If you've ever heard a jazz record with that eerie, singing, almost vocal percussion sound underneath everything and wondered what instrument that was, there's a good chance it was Nana Vasconcelos playing berimbau. He came up in Recife, Brazil, steeped in the music of the northeast, and he carried that into jazz circles in the 1970s without losing any of its strangeness. He didn't smooth it out to fit. He made the jazz world meet him.

The best way to understand him is through Codona (1979), the trio he formed with Don Cherry and Collin Walcott. Three multi-instrumentalists, none of them playing a conventional rhythm section role, building these loose, floating pieces that sounded like nothing else on ECM at the time. Nana's job in that group wasn't to keep time. It was to breathe, to moan, to whisper through the berimbau and his own voice, often simultaneously. That's the key thing about his style: he sang while he played percussion, low wordless tones that blurred into the instrument itself, so you couldn't always tell where the gourd resonator ended and his throat began.

He shows up on a surprising number of records you already know. Pat Metheny Group's As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls (1981) won a Grammy and his textures are all over it, not as decoration but as architecture. Egberto Gismonti leaned on him constantly, and together they made some of the most interior, patient duo records in the ECM catalog, like Dança das Cabeças (1977). He also worked with Milton Nascimento, which makes sense, since both men were obsessed with finding the emotional center of a Brazilian melody rather than just its surface rhythm.

What made him valuable to so many different bandleaders was restraint. A lot of percussionists fill space. Nana left it open. He'd drop in one bent berimbau note, let it hang, and the whole mood of a track would shift. That's a harder skill than people give it credit for, knowing when not to play. He won three Grammys working as a sideman, which tells you something about how in-demand that sensibility was, even if his own name never got the marquee billing it probably deserved.

He kept working steadily into the 2000s, recording with younger Brazilian musicians and revisiting the Codona material in spirit if not personnel. He died in 2016, back in Recife, the city he started out in. If you want an entry point, don't start with a compilation. Start with Codona and just let it sit with you for a while. It rewards patience the same way he did.