Any release by the Brazilian legend, a man whose unique genius has bewitched both fellow musicians and audiences alike for decades, is worth the time of day. But these two sets really provide the perfect summary of why his champions included the likes of Miles Davis, among many others. On Pascoal’s 1970 studio debut Hermeto he moves centre stage after productive formative years in groups such as Quarteto Novo, alongside the very talented percussionist Airto Moreira, and the set of original compositions was an outlandishly fresh take on bossa nova, big band and fusion vocabularies that saw Pascoal unveil a harmonic world full of beauty and ambiguity. The dark-to-light string scores, siren-like chants of Flora Purim and Googie Coppola as well as Pascoal’s ability to produce sound from any source, be it an electric piano or bottles filled with differing amounts of water to change pitch, made for something that was a genre in its own right. As for the 1981 live set Planteria De Gavea it was simply off the creative scale. Pascoal’s channeling of the indigenous and African heritage of his homeland is unique primarily because of the quite extraordinary ear he has for the hidden sweetness in dissonance. The melodic lines of ‘Jeque’ sound as if he has put mediaeval horns through a time warp that re-imagines them in the space age without at all succumbing to any cheap gimmickry. And that sense of sound that is simultaneously futuristic and ancestral, so mysteriously positioned between what can be envisioned and what has been lost from view, is compellingly vivid. Pascoal is nicknamed ‘bruxo’ (or ‘sorcerer’) for good reason, as the magic in all this music attests.