There were so many strange and surreal moments in the charmingly make-believe world of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou that audiences could be forgiven for not questioning why the film occasionally cut away to a handsome man perched atop a ship’s crow’s nest singing David Bowie songs in Portuguese. But the more one learns about Seu Jorge, the musician and luminescent actor who also appeared in City of God (2002), the more sense of mystery deepens. Jorge spent seven years living on the streets of the favelas, the gang-ridden ghettos of his native Brazil. How he came to be chums with the likes of Willem Dafoe and Bill Murray, who also appear in the upcoming video for his song “Tive Razao,” from his new album, Cru (Wrasse), is a tale of human resilience, hard work, and talent. You can hear all three of those qualities on Cru, a collection of incandescent, jazzy pop sung mainly in Portuguese but illuminated by a sense of tender optimism that shines through in any language.

“I was brought up in the favelas, and it was tough,” says Jorge, whose brother was murdered in gang-related violence. After being forced from his family home, he earned money cleaning sidewalks until a stranger gave him an old guitar, and he taught himself to sing.

While the title of his album translates as “raw,” the mood of the disc is anything but. Jorge’s music takes the opposite tack of American hip-hop: Crus’s lilting rhythms and sweet melodies provide a balmy antidote to the harsh realities of life on the street. But his lyrics do tackle social issues, including the pervasiveness of silicone breast implants in Brazil. And even his cover of Elvis Presley’s “Don’t” carries political overtones. “I feel Elvis was crucial to getting black music across to white Americans,” Jorge says. “The black man had no voice at that time, and Elvis helped black music come to prominence in white Amercia. So it is nice to get my people’s music back again.” With Cru, Jorge has filtered that music through Brazil and back to America one more time, imprinting it along the way with his own accent and his own story of struggle and salvation.

-Dimitri Ehrlich