Dan Moretti & Brazilia Bring Wayne Shorter Into the World of Latin Jazz at the UNITED

Dan Moretti & Brazilia Bring Wayne Shorter Into the World of Latin Jazz at the UNITED on Oct. 4, when the Rhode Island saxophonist leads an international quintet through a meeting of modern jazz and Latin rhythms in the UNITED Theatre’s Gallery Events Space.

This isn’t simply a Latin jazz band playing standards with added percussion. Moretti and Brazilia take compositions apart rhythmically and rebuild them around mambos, cha-cha-chas, sambas and other Latin and Brazilian grooves.

That approach is particularly important to the group’s latest project.

Their 2025 live album, Celebrating Wayne Shorter: Live at the Pump House Music Works, takes the music of one of the most influential composers in modern jazz and gives it a different rhythmic foundation.

That means compositions including “Black Nile,” “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum,” “Night Dreamer,” “Speak No Evil,” “Witch Hunt,” “Yes or No,” and “Footprints” can sound familiar and entirely different at the same time.

Five Musicians From Four Countries

The current Brazilia lineup is unusually international.

Dan Moretti, from Rhode Island, leads on tenor and soprano saxophones and flute.

Oscar Stagnaro, originally from Peru, handles bass. The four-time Grammy winner has spent decades at the center of Latin jazz and is closely associated with Paquito D’Rivera. He is also a longtime Berklee educator and has played with artists including Chucho Valdés, Dave Valentin and the Caribbean Jazz Project.

Maxim Lubarsky, originally from Ukraine, is on piano. His playing brings together jazz improvisation, classical training and the rhythmic vocabulary of music from different parts of the world.

Ernesto Diaz, from Colombia, supplies the percussion that gives Brazilia much of its Latin pulse.

Steve Langone, from the United States, completes the group on drums, working alongside Diaz rather than simply duplicating the percussion. That drum-and-percussion combination gives the ensemble room to move between straight-ahead jazz and denser Latin rhythmic structures.

All five musicians have Berklee connections, but the geographical spread matters just as much. Brazilia isn’t approaching Latin jazz from a single national tradition. The musicians bring backgrounds from the United States, Peru, Ukraine and Colombia into the same ensemble.

Brazilia Goes Back More Than 30 Years

The name Brazilia isn’t a recent addition to Moretti’s career.

He recorded Dan Moretti & Brazilia: Live at Chan’s in 1995 with a formidable lineup that included saxophonist Greg Abate, pianist Alain Mallet, bassist Oscar Stagnaro, drummer Ben Wittman and percussionist Pernell Saturnino.

Stagnaro’s presence in both the 1995 and current versions of Brazilia gives the group a connection spanning more than three decades.

By 1999, Moretti & Brazilia were appearing at the Litchfield Jazz Festival with saxophonist Dave Liebman as special guest. Moretti’s own discography continued moving through jazz, funk, Latin music and other combinations rather than settling into one permanent format.

The current incarnation circles back to Brazilia while using Wayne Shorter’s music as its jumping-off point.

Why Wayne Shorter Gives Them So Much to Work With

Wayne Shorter left behind the kind of compositions musicians can keep discovering things inside.

His career stretched from Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet to the groundbreaking fusion group Weather Report and decades of work under his own name. But his influence wasn’t limited to being an extraordinary saxophonist.

He was a composer whose pieces often resist the predictable resolutions of conventional jazz standards.

That makes his music unusually fertile territory for a group such as Brazilia.

Instead of reproducing famous Shorter recordings, the quintet can preserve the melodies and harmonic architecture while changing what’s happening underneath them. A composition originally associated with a particular post-bop feel can suddenly be propelled by a mambo or samba rhythm.

Moretti’s 2025 live recording grew out of exactly that idea.

The resulting album reached No. 1 on the Roots Music Report charts, climbed to No. 6 on JazzWeek and remained on national jazz charts for more than 20 weeks.

Moretti’s Career Runs From Ray Charles to Berklee

Moretti has enough history of his own to fill an evening.

Born in Providence and raised in Narragansett, he began playing saxophone in elementary school and was performing with the Rhode Island Youth All-State Jazz Band at the Newport Jazz Festival by age 12.

He later became the University of Rhode Island’s first saxophone major at a time when saxophonists generally had to major in clarinet and treat saxophone as a secondary instrument.

His professional career eventually crossed boundaries between jazz, R&B, funk, soul and pop. His performance credits include Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Ben E. King, The Four Tops, The Temptations, Chaka Khan, Dr. John, Stevie Nicks, Steve Winwood, Robert Plant, Nile Rodgers, George Duke and others.

Moretti has also recorded extensively as a leader, composer and producer. His catalog reaches back to the 1980s and includes Point of Entry, Dan Moretti & Brazilia, That’s Right, Latin Genesis, Stories, Passing Place, Invoke and numerous other projects.

Rhode Island recognized that body of work by inducting him into the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame in 2017.

Parallel to all of it has been a long career in music education.

Moretti became a professor at Berklee College of Music, teaching contemporary writing and production and helping develop curriculum in groove writing and arranging. He is now Professor Emeritus.

So when Brazilia plays with rhythm, it isn’t decorative. Moretti has spent decades studying, performing, composing and teaching precisely how rhythm changes the character of music.

Sunday Jazz in the Gallery

The UNITED is putting the quintet in its Gallery Events Space rather than one of its conventional theater rooms.

That’s a good match for this music.

Jazz built around improvisation works differently when the audience is close enough to watch musicians communicate. A glance from Moretti toward the rhythm section, a piano phrase picked up by the saxophone or a rhythmic shift between Diaz and Langone becomes part of what you’re watching rather than something happening at a distance.

And with musicians of this caliber, the written composition is only the beginning.

Wayne Shorter supplied the architecture.

Brazilia gets to decide where to take it.

More information is available at the Event Website link below. To purchase tickets, click the Event Ticketing link below.

Details

Event: Dan Moretti & Brazilia – Sunday Jazz at the U
Date: Sunday, Oct. 4, 2026
Time: 6–8 p.m.
Venue: UNITED Theatre – Gallery Events Space
Address: 5 Canal Street, Westerly, RI 02891
Music: Latin jazz, Brazilian jazz and contemporary jazz
Dan Moretti: Tenor and soprano saxophones, flute
Oscar Stagnaro: Bass
Maxim Lubarsky: Piano
Ernesto Diaz: Percussion
Steve Langone: Drums
Latest Album: Celebrating Wayne Shorter: Live at the Pump House Music Works
Accessibility: The UNITED’s cinemas are wheelchair accessible; guests attending live performances who need accessible seating are encouraged to contact the box office before purchasing tickets.
Box Office: 401-388-8208
Email: info@unitedtheatre.org

 

 

 

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