In addition to being Brazil’s reigning king of jazz-rock, Ed Motta is a voracious record collector. The shelves at his house in Rio de Janeiro hold some 30,000 vinyl albums, reflecting the multitude of styles that shaped him as a musician and songwriter: rock, soul, jazz, funk, hip-hop, bossa nova.
A decade ago Motta’s crate-digging habit became, for a time, a full-blown compulsion. “I was doing freaky stuff,” he told me in a recently published interview, “like going to L.A. to buy $50 records, obscure AOR from Texas and Milwaukee, small bands that I was crazy about.” That wave of enthusiasm crested in 2013 with AOR, an homage to his greatest influence, Steely Dan, and their fellow studio craftsmen of the 1970s and ’80s.
Around this time, Motta shared a pair of AOR mixes with the music journal Wax Poetics, helping to spread the gospel of so-called album-oriented rock: silky stuff like Byrne & Barnes, Eric Tagg, and Pages. (Listen to parts one and two.) Motta followed up with a sublime mix of city pop, a Japanese form of jazz-rock polished to an ultrahigh sheen.
This past June, as Motta was putting the finishing touches on his latest album, the just-released knockout Behind the Tea Chronicles, I inquired if he’d be interested in putting together another mix. The Steely Dan influence on Chronicles was apparent; I wondered what Dan-adjacent music he’d been listening to over the years while writing and recording. Motta was happy to indulge my curiosity. His selections come from all branches of the Becker-Fagen musical tree, from forefathers Hoagy Carmichael and Bob Dorough to contemporaries Little Feat and Prince.
Motta’s brief notes on each track follow.
