Antonio Adolfo Disowned His 1972 Debut. It Kept Circulating Anyway.

Antonio Adolfo has treated his 1972 solo debut as an error to be corrected. He excluded the self-titled album from his official discography and spoke against it whenever it resurfaced online. For a Brazilian pianist and arranger whose work runs through bossa nova and jazz, it was a record he did not want answering to his name.

His name is still on the cover. And the qualities he seems to have heard as failures are the ones that hold up. Adolfo sings slightly off his own centre, with a naturally dramatic timbre and small bent edges that press against the jazz-inflected solos, the basslines, the arrangements that move with a cinematic patience. There is something of Robert Wyatt or Scott Walker in that imprecision: a voice carrying more than it can hold cleanly, and gaining tension from the strain.

Whether he hears a botched performance or simply an earlier version of himself is a question the album does not settle. What remains is a strange, beautiful record its author wanted forgotten, kept in circulation by listeners drawn to the rough edges rather than put off by them. Rejection is rarely the last word on a piece of work. Here it is barely the first.