Nando Michelin

Hartford Public Library’s highly-popular Baby Grand Jazz Series returns for its 19th season in 2022 with a spectacular line-up of the best jazz musicians in the region. If you can’t make it in person, tune in virtually on Hartford Public Library’s Facebook Page or YouTube channel.

This band is a joint collaboration between composers Nando Michelin (Montevideo, Uruguay) and Ebinho Cardoso (Cuiaba, Brazil). In their music, they present songs using poems by João Cabral de Melo Neto, diving into the concrete work of a relatively forgotten poet in his own country. The result is exquisite, impressed by the beauty of the compositions, the quality of the arrangements and the level of the recording. Both composers are very experienced educators as well, Nando being a faculty member at Berklee College of Music and Ebinho having toured with his clinics all around Brazil. The idea of producing this music was the result of Nando’s first encounter with Cabral’s poetry, so universal, yet Brazilian. “João Cabral’s voluntary exile got me even closer to his literary universe, a Brazilian poet living in Spain, just like we are foreigners residing in the US. That triggered in me a deep regard for his poetry, and made me delve into his universe.” João Cabral de Melo Neto was a Diplomat who wrote a big part of his body of work in Spain, where he was good friends with Joan Miro and Juan Brossa. “We recorded compositions inspired by some of the most beautiful poems of Brazilian literature, and our main concern was to keep and bring out the beauty of the text in its plenitude,” says Nando.