Brazilian musician thriving in new home

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This article was published 06/06/2022 (1577 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Despite only arriving in Brandon seven months ago, Emmanuel Bach has already carved out a nice space for himself in the local music scene, forming a new band that is booked to perform at the upcoming Winnipeg International Jazz Festival.

And for someone who has lived in southern Brazil for most of his life, Bach told the Sun last week that his new Canadian home is providing a widening spectrum of opportunities to hone his craft and showcase his unique sound to a completely different audience.

“I never expected when I moved to a place as small as Brandon to have such high-level musicians here,” he said on Thursday. “The band that I’m playing with now, they’re really wonderful.”

Of course, Bach isn’t a rookie when it comes to the art of composing and recording music, since he has been a professional player in the industry for two decades now.

Growing up in the city of Curitiba, the 36-year-old said that he originally got into music through attending church with his family, which inspired him to start taking lessons on his own time.

“I switched over to guitar and started playing in nightclubs,” he said. “I was in an event band, then I started playing in a jazz band, got a scholarship to attend the Berklee College of Music and went to the States for a while. And then I came back to Brazil and I never stopped making music.”

While living in his home country, Bach’s reputation for fusing jazz with traditional Brazilian rhythms gradually grew over time, especially after he began releasing his own albums as a bandleader and working alongside world-renowned Latin musicians such as Airto Moreira, Oscar Stagnaro and Filó Machado.

But late last year, Bach decided to uproot his wife and two daughters by immigrating to Canada, eventually settling on Brandon, since he thought it looked like a good place to raise a family.

“I also got a scholarship from Brandon University,” he said. “So I’m studying in their music program because I want to teach at university in the future.”

Even though this inter-continental move did result in some culture shock for the family, like having to endure their first Canadian winter, it didn’t take long for Bach to start making some connections through BU.

After meeting and jamming with bassist Matt Kozicki, Bach also recruited drummer Graydon Cramer and saxophone player Paul Balcain to join his group, which is now known as the Emmanuel Bach Quartet.

Outside of getting an opportunity to perform live again, Bach said this new group is also granting him the chance to record and fine tune some material that he’s been sitting on for a while, since he’s finding that Canadian audiences are way more receptive to his preferred genre of music.

“In Brazil, there’s not much space for instrumental jazz,” he said.

“In Canada, people tend to respect jazz as an art form and listen to that music and not treat it as background music. In Brazil, there are also people who consume and listen to music like that, but the proportion is much less.”

Having worked as a music educator for 18 years, Bach was also pleasantly surprised to discover how plentiful arts programming is for local high school students here in Brandon.

“One thing that blew my mind was how every high school here has a band,” he said.

“That’s something very different from Brazil. If you want to learn jazz, there’s no way you’re going to learn that in high school. You’re on your own. You’re going to have to go after someone to teach you that.”

Now that in-person performances are back on the table due to loosened COVID-19 restrictions, Bach feels like his band has a lot of momentum heading into their June 17 performance at the Winnipeg International Jazz Festival.

And looking beyond this summer, Bach is also excited for what’s to come in 2023, since he’s hoping to release a new album and complete his BU program within that period of time.

But more than anything else, Bach is just looking to meet and connect with as many musicians as possible within the Westman region, since this community has already made his transition into a new life a pleasent experience.

“You find a lot of support here, both from the Brazilian community and from Brandon in general,” he said. “So this has been really good. People are helping me a lot.”

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @KyleDarbyson