By Mikaei Wood

THE LIFE MELODIC

Brazilian singer-songwriter Seu Jorge hardly shares in the youth-culture currency enjoyed by his countrymen making baile funk, Rio's hypersexual, favela-bred dance music, which this year has attracted authenticity-hungry North American hipsters tike wax-cylinder siren song. Unlike those ghetto-tech envelope-pushers, 35-year-old Jorge is more interested in keeping alive Brazil's rich samba tradition, so most of the time on Cru, his latest album, he strums an acoustic guitar and sings in lilting, deep-voiced Portuguese.  In the stripped-down "Fiore de la Citta" he leaves enough room between his vocals and his skeletal chording that you can practically hear the wind rustling the leaves in the trees; the same goes for "San Gonca," where he moves beyond his luscious whisper-croon and really lets his rough-edged voice rip.

But Cru doesn't translate to "raw" for nothing.  Jorge, who portrayed slum gangster Knock-out Ned in 2002's City of God, ends the album with "Eu Sou - Favela"("I Am the Favela"), in which he passionately celebrates the mettle of a "humble people, kept out of society" over a persistent shaker groove, not quite fulfilling the beachside-pacifier role Americans have developed for samba and bossa nova singers. Nor is forge's idea of raw-ness strictly limited to samba's origins: as suggested by his turn last year in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou -- in which he played a seafaring balladeer given to covering David Bowie tunes -- the singer looks outside the form for inspiration, too. An adaptation of Serge Gainsbourg's "Chatterton" features a buzzing synth-bass line and a falsetto vocal hook out of the Pharrell Williams songbook, while sweet-and-sour rendition of Leiber Stoller's Elvis Presley chestnut "Don't" comes with some sly baggage: Jorge is a black man singing a song originally popularized by a white man famous for popularizing black men's music. It's the sort of raw material in which you figure Jorge hears the world.

SEU JORGE plays the CEDAR CULTURAL CENTER FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 16; 612.338.2674