The L.A. Weekly ran a piece on Triorganico written by Argentinean music journalist Gustavo Turner. Turner delved into the group’s founding, and expounds on their musical heritage. Read an excerpt below, and link to the full article here.
“Triorganico’s Fabiano do Nascimento is eating a sushi snack at the Los Feliz coffee shop we’re in. With his young man’s jet-black beard and the spotless, almost tuniclike white T-shirt he’s wearing, the gaunt guitarist looks like a particularly devout acolyte from a mystical school, or at the very least like someone who would have been given a hard time by airport security around early 2002. It’s the eyes, really — in a town rife with shallow operators, those unusually serious eyes of his mark him as a dedicated believer.
Though he might in conversation refer to spiritual and political matters, Nascimento’s intensity of purpose is entirely at the service of one thing: his music, which he calls “a universal sound,” spreading from his native Brazil through the improv-jazz scene in New York to the bohemian enclaves of East Los Angeles and the more unlikely practice rooms of Orange County.
Nascimento left Brazil a decade ago, at 15, relocating to Costa Mesa to live near his older half-brother, Dave Orlando. Orlando, celebrated as a DJ for his pioneering Dub Club nights, expanded Nascimento’s musical horizons through his impeccably curated record collection, turning him on to Fela Kuti and chaperoning him through the underground of O.C. groovers and hip music cognoscenti.
Local genre-busting soul singer Aloe Blacc quickly spotted Nascimento as a guitar virtuoso who was deadly serious about his instrument (again, those eyes), hyping him to everyone in his L.A. label crew. The Stones Throw family — Peanut Butter Wolf, Madlib et al. — were duly impressed. “Here’s this lanky Brazilian kid,” says Stones Throw manager and dapper scene maker Egon Alapatt, “playing his weird seven-string guitar with Aloe, and we’re all blown away.”
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Blacc passed the CD on to Alapatt at Stones Throw. The band protested that this was “raw stuff, demos,” but Alapatt, who single-handedly runs Stones Throw’s soul-funk reissue label, Now-Again, heard a kindred spirit in the recordings. “They were rough and raw,” explains Alapatt, who knows Brazilian music, “the way things used to be” (no slouchy compliment coming from one of the greatest Brazil-head crate-diggers in the world!). Alapatt talked the band into releasing it as-is, and the result is Convivência, a little-promoted gem of a record that could only have been produced in the progressive melting pot that is today’s Los Angeles.
Influential magazine Waxpoetics, along with the many online music writers who have been spreading the word about Convivência, is hailing it as a modern-day bossa nova classic, “something you’d expect to hear floating from a smoky bossa nova club in the 1950s — not downtown L.A.” ”