Take Gershwin, Ravel, Cole Porter and Puccini, mix them together and let them brown in the tropical sun of Rio De Janeiro. Roll them down and slope separating twentieth and twenty-first century carioca, where samba, choro and baiao get caught up in their hair and get into the fibres of their clothes, then introduce them to Villa Lobos and Jobim, and you will have a rough but reasonable idea of what Guinga’s music is all about. The three musicians with Guinga are the well known clarinet player Gabriele Mirabassi, plus Paulo Sergio Santos and Lula Galvao. Santos is one of the most beautiful-sounding clarinettist in the world, he was for many years soloist with the symphony orchestra in Rio and with the mythical Villa-Lobos Quintet, of which he is a founding member, and he later epitomised the rebirth of choro. And then there is Lula Galvao, a guitarist who could only have been produced in Brazil and who has the unique ability of being both a fantastic improviser in the purely jazz sense and also a leading exponent of the Brazilian school of guitar, which is admired all over the world. This CD features also the extraordinary trumpet player Jorginho do Trompete on some tracks. He is a T E R R I F I C virtuoso of his instrument and blows the horn like a killer. This recording is for us a reason to be proud, as it records for the first time on CD one of the most explosive groups from the world of Brazilian popular music.