Yamandu Costa’s De La Ana keeps two Brazilian guitars in close conversation

“De La Ana” places Brazilian guitarists Yamandu Costa and Leandro Rodrigues in a conversation so stripped of arrangement that every note reads like a question looking for its answer. The single runs to one track and delivers the kind of economy that is harder to sustain than spectacle. No rhythm section, no ensemble buffer. Two guitars find or do not find each other, and the recording keeps the evidence.

Costa has made collaboration his primary method for years, accumulating records with partners who pull different and sometimes opposing registers from his seven-string instrument: a French guitarist working in the gypsy jazz tradition, a Venezuelan violinist steeped in joropo, a duo rooted in River Plate tango. “De La Ana” reads differently from all of those. The two voices here share the same grammar, the same Brazilian vernacular. Neither defers to the other. Both listen. The piece is a closed exchange, not a cross-cultural novelty.

That closeness is also the single’s primary limitation for international audiences. A listener outside the orbit of Brazilian instrumental music will find little to anchor to: no lyric, no dramatic textural shift, no parallel from another tradition to recognize and follow. Costa’s cross-cultural collaborations gave unfamiliar ears a built-in foothold. Here, the frame is the music itself, and the music asks for patience.

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What makes “De La Ana” worth that patience is the specificity of Costa’s command of the violão de sete cordas. The Brazilian seven-string guitar occupies a singular position in its tradition: it carries rhythm, harmony, and melody simultaneously, a one-instrument polyphony that most plucked instruments leave to the ensemble. Costa has spent his career finding the outer limit of what that instrument can hold, and his partners tell him something different about it each time. The Latin Grammy he shared with Toquinho for their live collaboration confirmed what Brazilian concert audiences already understood: the ceiling is further up than it looks.

Costa’s recent output has moved at a pace that keeps even attentive listeners scrambling. Multiple collaborative albums have appeared within a single year, each partnership arriving with a distinct tonal proposition: the French gypsy jazz encounter brought swing and improvisation, the Venezuelan pairing introduced the rhythmic geometry of joropo, the Hermanos Guedes project opened a door to tango. “De La Ana” steps back from that breadth. It is the quietest statement in the run, not a collision of styles but a two-man conversation that knows exactly what it wants to say and stops the moment it is done.

Whether Leandro Rodrigues provides the counterweight the format demands is a question one track can only partially answer. Their exchange here suggests either a deeper collaboration in progress or a very good afternoon in a recording studio. “De La Ana” is out now across digital platforms, and makes the case for whichever it is.

Tags: music-en1, Brazilian music, instrumental, De La Ana, Yamandu Costa & Leandro Rodrigues

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