Tom Cohen - Embraceable Brazil

[GA Russell]

Philadelphia Drummer Tom Cohen Delivers a Love Letter to Brazilian Bossa Nova On "Embraceable Brazil," Releasing Oct. 10 on Versa Records Album Is a Collection of Brazilian Standards & Unusual Covers Performed by Cohen & Ensembles Featuring 20 American & Brazilian Talents, Including Filó Machado, Chico Pinheiro, John Swana, Larry McKenna   September 5, 2025 Drummer Tom Cohen’s lifelong love affair with bossa nova music culminates with the October 10 release of Embraceable Brazil on Versa Records. More than a decade in the making, Cohen’s sixth album features a panoply of creative, able-bodied musicians in various combinations, adding up to a stunning rainbow array of colors, textures, and interpretations in the bossa mode.   The very facts of its creation betray Embraceable Brazil as a labor of love on Cohen’s part. The drummer—who has been smitten with the relaxed fusion of samba and jazz since his childhood in Newark, New Jersey, and played it for nearly as long—began about a dozen years ago to put together a series of recording sessions with rotating lineups of American and Brazilian musicians, laying down bossa nova tracks in no real hurry (and with frequent interruptions and retakes).   “I would record the music, then redo it and shelve it, wait a year and redo it again, and again,” says Cohen, “until finally I put the project on hold because I was busy working on other records. At the end of 2023 or beginning of 2024, I vowed that it was time to get this thing finished up.”   As painstaking in his production as in his initial recordings, Cohen found new and inventive ways to refresh and refine the album’s sound as he constructed 13 tracks from the ground up. This resulted—as heard on Embraceable Brazil—in a unique soundscape that’s at once instantly recognizable as the bossa nova style, yet also a thoroughly individual take on that idiom. We can hear this, for example, in the reverent yet charmingly quirky rendition of Milton Nascimento’s “Tarde,” driven by Brazilian phenomenon Chico Pinheiro’s guitar and American John Swana’s electronic valve instrument (EVI). It’s also in the lyrical but oddly unsettling take on Toninho Horta’s “Aquelas Coisas Todas,” illuminated by the vocals of husband-and-wife team Orlando Haddad and Patricia King, and of course on Antonio Carlos Jobim’s intoxicating “The Girl from Ipanema,” the most iconic bossa nova ever written, Barbara Mendes’s laidback vocals and Larry McKenna’s velvet tenor saxophone augmenting Cohen and Edson da Silva Café’s gentle percussive matrix.   But Cohen also puts his own twist on the classic bossa nova genre by adapting distinctly non-bossa (and indeed non-Brazilian) tunes to its stylistic formula. Hence along with pieces by Jobim, Nascimento, Horta, and Chico Buarque, Cohen gives us an Afro-Brazilian refit of Pat Martino’s jazz-fusion stinger “Joyous Lake” and, more unlikely still yet beguiling, Carly Simon’s pop mega-hit “You’re So Vain” into a stubbornly groove-centered piece of music. It’s precisely the kind of imaginative songcraft that turns Embraceable Brazil into a listener’s playground—one of repeated musical discovery. Tom Cohen was born May 7, 1954 in Newark, New Jersey, into a family that encouraged his love and pursuit of music. It was his parents, for example, who turned their son on to Brazilian pop/jazz by playing Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 around the house—and his mother who intensified his nascent interest in jazz with a tenth-birthday trip to Connecticut to see Dave Brubeck and Cohen’s drum idol at the time, Joe Morello, in concert.   By that time he had already set his sights and ears on the drum kit, which Cohen began playing when he was in the third grade. He took the kit with him to high school, where he played in a rock power trio and a jazz fusion band, and to George Washington University in DC, where he jammed for hours on end in the music department’s practice rooms while ostensibly studying for a “more practical” career. Ultimately, he dropped out of university life and moved to Philadelphia, where he started making his way on the city’s rich local jazz scene.   After gaining years of experience working with Odean Pope’s Catalyst, Orlando Haddad and Patricia King’s Minas, Shirley Scott, Orrin Evans, and many others, as well as studying in New York with drummer Tony Williams, Cohen made his first album as a leader, Tom Cohen Trio (with pianist Ron Thomas and bassist Mike Richmond), in 1997. Further recordings included 1999’s Diggin’ In, Digging Out, featuring saxophonist Chris Potter; 2006’s The Guitar Trio Project, whose titular trios included Rez Abbasi, Paul Bollenback, Jef Lee Johnson, Ben Monder, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Bruce Saunders; 2016’s Joyride, featuring pianist Benito Gonzalez and saxophonist Tim Ries; and 2021’s My Take, with Hammond organ genius Joey DeFrancesco and saxophonists Tim Warfield and Ralph Bowen.   Embraceable Brazil is his sixth album, about which Cohen says, “I was really proud of this producer in me that kind of emerged. You just never know what possibilities there are until you try something new. The future is sometimes more open than we think.”       Photography: Rachel Bliss 

Tom Cohen Website