Release: Here is Donato!

On Here Is Donato!, acclaimed trombonist and composer Ryan Keberle and his São Paulo-based band Collectiv do Brasil – pianist Felipe Silveira, bassist Felipe Brisola, drummer Paulinho Vicente, and Guegué Medeiros (percussion) – celebrate the music of João Donato, one of the most influential voices in Brazilian music. Drawing on the improvisational openness of modern jazz and the rhythmic and melodic richness of MPB (the post–bossa nova movement known as música popular brasileira), the quintet brings warmth, lyricism, rhythmic subtlety, and collective interplay to Donato’s timeless compositions. The result is a vibrant collection that reveals the enduring vitality of Donato’s music.

Few musicians have shaped modern Brazilian music as profoundly as João Donato (1934-2023). Renowned for dissolving stylistic boundaries, Donato seamlessly blended samba, jazz, Afro- Cuban rhythms, bolero, funk, and bossa nova into a singular personal language that was harmonically rich yet invitingly direct. Rather than treating Donato’s compositions as fixed standards, Collectiv do Brasil approaches them as living works—music that continues to reveal new harmonic, rhythmic, and emotional possibilities through performance.

Available October 23, 2026
on Alternate Side Records

“João Donato’s music has always felt deceptively simple to me, in the best possible way. Much like the music of Horace Silver, the lines are clear, the grooves are deeply swinging but always relaxed, and nothing ever seems forced. But the deeper you go, the more you hear how precise it all is. There’s a real sense of economy and restraint in his writing, a willingness to let things unfold slowly. That openness is what makes Donato’s work so adaptable, and why it continues to resonate across different contexts and generations. With Here Is Donato!, we’re not trying to reinterpret or modernize the music so much as spend time inside it—engaging with its logic, its feel, and its particular kind of clarity.”

Release: Choro Das Aguas

Brazil’s musical ocean is vast and deep, yielding the most sumptuous of treasures to those who devotedly seek its riches. Few American jazz artists have delved as effectively and gleaned more bountifully than New York trombonist Ryan Keberle, whose third album with the São Paulo–based Collectiv do Brasil Choro das Águas celebrates the genius of Ivan Lins on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The album is the latest dispatch from a revelatory sojourn into the heart of MPB (the post–bossa nova movement known as música popular brasileira).

With drummer Paulinho Vicente, pianist/arranger Felipe Silveira, and bassist Felipe Brisola, Collectiv do Brasil is a prolific unit featuring some of São Paulo’s most sought after accompanists. Reimagining songs by definitive MPB composers as modern jazz vehicles, Keberle and the trio have fashioned a joyously fervent Brazilian jazz realm in which the kindred musical traditions resonate together in particularly evocative frequencies.

“They had this desire to play jazz with an American, and I had a desire to play Brazilian music,” Keberle says. “That’s what led us to put this band together. It’s really rare to find musicians fluent in both of those languages.”