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	JOYCE AND DORI CAYMMI deep swing

Despite her long career, the wonderful Brazilian singer Joyce had never before performed in Boston. Her debut album appeared in 1968, so she’s "second-generation bossa," as she put it from the stage of the Real Deal Café last Thursday night, and she, like the rest of her generation, has added to what she inherited from the pioneers of the genre, like her teacher Antonio Jobim. Caetano Veloso pushed bossa’s connection to pop; Gilberto Gil highlighted its ties to the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of carnival. Joyce leaned on bossa’s connection to jazz, honing its swing.

So it was fitting that her long-overdue appearance came as part of a jazz series programmed by Water Music at the Real Deal in the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center. Her band matched the milieu, a piano-bass-drums trio that stuck to a jazz vocabulary all night, with bossa rhythms overlaid almost the same way they overlaid the American jazz world as a craze in the 1950s after the commercial success of Jobim’s collaborations with Stan Getz. ("Stamp out Bossa Nova," wrote an exasperated friend of my mother’s on the front of all his letters at the time.)

But what can rescue even the most standard jazz is the very thing that animates the genre in the first place: swing. And Joyce, like Jobim and his great interpreter João Gilberto, swings so deep she pulled her band, and the audience, into her orbit. She makes everything look easy — isn’t that what swing is all about? Her precise pitch, her elegant harmonies on guitar, her choice of material both classic and new — it all seems such a natural part of her, you might overlook her virtuosity. But she is a virtuoso — a songwriter capable of classics like "Feminina" (which closed her set) that sit comfortably alongside the tunes she sang by Jobim, Baden Powell, and Vinicius de Morães.

Sharing the stage with Joyce was arranger and composer Dori Caymmi, whose father was the influential samba songwriter Dorival Caymmi. He was an entertaining foil, making jokes, singing in his gruff composer’s voice, keeping everything loose. He helped orchestrate her first album back in 1968, so their current tour together, behind a new collaborative album already released in Great Britain but not yet available here, is something of a nostalgic return. Joyce’s local fans had waited a long time for this performance — but with Caymmi on stage, it was as if she’d compressed her entire professional history into this one show.