Julia Bomfim brings Brazilian strings to Amazing Things

“It was definitely the influence of my father,” said Julia Bomfim, when asked what first made her want to play an instrument. “He’s a professional flutist, a classical musician, and I grew up listening to a lot of classical music and going to a lot of his concerts.”

Bomfim, a native of Rio De Janeiro, who moved to Cambridge five years ago, initially followed in her father’s footsteps, taking up the flute at the age of 6. But when she fronts her quartet at Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham on Sept. 21, she’ll be playing the instrument she switched to and stuck with: the violin.

“I didn’t like playing the flute because I didn’t have good posture, and I would get dizzy with all of that breathing,” she said. “So, when I was around 7 or 8, and I started the violin, and never played the flute again (laughs).”

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Though she studied classical violin all the way through high school, played in youth orchestras in Rio, and made the move to the States to continue classical studies at Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Bomfim’s listening habits have been wide-ranging for a long time, which helps to explain why her Amazing Things show will consist of a very different sort of South American music, popular rather than classical.

“I was always listening to a lot of music from Brazil, popular music such as bossa nova, samba, and choro. Those are my main influences,” she explained. “But my mother is from Argentina, so we also listened to tango music and Argentinian popular music.”

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Yet Bomfim didn’t have any thoughts of performing that type of music professionally, devoting her practice time to classical, only playing the popular stuff with friends just for fun. Things changed when she moved north.

“I came here for two main reasons,” she said. “One is that there was a teacher I wanted to study with her at Longy – Laura Bossert. A friend from Brazil had studied with her and told me about her. At the same time, my sister, who is a physician, was already living in Boston at that time, and I thought it would be nice to have some family here.”

She also wanted to learn about jazz.

“Growing up as a classical musician, I didn’t improvise at all,” she said. “But I liked some jazz. The closest thing I listened to back home was Gypsy jazz. Because I’m a violinist, I loved Stephane Grappelli’s playing. So that was jazz for me. But when I came to Boston, I found this whole new world of jazz.”

And it shared some traits with her favorite style of Brazilian music: choro, which is the Portuguese word for “cry,” though the all-instrumental genre is often upbeat and quite happy-sounding.

“At many of my shows I play some bossa nova, and I like music from the northeast [of Brazil], which is called forró and baião. That’s usually not a written music; you just learn it by ear. You have the melody, and then musicians can improvise with it. But when I play choro, which is not very common here, people sometimes come up to me and say, ‘Wow! What IS this music? We love it!’

“I don’t think of it as jazz, though,” she added. “I think right now jazz is a very broad term, and people use the word for many different things. Choro has a very strong tradition, but nowadays it’s opening up. In the beginning, choro was not an improvised music. but recently, improvisation has become an important part of it. Some people say that it’s become a choro-jazz fusion.”

 

The Amazing Things show will feature Bomfim on violin, Ricardo Borsatto on 7-string guitar, Kan Yanabe on pandeiro (a tambourine-like Brazilian instrument), and Berklee professor Fernando Brandão on flute. They’ll be performing some of Brandão’s original choro- and samba-style compositions, as well as songs from Bomfim’s new EP “Reencontro,” which translates as “Reunion.”

“One of the reasons I called it that is because of me and choro music,” said Bomfim. “I had played it before but I had never recorded any. I think living here became an important role in that because being far away from home, I felt that I wanted to play more Brazilian music. So, it was like being reunited with an important part of my music.”

Julia Bomfim and her quartet play at Amazing Things Arts Center in Framingham on Sept. 21 at 8 p.m. Tickets: $25; seniors, $24; students & kids, $12. Info: 508-405-2787.

Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@rcn.com.

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