Born in 1934, João Donato spent his early years completely landlocked in the Amazon wilderness of Acre, a state that borders Peru and Bolivia. By eight, he was playing accordion and even wrote his first song, “Indio Perdido,” which he would later re-record as “Lugar Comum” thirty-three years later with lyrics courtesy of tropialist pop star, Gilberto Gil.

Donato’s family moved to Rio de Janeiro when he was sixteen and he started hanging out with other jazz-obsessed teenagers in the suburbs of Rio. By 1958, at the age of twenty-four, Donato was one of the most respected musicians in Rio, but what he wanted to play was not what local audiences wanted to hear, so he spent the next 15 years bouncing between Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York City. Upon his return in 1973, he’d been forgotten by the general public, but had become a legend to a younger generation of musicians, including: Marcos Valle, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa & Gilberto Gil.

João Donato deserves a place among the legends of Brazilian music, alongside Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, Dorival Caymmi, Ary Barroso, and select few others. Ironically, his constant experimentation with different genres – the very essence of his greatness – make him a challenge to classify and perhaps held him back from becoming the household name some of his peers became. Asked how he would describe his own work, he says, “It’s my style of music, the way I think about [music]. I don’t even think about it, it’s just the way I do things. I don’t know if it even has a name.” Donato has finally received long overdue accolades for his contributions to date.

An archetypal “musician’s musician,” Donato’s stepped out of the shadows more recently, recording at an unprecedented rate and collaborating with a variety of musicians, from Brazil and beyond, old and young. Still going strong at over eighty years old, the late praise and recognition is finally coming for the artist who Claus Ogerman offered to arrange an album, who Antonio Carlos Jobim called a genius, and who no other than João Gilberto claims invented the bossa nova beat.