“I have no idea what we’ll play next,” Jovino Santos Neto chuckled as he ran chords up and down The Old Church’s Steinway’s keys, joking that he and his quintet, in the second set, would play the first set’s tunes backwards.

Spontaneity is part of the irrepressible fun of Jovino’s exuberant Brazilian music. The Feb. 26 Portland show didn’t have the full house of a primarily “older” crowd dancing in the church aisles or pews, but it inspired them to shake, bop their heads, hoot and clap. Jovino — the name he is known by — thanked the church for its resonant sound and the enthusiastic crowd for “hanging around.” The Biamp Portland Jazz Festival crowd was hungering for and eating up the south-of-the-border tunes.

With his fluffy white hair and high-spirits, the Rio de Janeiro-born Jovino, 70, is a seasoned musician who can switch between piano and flute, and sometimes play them at the same time — not to mention lead the band for a couple of hours, also at the same time. He added to the instrumental mix a melodica (a large harmonica with keys so you hold it in your mouth, blow, and finger the keys) throughout two highly charged 45-minute sets. 

A versatile and energetic musician, he stuck with the piano most of the time without a note of music in front of him— rarely looking at his hands — as did most of his Seattle-based quintet composed of gringos, minus him. They were so grooved and graceful and together and tight, you’d never know they weren’t born into this rhythmic, joyful, textured music. Jovino relocated to Seattle from Brazil in the early ‘90s and has taught, performed and composed there as well as honed his quintet.

When vibraphonist Ben Thomas played the bandoneon, a small version of the accordion but trickier to master, he actually looked at some notes on the “Ser Feliz” score, one of Jovino’s many compositions. You don’t often hear the bandoneon in upper America though it’s quite common in South America, especially at tango concerts. It’s a boxy romantic instrument that gives even more color to highly vibrant Brazilian and Latin music. But it’s hard to play, and Thomas – strung tight as a guitar string (no violins here) and friendly as a golden retriever – said at intermission that he has been working to perfect his bandoneon expertise for 20 years, and in some ways, he wished he’d never learned it because of the squeezebox’s difficulty. The audience loved it, as much as it did Thomas’s vigorous vibraphone play. During intermission and after, concertgoers wandered up to the stage, chatting with the musicians and looking curiously at the unfamiliar instruments.

Percussionist Jeff Busch, sided by drummer Mark Ivester and bass guitarist Tim Carey, was the man to watch if surprises grabbed you. He had a huge pile of instruments behind him and pulled most of them out, one or two at a time, during the performance. Among them: a berimbau, a single string instrument with a gourd resonator, common in capoeira music; a shekere, which is a West African hollow-gourd instrument covered with beads which percussionists shake; a caxixi, a woven-basket rattle; a log drum that produces different pitches; maracas and different sized agogo bells, usually played with a stick; hanging forks, spoons and knives; tambourines; all manner of wooden boxes, wind chimes, and a whistle worn around Busch’s neck. The instruments add layers of texture and conversation to the complex rhythms common to Brazilian, Latin and African music. If you were new to this music, or had been listening to it for a lifetime, you simply could not get bored with its high-energy vocabulary and varied instruments.

Though many of the performance’s tunes were Jovino’s arrangements and compositions, he paid tribute to his longtime mentor and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal, with whom Jovino played for 15 years (1977-1992) before settling in the United States. Pascoal, an albino South American who practiced as a kid all day inside, as well as a brilliant improviser and composer, worked with Miles Davis on his 1971 album Live-Evil, nailing international attention. The ballad-like Pascoal tune made space for the soulful bandoneon, revving up a conversation between piano and squeezebox, with percussionist Busch blowing the whistle around his neck every so often.

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What a blast.

This was music for the world, for any continent or village or church or concert hall. For anywhere and everyone.