Moises Borges & Ava Preston at the Blue LLama

The Blue LLama traveled — musically — to Bahia in mid-January. That’s where Brazilian musician Moises Borges is from (although he’s lived in Cleveland for years now) and he brought his homeland — and a slight accent — with him, along with a blend of his African heritage on his father’s side and his indigenous Pataxo heritage on his mother’s.

Borges also brought vocalist Ava Preston, whom he met in Cleveland when she was only sixteen (or so he told me). But then again, she’d already been singing in jazz clubs since she was ten. Her style is easy-going and she’s pretty proficient at scatting.

Preston started each song in English, then stepped aside so Borges could re-sing it in the native Brazilian, a form of Portuguese. Not only the language changed, but also the mood, becoming freer and more “spoken.”
The duo opened with “No More Blues” (“Chega de Saudade”) and “Wave” by Antônio Carlos Jobim, Brazil’s most famous bossa nova composer. Then came João Gilberto’s “BimBom” and Jobim’s “Desafinado.”

The tone changed when Preston sat down at the piano to play and sing a tune of her own, “Move Along.” It was the only non-bossa/samba moment of the evening. Not to be outdone, Borges followed on guitar with a song of his own, “Pedir ao Santo” (“Ask the Saint”). Then the two blended back together with Jobim’s “Girl from Ipanema” and “One-Note Samba.”

They closed with Luis Bonfa’s “A Day in the Life of a Fool,” a song made famous in the movie “Black Orpheus” and even sung by Frank Sinatra. Although all the other songs had been melodic and easy-hearing, this one plunged to poignant depths of feeling that we hadn’t heard yet but could feel in our ears and hearts. A whole other layer that drew the crowd in even deeper. I wonder if that depth continued in the second set, which I would have loved to stay for.

photographs by Linda Yohn