Gentle Wonderment is a curious title.First, because it unites two words apparently very distant from one another. “Gentle” makes one think of a hand sliding the air, giving way, “Please! After you. No, I insist!” “Wonderment,” on the other hand, is a reflflex that makes the jaw drop. The title is even stranger, however, than the apparent distance between the terms: in such complicated times, both the generosity of small acts and the state of being astonished seem to have disappeared, undermined by truculence and stupidity. The key word, here, is “seemed”: this beautiful album by João Camarero proves that it has not. Despite everything unfolding in the world right now, hand in hand, gentleness and wonderment can still get off the ground, pick themselves up, and turn everything around.

I heard João Camarero perform for the fifirst time at the end of 2020. To all of you in the future, who may have picked up this CD in a store or have encountered its booklet on the internet, metaverse, or whatever new technological doohickey we may be using to communicate at present, I recall, briefly, what was unfolding. Quarantined at home because of a virus, Brazilians had the impression of watching their country fall apart in real time. Day in and day out, it felt to many of us that it was only a matter of time until the last remai- ning Villa-Lobos score was burned up along with the Amazon’s final tree. It felt as though all the pos- sibilities of a nation that, despite its many struggles, had produced such luminaries as Pixinguinha, Machado de Assis, Cartola, Ariano Suassuna, Sinhô, Donga, Garoto, João Pernambuco, Guimarães Rosa, and Turíbio Santos had been finally extinguished.

It was then that I heard João Camarero. He picked up his guitar, sat on a stool and straightened his spine like a concert artist. I thought he was going to play some Bach. It was then it began: I realized, moved, that he was playing choro. Brazi- lian music, that auspicious mixture of Europe and Africa with a hint of Native Brazilian: indebted as much to the Brazilian countryside as to an Orisha like Eshu; a veri- table compote of that other Brazil that could have been but wasn’t… yet. I sharpened my ear, raised up my head and heard as the guitar appeared to say: “Friend, as long as we don’t hear the referee’s final whistle or the coming of the last judgment, we can still turn this ship around.” A country capable of producing an album like this cannot be destined to fail.