TALL and dreadlocked, wearing a pinstriped suit, the Brazilian singer Seu Jorge is at the Bowery Ballroom one Monday night in September, performing David Bowie songs in Portuguese. There are few Brazilians in attendance, however; the crowd is instead heavy on jittery Anglo men and their tall girlfriends - less like a Brazilian cultural event and more like the opening of a Wes Anderson film. Which makes sense, since it was his role performing these songs in Mr. Anderson's "Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" that brought him an American audience.
Seu Jorge gives them what they expect up front, rolling his smoky baritone through drowsy but appealing voice-and-guitar versions of "Ziggy Stardust" and "Rebel Rebel." He plays them almost bossa-nova style, except where the compositions demand strumming, and the crowd loves it: they get it, they're with him.
Then his four-member band comes on, with the little Brazilian guitar called a cavaquinho, the tambourinelike pandeiro, electric bass and a drum set with only a tiny cymbal. Superfunky, this other music is Brazilian to the core, and he switches on and becomes animated, singing in tight but flexible rhythm. The audience now seems a little more cowed, dancing with a lack of certainty.
Seu Jorge (pronounced SAY-oo ZHOR-zhee) has come in through the backdoor. It's hard for even the best Brazilian singers to find more than a tiny interest in the United States: only after 20 years of trying has Caetano Veloso gained a beachhead here, and he's not even representative of what's truly popular in Brazil.
Neither is Seu Jorge. (His real name is Jorge Mario da Silva; Seu, a shortening of the Portuguese senhor, is an old-fashioned honorific.) But the Brazilianness of those Bowie covers - not just the songs themselves, one assumes - have found him an audience here. His new album, "Cru" (Wrasse Records), has stayed on the college-music and iTunes charts since its release in early September; his contributions to the soundtrack of the Anderson film are now part of the furniture in college-town cafés around the country. In less than a year, his edge has almost been blunted by benign approval. ("Liking Seu Jorge these days is like saying that you're into raw foods or enjoy surfing Internet blogs," wrote a critic last month in the new music-and-fashion bible The Fader, before admitting his love in the next clause.)
Brazilian musicians who have found an American audience - a line that includes Carmen Miranda, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Sergio Mendes, Milton Nascimento, Mr. Veloso, and Bebel Gilberto - have, the assumption goes, appealed to Americans' fantasies about Brazilian music: an idealized embodiment of sex, rhythm and intellectual sophistication.
Seu Jorge doesn't quite do that. "Cru" - it means "raw" - is seductive and crude in equal measures. It bears the aesthetic thumbprints of Favela Chic, the Paris club-restaurant that has also produced popular mixtape CD's of Brazilian samba-funk; the album's producer is Gringo da Parada, the Brazilian who started the club. The album has two lovely bossa novas written by the songwriter Robertinho Brant, but beyond that, a series of hard left turns.
One song, "Mania de Peitâo" is a samba-rock tune about fake breasts. "What the people don't know," warn the translated lyrics, "is that the muse of the 2000 generation is silicone-armored." There's a croaking version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Chatterton" (originally in French, here in Portuguese), listing famous artist suicides, with a bleary refrain that translates as "and I'm not doing so well either." There's also a version of the Elvis Presley ballad "Don't." The whole album ticks back and forth between a sense of craft and a hipster's willful amateurishness - so much so that unless you see him live, you might not know how musical he really is.
Seu Jorge is 35. Before he became known through his roles in "The Life Aquatic" and Fernando Meirelles's "City of God" (as the character Knockout Ned), he was briefly part of a weak-selling, major-label Brazilian pop group, marketed as Rio's new sound, called Farofa Carioca. Before that he worked with a Rio theater group. Before that he was homeless, and before that he grew up in a favela (or slum) neighborhood called Gogó da Ema, which means Adam's apple. He went to a private high school, thanks to a Brazilian politician who gave bright kids scholarships as a means of winning votes in the favelas.
"I'm a musician first," he explained that same afternoon. "I started playing when I was 20." He was already in his show clothes, for the benefit of a Brazilian television crew shooting a documentary on the history of Brazilian music in America. We went to his hotel room so he could smoke, and he had left the radio on, which was playing country music. He took off his pinstriped jacket and his black dress shoes, and was momentarily transfixed by Waylon Jennings's voice, which centers on the same deep vocal range as his own.
After Seu Jorge finished his year of compulsory military service at 20, his 16-year-old brother was killed in one of Rio's ongoing battles between police and favelados. "I had to leave the community then," he said. "I had to be a role model to my other younger brothers, and we couldn't go back to where we were living, or I would be put in the role of having to seek vengeance for the death of my brother." On the day of his brother's burial, he met Gabriel Moura, the nephew of the Brazilian saxophonist Paolo Moura. Seu Jorge had played some cornet in the military band, and he wanted to play more music; Mr. Moura promised to set him up with some other musicians.
Seu Jorge relocated with his family to an uncle's house in another neighborhood, but was kicked out when he announced his plan to become a musician. So he lived on the street for three years, around the Zona Norte section of Rio, singing and playing guitar.
"But when I was 23 I joined a theater company," he said. He performed as an actor and musician in a university-affiliated theater group called Tuerj: Teatro da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. He acted in 20 of their productions, including Shakespeare and Sophocles, while - unknown to the directors of the theater group - sleeping in an old theater that they were reconditioning, occasionally sharing space with other actors who were just scraping by. Sometimes, he remembers, he rehearsed his lines naked late at night to an empty house.
When Seu Jorge started learning music in 1990, he did so to get a girlfriend; he didn't expect to be able to make a living from music. Now that he could, his acting career has heated up too. (His latest film, "The House of Sand," opened last May in Brazil and will be released here by Sony Pictures Classics next year.) He has moved away from Rio, and is now living in São Paolo, with his wife, Mariana, and their third child on the way.
Asked about American's idealized view of Brazilian sophistication, he flips the equation around. "Brazilians think of the American market as sophisticated," he said. "So they come here with the idea that that's what Americans are going to like." Seu Jorge's success is based on the discovery that they might accept other sensibilities, too - rugged and eccentric instead of suave and put-together.
The era of Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz doing bossa nova is long gone, he says. "I think the world has completely changed - it's more interested in roots music," he reasoned. "Except in Brazil, where we have all the roots music we can bear."
