STACEY KENT AND DANILO CAYMMI TO SALUTE BOSSA NOVA’S GREATEST COMPOSER IN A TRIBUTE TO TOM JOBIM
The Town Hall, Saturday, April 12, 2025 at 8pm
The platinum-selling jazz singer joins Jobim’s longtime band member—a member of Brazil’s legendary Caymmi family of musicians and singers—to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Jobim’s death
photo by James Gavin
It was in 1964 that the Rio-born composer Antonio Carlos Jobim conquered the world with “The Girl from Ipanema,” the song that made bossa nova one of Brazil’s most famous exports. As America’s greatest pop and jazz singers adopted his alluring compositions—“Wave,” “Waters of March,” “Corcovado” (Quiet Nights), “Desafinado,” “One Note Samba,” “Meditation”—Jobim was likened to Gershwin and idolized by jazz players. His work is a bittersweet brew in which the mysteries of nature and the ache of romance come together, set to pulsing, seductive rhythms that often defy explanation.
In honor of the recent thirtieth anniversary of Jobim’s death, The Town Hall in New York will host A Tribute to Tom Jobim (Tom was his nickname). Its stars are composer, singer, and longtime Jobim colleague Danilo Caymmi, the superbly pedigreed son of Dorival Caymmi, a Brazilian composer as fabled as Jobim; and Stacey Kent, the Grammy-nominated, gold- and platinum-selling jazz singer known for her collaborations with several Brazilian masters. The show will benefit Instituto Dara, a valued Brazilian organization that combats poverty and safeguards the needs of families afflicted by it. A Tribute to Tom Jobim is the first presentation in Dara’s “The Art of Brazil,” a series that will celebrate the gems of Brazilian culture while drawing attention to the problems Dara addresses.
Jobim and the Caymmi family—which includes Danilo’s venerated siblings, singer Nana Caymmi and composer-singer Dori Caymmi—were closely intertwined. At 16, Danilo played flute on the 1964 album Caymmi Visits Tom and Brings His Children, Nana, Dori & Danilo. After years of friendship and occasional shared performances, Danilo played in Jobim’s band from 1983 until the composer’s death.
“Tom was a really special person,” says Danilo. “I learned a lot about music and life from him.” As for the singer he chose to share The Town Hall’s stage with him, Danilo says: “Stacey is very cool. I’m a fan of her work.” In the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote of Kent’s strong rapport with bossa nova (“Her tart, silky vocal timbre was made for the genre”) while praising her “no-nonsense directness” and her upbeat but dreamy attitude: “pert and happy on the surface, wistful underneath.”
The concert “will have no piano, bass, or drums,” says Danilo. Instead the band will comprise three flutists (including him), guitar, cello, and the tenor saxophone of Kent’s British-born husband, musical partner, and producer, Jim Tomlinson.
This tribute represents a homecoming for Jobim, at least in spirit. Although his main residence was in Rio, New York held great meaning for him. Before he became famous in the U.S. he had performed at Carnegie Hall in November 1962 in a gala concert of bossa nova, a style that had just begun to emerge internationally. A year and a half later, Verve Records released a single of Jobim’s most famous composition, “The Girl from Ipanema,” recorded in Manhattan; that record made the bossa nova a worldwide phenomenon. Aside from giving saxophonist Stan Getz a No. 5 hit, it turned the three Brazilians who joined him—Jobim (on piano), João Gilberto (the pioneering bossa nova guitarist and singer), and João’s wife, Astrud Gilberto—into American stars.
In later years, Jobim kept an apartment in Manhattan. He told Stuart Troup of the New York Post: “For me, New York is like a farm; it’s very quiet, especially in the park. I know few people, so it’s not like in Rio, where everybody knows me so I can’t walk on the street.” The composer died at a New York hospital in 1994.
Danilo Caymmi is one of his foremost flag-bearers, but he has a distinguished history of his own. Caymmi was barely twenty when he cowrote “Andança,” a song that became a Brazilian standard. In the ‘70s and ‘80s he played on albums by many of Brazil’s foremost artists, including Jobim, Joyce, Edu Lobo, Egberto Gismonti, Simone, Djavan, Chico Buarque, Fafá de Belém, and Emílio Santiago. Caymmi and Jobim’s son Paulo play flute on Sarah Vaughan’s first Brazilian album, recorded in Rio.
The public got a closer look at Caymmi when he began to tour and record with his siblings in tributes to their legendary father. It was Jobim who had encouraged Caymmi, who has a warm, plush baritone, to step out as a singer. In 1992 he made his first of (to date) seven solo albums.
The most recent one, Danilo Caymmi Canta Tom Jobim (2017), features a guest appearance by Stacey Kent. Her purring, intimate voice has the confidential tone of the bossa nova, but her background is much more broadly cosmopolitan. The New Jersey-born Kent had a Russian-born, French-raised grandfather. After having established her singing career in London in the 1990s, she built audiences in France, Germany, and the U.S. The multilingual singer’s work often has a literary and intellectual bent; since 2006, much of her signature material has featured lyrics by the Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, with music by Jim Tomlinson.
The rest of Kent’s repertoire is similarly adventurous and refined. But she’s much more than a cult artist; Blue Note, Warner Bros., and Sony have issued her albums. Kent’s 2013 CD The Changing Lights includes three songs by Jobim as well as other Brazilian classics. Recordings and tours with the likes of Marcos Valle, Roberto Menescal, and now Danilo Caymmi have deepened her relationship with Brazil.
“Innately I could feel something that connected me to this country and culture,” she says. Brazilian music, explains Kent, “is among the greatest conveyers of life’s delicate balance between joy and sadness. There is often this gentle tension between the rhythm pulsating, literally moving you forward, while also pulling you back, like the movement of a wave—you feel both at the same time.”
These concerts with Caymmi are one more opportunity for her to connect directly with a great heritage. “Standing next to Danilo to sing and duet is beyond description. I love, love, love singing with him. I also love standing back and listening to his solo numbers. What a voice!”
The Town Hall is located at 123 West 43rd Street in New York.
For more information about Instituto Dara, visit https://dara.org.br.