinto, who is a film score composer but plays a McCartney bass and looks like a druglord’s enforcer: mirror-sunglassed, grey-stubbled, functional haircut and running shoes. Maia leads the band in music and fashion with gobsmackingly articulate guitar figures - there’s sharp, and then there’s a guitarist in a longtailed Cuban shirt and pant creases.
The band played through most of it’s excellent self-titled debut, an array of covers stretching from Kraftwerk’s impassive “The Model,” Warholian moue yielding genuine sex appeal via Jorge’s critically cocked eyebrow, to Roy Ayers’ gorgeously laconic “Everybody Loves The Sunshine.”
For the small minority of non-Brazilians in the audience, there was a quixotic appeal to many of Almaz’ Portuguese songs, which clearly pursue an intricate romantic narrative rendered gorgeously opaque by unfamiliar soft consonants. Jorge, an accomplished actor, performed these songs with sardonic gusto, eyebrows emoting like the narrator in a high school production of “Joseph,” turning to his bandmates as props and straightmen. It’s possible that no lyrics, once decoded, could do justice to the knowing looks and cocked fingers.
The band’s sly, sardonic take on “Rock With You,” for which a beer bottle did double duty as percussion, proved that the lyrics are anyway little more than a canvas for Almaz’ supple swing and Jorge’s gruff, weathered voice, all the more disconcerting for emerging from such a slight, dapper figure. Jorge followed up Michael Jackson by announcing another one “for the Americans” and launched into “Ziggy Stardust.” Jorge clearly loves the heft and scope afforded by his band on such a guitar-motivated song, flinging himself around during the unmistakable riff, hands and feet flying. For those watching and shimmying in sympathy, it was impossible not to grin like a loonie.
