Philadelphia drummer Tom Cohen has been playing Brazilian music for many years—with his own groups and as a sideman, in jazz settings and Latin ones, with American and Latin players. His love of bossa nova goes back to his childhood, when he was hooked by the Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 albums his parents played. But not until he created an album of his own in this stylistic vein did he realize the possibilities of putting his personal stamp on it.

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Though the album, Embraceable Brazil, features three tunes by Antonio Carlos Jobim, including the imperishable “Girl from Ipanema,” this is not your typical jazz-meets-bossa project. Recorded over the past decade with a shifting cast of American and Brazilian artists and with an emphasis on texture and layered effects, the album doesn’t sound like any other such recording—certainly nothing the prolific Cohen has done before.

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On his previous albums under his own name, including a quartet date with Chris Potter, Diggin’ In, Digging Out, and an organ trio with Joey DeFrancesco, My Take, he recorded the music in conventional fashion. “Those albums had some distinction to them by virtue of the people I surrounded myself with,” he says. “But it was mainly a matter of going in and playing and then maybe doing some editing, pasting some intros and outros. That was the extent of the production element of it.”

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Embraceable Brazil, in contrast, is a producer’s tour de force. A kind of reclamation project, it mixes newly recorded music with tracks from private sessions Cohen organized over the past dozen years. The contributing musicians include EVI master John Swana, tenor saxophonist Larry McKenna, and a trio of Brazilian aces including pianist Cidinho Teixeira, bassist Itaiguara Brandão, and percussionist Edson da Silva Café.

Says Cohen, “I would record the music, then redo it and shelve it, wait a year and redo it again, and again, 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.”

Working with ace engineer and co-producer Brendan McGeehan, who was deeply familiar with the Brazilian genre, Cohen began by refreshing his drum parts. “That started to change everything,” he says. Assembling the songs from performances new and old, he gradually achieved a uniquely appealing sound.

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Released on the Versa label, Embraceable Brazil includes two songs each by Milton Nascimento, including a string arrangement of “Tarde,” and Toninho Horta, including “Aquelas Coisas Todas,” featuring husband and wife vocalists Orlando Haddad and Patricia King (a/k/a Minas). There’s a piano trio rendering of “Bye Bye Brasil” featuring German-born Klaus Mueller at the keys. And there’s a surprising cover of the Carly Simon hit “You’re So Vain.”

 

“We started playing in a kind of 6/8, a very Afro-Cuban or African-influenced type of rhythmic thing,” says Cohen. “And then, following Café, we’re in a Brazilian mode, and playing like 3/4, and okay, where’s this tune going? All of a sudden, it’s like you’re hearing ‘You’re So Vain,’ you’re hearing a pop tune. I didn’t see that going there and neither did John Swana, who really is a genius. It just seemed like a logical place, a fun place, to go, to add this suddenly, and then the listener is kind of transported.”
 

A similar sense of the unexpected is inspired by the treatment of “The Girl from Ipanema,” featuring the wonderful vocalist Barbara Mendes, whom Cohen first saw at the Zinc Bar in New York. Though it is the second-most recorded pop song ever (Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” places first), Cohen’s version, also featuring McKenna—“one of Philadelphia’s iconic saxophonists who is a master of passionate cool”—takes on a life of its own with its key changes and modulations.  

“Every decision I made was with the listener in mind,” he says. “Am I engaging the listener? That was always the goal. I think my style of production gave birth to a sense that you’re on a journey, and decisions to introduce a sax solo, for example, came out of the sense that now we’re making this turn and what is called for to keep things alive. It’s not too layered. It’s not too thick. It’s meant to be transparent and to bring the most out of the compositions. It’s still a jazz record and I’m a jazz artist, so keeping that spontaneity was important.”

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Tom Cohen was born on May 7, 1954 in Newark, New Jersey. He started playing drums in third grade and also briefly played violin—too briefly for his “heartbroken” instructor Judith Eisner, principal violinist in the New Jersey Symphony, who saw promise in his playing. For his tenth birthday, his mother took him to hear the Dave Brubeck Quartet, whose classic album Take Five he had “worn out,” at the American Shakespeare Theater in Connecticut. Meeting Brubeck’s great drummer Joe Morello after the show only added to his love of the music, with its odd time signatures.

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From a young age, Cohen made tapes of himself practicing and playing along with various albums including ones by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. He dragged his reel-to-reel recorder to high school gigs to tape his fusion band. “It’s pretty amazing listening to those tapes,” he says. “You can really see what my influences were.”

