Luciano Calazans

Luciano Calazans

From: Salvador, Bahia, Brasil.
Style: choro, mpb, samba, jazz
E-mail: lucianocalazans@lucianocalazans.com


There are some great jazz bass players in the world, and Luciano Calazans (a Salvador native living in the neighborhood of Barris) is one of them. What he has -- and the others don't -- is a bone-deep Brazilian sensibility and a peerless knowledge of Brazilian rhythms woven into his compositions and style. A facile, but not entirely futile, collocation might be "the Brazilian Jaco Pastorius" (Luciano has a pithy tale of one cold night outside a jazz bar on the south side of Chicago, when there was no way the passing taxis could be bothered to consider him and his two musician companions as fares -- the three were on a night off from Margareth Menezes' U.S. tour; Luciano was, in addition to being the bass player, the group's musical director. In desperation Luciano approached a cop -- African American -- who was able to hail a cab for them. And no, language wasn't the problem...Luciano speaks excellent English.)