João Donato

In 1959, the pianist and composer João Donato showed up in Los Angeles hoping to break into the city’s jazz scene, only to find out there wasn’t one. Latin music, sure: salsa, cha-cha, stuff like that. He didn’t know Latin music. But he’d already been effectively forced out of work in Brazil because club owners said his music wasn’t good for dancing, and his ticket was one-way anyway, so he figured he’d buy some Tito Puente and Machito albums and give it a shot. Within a couple of years, Puente had asked him to arrange one of his songs (“Sambaroco”) for his band. He’d never arranged anything either, but hey, why not? Born in 1934 in a rural Amazonian area near the western edge of Brazil, Donato spent his youth swimming in rivers and sleeping in hammocks before eventually becoming one of the more quietly important figures in the development of modern Latin and South American music. His early work—the stuff the club owners had complained about—formed the foundation of bossa nova (he played on Astrud Gilberto’s first album and was a kind of musical sibling to her husband, João), while songs like “The Frog”—popularised by Sergio Mendes—helped bridge samba with Western pop and export Brazilian rhythms to the world. Donato recorded a funk-inspired album with Miles Davis bassist Ron Carter in the early ’70s (A Bad Donato) and spent the next five decades collaborating with some of the most prominent names in Brazilian music, including Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, who described Donato’s music as extreme complexity in extreme simplicity. One of his last albums was a wildly joyful synth-funk collaboration with his son, Donatinho, called Sintetizamor. He died in 2023 at the age of 88.