Another turning point came in the form of a Chick Corea DVD. “As silly as it sounds, getting given that made me want to stay in music. He became someone I could look up to,” Freitas said of the pioneering jazz fusion pianist. “I didn’t have a computer then, but I remember asking my friend to burn me a CD with all things Chick Corea after that,” he added.
“I would come back from school and listen to everything. I was obsessed.”
Corea, whose work ethic he has always admired, also taught Freitas discipline. While he didn’t own a piano at the time, he would practice on imaginary keys at home until eventually, he struck a deal with a local restaurant that let him play before opening hours. In the years that followed, Freitas went to university in Recife and studied music production, and started playing gigs around town. “I began to see myself as a Black man for the first time,” he recalled. “In church, I wasn’t allowed to wear my hair long, I had to put myself in a mold.”
Breaking out and experimenting with new formats led him to people like the bassist Jean Elton and the drummer Hugo Medeiros, who kept hearing about Amaro, the “crazy kid who was playing in 7/8 and 6/4,” and went on to form a trio with him. Their success — and an international record deal with the London-based label Far Out Recordings — would eventually lead them to tour the United States and Europe.
In 2019, Freitas was one of six musicians selected to participate in the Montreux Jazz Academy, a prestigious residency for up-and-coming talent. “Amaro didn’t speak much English then, so it wasn’t easy for him to be in the middle of people speaking it all the time,” said Mathieu Jaton, the chief executive of the Montreux Jazz Festival, in a phone interview. “But his music was so pure, and his ear was so good that he was just talking with the music.”
When Nick Sanborn, a founder of the record label Psychic Hotline and half of the synth-pop duo Sylvan Esso, began thinking about putting out Freitas’s new album, he felt similarly. “We have this meeting once a year at the studio where we play each other everything that might happen,” he said by phone from Durham, N.C. As soon as the team heard Freitas might be looking for a home for his solo project, everyone was instantly on board. “We were are all like, ‘Really?’” he said. “And that was kind of it.”
It all happened so fast, the two haven’t even met in person yet. They’ll finally link up when Freitas plays Le Poisson Rouge in New York on March 5 before he sets off on a 40-date tour across Europe. “It’s cool,” he said of the prospect of traveling the continent. “But not everyone can have access to that.”
Freitas often thinks about what big cities like Recife look like at dusk during rush hour. “So many people work all day and have to hurry back home straight after,” he said. “No one gets to see the sunset.” Making music, for him, often feels like a way to help those people recreate the joyful moments they tend to miss out on. “I want my work to be that, a sunset of sorts,” he added. “I think that’s what it’s all about.”
