New Jazz Release: Mauricio Zottarelli & Gilson Schachnik | “Mozik” (Avail Now)

While jazz pianist
Gilson Schachnik and jazz music drummer Mauricio Zottarelli were both
born in the state of Sao Paulo, it wasn’t until they landed in Boston
that Brazilian music seized their imagination.

But Brazilian
music didn’t capture their interest while they were in Brazil. Each grew
up idolizing and playing American jazz. When they met at Berklee,
however, their love of Brazilian music was rekindled. Says Zottarelli,
“it’s our honest expression of the music we love. We’re not trying to
recreate something or recover the past. We don’t have any kind of
agenda. It just so happened that we fell in love with Brazilian music.
Brazilian jazz, while living in Boston.

”Reared on hard rock,
European classical music, blues, funk and jazz, they independently found
their way to Berklee College of Music, earning scholarships to study at
the prestigious institution. Moving to the United States provided a
sudden, jarring perspective shift, and a reappraisal of their
relationship to their musical birthright. Their captivating new album
Mozik reflects their deep engagement with Brazilian jazz rhythms and
forms, filtered through their love of the early fusion of Chick Corea
and Herbie Hancock.

“A lot of non-Brazilian musicians who play
Brazilian jazz music are obsessed with being authentic, ” says
Schachnik, who wrote most of the album’s arrangements. “That’s not our
goal at all. We’re not trying to recreate bossa nova. We want to play
with all the information that we’ve gathered over the years. I grew up
listening to Return to Forever and Headhunters”

Whatever qualms
Schachnik (http://gilsonmusic.com) and Zottarelli once harbored about
claiming Brazilian music as their own are washed away in this roots
samba jazz celebration of Brazil’s miscegenated culture.

Zottarelli
grew up in the town of Rio Claro in the state of Sao Paulo, immersed in
music. He earned a degree in computer science in 1997, but his love of
music led him to apply for and earn a scholarship to a summer program at
Berklee. When he came to Boston in 1999 he thought it was just for a
season, but he kept earning new scholarships to study film scoring,
arranging, and performance, and by 2002 Zottarelli had graduated from
Berklee.

With his versatility and wide rhythmic palette
Zottarelli has become one of the most sought after drummers on the scene
since moving to New York City in 2006. He’s toured internationally with
Japanese pianist Hiromi’s Sonicbloom, while performing and recording
with an international array of artists, including Eliane Elias, Marc
Johnson, Prasanna, Esperanza Spalding, Keiko Matsui, Richard Bona,
Claudio Roditi, Chuck Loeb, Rosa Passos, Jovino Santos Neto, Nilson
Matta, Toninho Horta, Filó Machado, Cidinho Teixeira, Marc Rossi Group,
Hendrik Meurkens, and Oriente Lopez.

He co-leads Dig Trio and
recently released his first album under his own name 7 Lives, which
documents his evolving synthesis of jazz, Brazilian jazz music and
fusion. It’s a vision that he also explores with Schachnik on Mozik, a
jazz album conceived by Brazilian musicians who approach the music of
their homeland with fresh ears and open hearts.