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When he was 16, he played in a Cream-inspired power trio with two 20-year-old Berklee School of Music alumni. He badly wanted to attend Berklee, where some of his friends went, but his parents wouldn’t allow it: “You were expected to be a doctor or a lawyer.” He went instead to George Washington University in the nation’s capital. At the Top o’ Foolery House of Jazz, a few blocks from his dorm, he took in nightly sets by drummer Bernard Sweetney (Robert Flack, Shirley Horn), whom he befriended and studied with. Sweetney’s pianist, Kevin Toney (Blackbyrds), brought him into the Howard University Big Band, directed by Donald Byrd, in which Cohen learned to read charts and gained bandstand experience.

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At GWU, he says, “I had the keys to the music room, where there was a set of drums. I would finish doing my papers or homework and go up there. This would have been in my sophomore or junior year. And I would just practice every night for several hours. And then I dropped out of school.”

He moved to Philadelphia, where he “entered the music world kind of unprepared. I mean, I could read music better in high school, junior high school, than I did when I got out of college. My friends were in Berklee lab bands and big bands and all that, but I learned everything I did on the street. That held me back for a little a bit, but not for long.”

While establishing himself in groups including tenor star Odean Pope’s fusion band Catalyst and Minas, with whom “I kind of fit right in,” he made frequent trips to New York, where he became involved with the thriving Brazilian jazz community. In 1972, at a gig by Stan Getz at the Rainbow Room, he got to meet one of his idols, drummer Tony Williams, with whom he serendipitously crossed paths again at a 48th Street drum shop that advertised drum lessons by Williams, Elvin Jones, and Billy Cobham.

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“When I went inside to sign up, Tony was there,” recalls Cohen. “After I told him I wanted to take lessons, he was receptive, but I basically had to audition for him. We went upstairs to the top floor of this building where there was this little studio with his drums in it and he just sat down in front of me and said, ‘Play.’ When I started, he kept looking at my left hand like what’s wrong with that. I played with it all open. He showed me the right way to play. From that day on, I’ve always looked at drummers’ hands.”

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Brazilian music requires expansive rhythmic skills and knowledge. “It’s such a large country and all these different rhythms come from different parts of the country,” says Cohen. “There’s even some that I’m not familiar with or have become familiar with more recently. There’s this one rhythm from an area in Minas Gerais [a state in southeastern Brazil] that has a kind of swing to it, almost like a hip-hop kind of sound, and it is called xote. The challenge is to understand these different rhythms and be able to play them.

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“The first tune on the album, “Eu Só Quero Um Xodó,” comes from northeast Brazil and it’s based on what’s called an afoxe rhythm. On this track the verses are afoxe, except the last verse which is a baião rhythm, and all the bridges in between are played in a maracatu rhythm.”

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Cohen made his album debut in 1997 with the Bill Evans–influenced Tom Cohen Trio (Cadence), featuring pianist Ron Thomas. He followed it up in 1999 with Diggin’ In, Digging Out (Double-Time), on which saxophonist Chris Potter plays a solo for the ages on “Anthropology.” Guitarists Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ben Monder, Rez Abassi, and Jef Lee Johnson appear on 2006’s The Guitar Trio Project, a collection of jazz standards. Joyride, released 10 years later, features pianist Benito Gonzalez and saxophonist Tim Ries. My Take, the DeFrancesco set, came out in 2021.

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“I haven’t been a drummer that’s gone out on tour with heavyweights,” says Cohen. “But it was going to happen with Joey. We had a great conversation a couple months before he died and he just kept saying it was going to happen. I can only imagine what that would have been like.”

Through the years, Cohen has played with a galaxy of jazz greats including Uri Caine, Orrin Evans, Donny McCaslin, Shirley Scott, Richard “Groove” Holmes, and Charles Fambrough. He has been featured in the klezmer band Klingon Klezmer and the Soul Survivors, led a Miles Davis electric tribute band, and performed with the Philly Pops under the direction of Peter Nero as leader of the Latin Jazz Journey ensemble. He was a faculty member of Temple University’s Esther Boyer School of Music under the direction of Bill Evans alumnus Chuck Israels.

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For all that, he’s never been happier about a project than he is about Embraceable Brazil. “I was really proud of this producer in me that kind of emerged,” he says. “You just never know what possibilities there are until you try something new. The future is sometimes more open than we think.”

 

Tom Cohen: Embraceable Brazil

(Versa Records)

Street Date: October 10, 2025

 

 

Website: www.tomcohenproductions.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/tom.cohen.714

Instagram: www.instagram.com/tomco215

 

 

Media Contact:

Terri Hinte

510-234-8781, hudba@sbcglobal.net